Dear Friend,

I’m not sure how I got so lucky but the Doberman Dan Letter has attracted some really nice and interesting subscribers.

For example, on my first teleseminar I recommended people transcribe winning ads to help “wire” those successful ads into their brains.

One of my subscribers, Erin “Liz” Daniels, decided  she wanted to “wire” the information from the teleseminar, so she invested the time to transcribe the entire teleseminar. She did it for her own personal use but then thought others might benefit from the transcription, too.

So Liz sent me the full transcription and gave me permission to use it however I wanted.

To say I was surprised was an understatement. First of all, I’m usually pleasantly surprised when anybody takes action on my recommendations. I expect most people to do nothing. That’s just the reality of teaching. So I was pretty impressed Liz actually listened to me.

But then she gave my subscribers the transcription, too… no charge. Wow! That’s very generous!

Thank you, Liz. I really appreciate it and I’m sure my subscribers do, too.

I hope you’re repaid 1,000-fold for your generosity.

So without further adieu here’s the transcription of my very first Doberman Dan teleseminar.

Best,
Dan

P.S. I’ve paid some pretty hefty fees in the past for transcription services… but Liz’s transcription has been the most accurate transcription I’ve ever personally seen.

Again, a big thanks and a big hug for Liz.

Doberman Dan’s Teleseminar Transcript – June 9, 2009

Dan: Okay, welcome to everybody.  This is Doberman Dan Gallapoo. Welcome to my very first ever teleseminar. Good to have you on the call. I’ve got a couple special guests with me that it wasn’t announced but I’m glad to have them on.  And one of them is Ben Settle and he’s not only an excellent copywriter but he also is the developer of the “Crackerjack Selling System.”  Ben, what’s your, give out a website where people can get more information about that.

Ben: The main site would just be BenSettle.com and from there you can find
everything else.

Dan: Okay, BenSettle.com.

Ben: Yeah.

Dan: And my other guest is Caleb Osborne. Another excellent copywriter and also a direct response internet entrepreneur.  Caleb, you on the call?

Caleb: I am here Dan.

Dan: Okay and what’s your website?

Caleb: People can go to CalebOsborneConsulting.com.

Dan: Alright. Cool. Like I said, both these guys are excellent copywriters and direct response consultants and entrepreneurs.  I taught them everything they know.  That’s a lie.  I’m just lying.  I wish I could take credit for their success.  Anyway, thanks for being on the call with me guys.

Ben/Caleb: No problem.

Dan: I remember when I went to a Gary Halbert seminar.  He did something which I thought was pretty cool which I’m gonna do on this seminar.  There was some anal retentive guy in the crowd who showed up to the seminar with a sales letter that Gary wrote to promote the seminar.  And he went through each bullet point to make sure everything was covered.  I’m actually gonna do that today. That’s how we’re going to get started.

A little bit of background about me—if you’ve read any of my articles at DobermanDan.com you probably know a little bit about me.  I have been in direct response marketing since ’95.  Been doing it full time since ’97.  I’m basically a serial entrepreneur that stumbled upon direct response marketing and started a mail order business, and found guys like Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert and studied them, and then just basically pursued Gary Halbert until I had the opportunity to mentor with him and work with him.  I’m one of I think a handful of people who has been fortunate enough to do that.  And since then I’ve done freelance copywriting and continued on with my entrepreneurial projects.  And that’s why I started DobermanDan.com.  Basically, I wanted to pass along all the stuff I’d learned along the way and the stuff I learned from Gary Halbert to other people in the internet marketing and direct response marketing community.

So that’s my brief background and I’d really like to get right into the meat of this because I also, I got a lot of questions from people and I want to cover as many of those as I possibly can.  If you read the promotion for my teleseminar and read some of the bullets, I want to go ahead and cover those now so you don’t think that I’m cheatin’ you, and just slipping in enticing little bullets just to get you on the call and not going to actually cover that information.

In the promotion it says “here’s just a small sample of what I will reveal in my free teleseminar.” And the first bullet is “How to start a ‘kitchen table’ direct response business for less and $200.”

I actually did an article about that on my website and I forget which one it actually is now.  I think it may say “How to Start a ‘Kitchen Table’ Direct Response Business.” But it’s on the website at DobermanDan.com. But this is how I got started in direct response marketing. First of all, I chose a niche that I understood, and the reason I did that was because I was already a customer in that niche—and that niche was bodybuilding.  And I knew all the hot buttons already because I was a rabid consumer of that niche and I knew the language.  I knew everything about that niche and I figured if I’m gonna, you know, be successful at something I ought to choose a niche that I know something about.  And also a niche that I would enjoy reading about and creating products for and selling products to that niche.  So I chose bodybuilding and what I did was I created a self-published manual about bodybuilding.  Basically how hard gainers should train to gain muscle mass cause that was my story—the typical 99 pound weakling that couldn’t gain any muscle and then figured out how to do it.  And here’s how I started and then the caveat is I’ll tell you how I would do it today.

On the article on the website it actually goes into much more detail but this project initially was pretty much a miserable failure.  I was trying to sell a manual directly from a classified ad.  And then I got some direction and figured out that I needed to do some two-step advertising.  So that’s how I started.  I wrote a very short two-step ad—“Free Report Reveals How to Gain (whatever it was) 10 Pounds of Muscle in 8 Weeks or 15 Pounds of Muscle in 8 Weeks.  Call the 800 number for a free report” and when the people called for the free report, they got my free report which was basically a sales letter—a story in a sales letter, with a response in the sales letter where they could call or send their money in to order.

I did it as cheap as I possibly could.  I bargained with the magazine and got the price of the ad real cheap.  I did all the grunt work myself.  I transcribed the messages off the voicemail.  I hand stuffed the sales letters and hand addressed the envelopes.  And my total investment was actually under $200.

How I would do that today?  I would do the same process but I would initially test it online with Google Adwords, and use Google Adwords to drive people to a website where they could request the free report and the deal would be they’d have to give me their email address to get the free report.  And then the free report would be emailed to them and also a series of follow-up messages to the people who didn’t buy to try to sell them the course.  And I would constantly tweak the Google ad and constantly tweak the sales letter until I really had that humming along at concert pitch.  And then I would start rolling out the magazines you know exactly as I did back in ’94, ’95 in running two-step ads in the magazines, driving them to call an 800 number and to send them a sales letter.  That’s how you can start a kitchen table direct response business for less than two hundred bucks. I’ve done it and a bunch of other people have done it too and it works.

The second bullet is “How to ‘bootstrap’ your marketing and still grow your business into a multi-million dollar cash cow.”

Well, most of the time I had to bootstrap my marketing cause I never had any money to get started and never had any rich relatives that were willing to finance any of these crazy ideas I had.  So you can do that.  You can bootstrap your marketing with low cost stuff.  Some of the online low cost stuff is Google Adwords, posting in forums, become a member of certain forums in that niche and make posts in there, press releases.  You can send out articles and post articles.  Caleb or Ben, you want to chime in on any of the low cost marketing stuff you can do online?

Ben: Yeah.  You mean besides what you were just saying like the press releases?

Dan: Yeah.

Ben: Well.  I’m starting to dabble a lot with social media and I’m not by any means an expert at it at all.  But I’m finding that you can get a lot of really good word of mouth going, not just to your own website, but if you email something to your list every day and I know that might sound a little like overkill at first, but if you just get in the habit of emailing your list every day something interesting, and then you can take that and you can put it on EzineArticles.com or as many article directories as you can right after you put it on your own website.  So you do the email and then you put it on your own website and then you can put it on all the article directories, and what will happen is you will get a bunch of links like that just for SEO purposes.  You also get people who are reading your articles and then they’ll come back to your site and you can set some of these sites up like EzineArticles.com.  They’ll send your link to your article to Twitter for you on your own account.  It’s all linked up and you can get multiple people coming to see your message whether it be on an article directory or on your website and, of course, if you’ve got a good opt-in process and all that, it’s just a really cheap way to get people to your website, looking at your sales letters and spending some money with you.

Dan: Right.  Good.  Caleb, is there anything we haven’t covered that you want to add?

Caleb: No, I pretty much just echo everything Ben says.  Definitely you know, blog, get a blog set up and build your email list.  Email your email list.  That’s actually something, I—the only thing I differ with Ben is I don’t do the Twitter thing yet. And it’s just because of my laziness.  It’s one more thing to do.  But definitely blogging, ezine articles is the biggest and best article directory and build your email list and keep in contact with them.  All very low cost ways.  It’s really great when you have something you can do when a lot of times people go “aw, I don’t got money to go buy ads or whatever you know.”  I was in that position too but just knowing you can do something every single day is gonna get you closer to what you’re doing.  You know that little stuff adds up.

Dan: Right.  Exactly.  When you don’t have money to work with then you know the only thing you’ve got to work with is your time, and you gotta do this kind of grunt work stuff and some of it may not be, may not bring super fast results but it builds on itself.  And from myself included when I started, I started like that you know.  I didn’t have thousands of dollars for ads.  There’s some offline stuff that you can do.  It’s not as cheap or free as the online stuff but it can be affordable, especially if you know how to negotiate to get ad costs down—two-step ads like I described in how I started my kitchen table business, classified ads in magazines that cater to your market, postcard mailings.  It’s cheap to mail a postcard as a way to generate leads, and even direct mail if you do it in bits and pieces which I’ve been forced to do that at times you know.  You can’t drop 5,000 letters cause I don’t have the money but you know what, I can drop a hundred, and if that works, then drop another hundred.  And if that builds you just roll your profits into more and more stuff.

Say you got a lead gen campaign that’s working well in one of the magazines with a two-step ad.  Well as you start making more and more money then you can use that same lead generation ad in other magazines.  Like I said, it’s a way to do the grunt work initially and do it cheap, but snowball the profits and build it up more and more.

My, let me see, my third bullet was “If you have an online business I’ll reveal how you can DOUBLE your sales in 59 days or less.”

And I did an article about that on my website as a matter of fact.  I believe the title is “How to Double Your Sales in 59 Days or Less.”  And my secret to doing that is direct mail to your list of customers.  I’m amazed at how many people in this business don’t work their backend at all.  Which you know it took me a while to learn, but your backend is where all your money is.  If you’re just focusing on the front end, you’re just not gonna make much money.  The easiest sale to make is to someone who’s bought from you before.  And the best time to make that sale is immediately after they’ve bought something.  And if you don’t have a direct mail promotion for backend products going out to your list of buyers—at the very least once a month—you’re just leaving so much money on the table, it’s not even funny.  But it still amazes me how many very well-known online marketers and really big online businesses for some reason don’t get this. You literally can double your sales in 59 days by just sending a direct mail promotion out to your list of buyers.

And especially if you’ve got an online business. You’re generating sales or customers online.  The big secret in internet marketing is to generate that initial sale or lead online but then market to them offline. But you’d be amazed how many people don’t do that.  I don’t understand it.  It’s my biggest secret. I’ve used that to create miraculous turnarounds in a very short period of time.  So I highly recommend that.

My fourth bullet which is the most important thing you’re going to learn this evening, I’m gonna cover at the end of the call.  It says “The most important thing you MUST master if you want to make the big bucks.  (It’s taken me 19 years and numerous catastrophic failures to discover this jealously guarded “gem.”  And NONE of the marketing gurus are revealing it.  NOT A ONE!  They’re ALL using it…  they’re just not sharing it with you). Discover THIS and enjoy success beyond your wildest imagination.”

And sorry, you’re gonna have to wait until the end of the call for that because it’s the most important lesson you’re gonna learn and I want to cover some of the other stuff before I really let loose with that one.

The fifth bullet is “How to find hot markets. . . . folks with money burning a hole in their pocket STARVING for your products. . . . and how to identify and develop EXACTLY what kind of products these people want to buy.”

That is a question I got a bunch for this teleseminar so I’m gonna go ahead and answer that.  I’m gonna tell you how I do it.  And this is how Gary Halbert taught me to do it.  Gary Halbert literally took me by the hand and showed me how to do this—and none of it’s done online.  Now I do still use some online tools to do market research.  Caleb do you know, or Ben do you know, Yahoo used to have a search tool that it showed you like if you searched for whatever, “motorcycle helmets,” it would show you how many people the previous month were searching by that term.  Do they still have that tool available?

Ben: I know they have that for Google.

Caleb: Yeah.

Ben: I don’t know about Yahoo.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

Dan: Okay.

Caleb: The Overture tool is gone but Google’s tool is actually better too.

Dan: Okay.  Google’s a better one.  When we used to use that Overture tool which was then a Yahoo tool, for example, if it told you a thousand people were searching a month for your keyword, that was just on Yahoo’s search, you could usually like triple that or more the amount of people searching for that on Google. I use forums. I go into forums, become members of forums, occasionally. Google, Amazon.com is a great resource for that, looking up certain software products or books, it’ll tell you what sales rank they are.  Another one that I use a lot is the SRDS (Standard Rate and Data Service) which you can get a membership at SRDS.com.  It shows you all the lists, direct mail lists, that are available for rent. So you’ll find out like, say it’s a weight loss list, you’ll find out how many people are on the list, what products these people bought, the average unit of sale, how many names are coming in a month.  So you can pretty much get a good idea how much product they’re selling every month, how many new customers they’re getting every month.  And it’s a good way to look at certain markets and using the SRDS, you’re looking at, as long as you’re looking at buyer’s lists, you’re looking at people who’ve bought a product—so you’re finding markets where there already is a proven demand.  So that’s a really valuable resource.  I recommend you get a membership to SRDS and use that for your product research.

But here’s the method that Gary Halbert taught me which I love.  It is basically taking a couple of hours and going to the bookstore. Because I don’t know if you know this or not, but we Americans spend like, last I looked it was over $30 billion (with a “b”) every year on books and magazines.  And so when you walk into, like a Border’s, you’re looking at somewhere around you know a chain that moves about $4 billion worth of books and magazines a year. And apparently Barnes & Nobles and B. Dalton do about 5% better than that.  So you walk in there and you are in marketing heaven.  You’re in the presence of about 200,000 titles. And you’re looking at millions upon millions of dollars of marketing research.  Because to sell a book these people, they have to get your, the AIDA— the “attention, interest, desire, action” in a single moment, in a space that will fit on the size of a book jacket.  And if it’s a magazine, it’s basically the space at the top third of the magazine.  So these book marketers and magazine people do millions of dollars worth of research and marketing research to figure out how to sell their stuff.

And when you consider a weekly publication like The National Enquirer, these guys have to come up with a different way to capture the maximum number of buyers every single week.  So the amount of research they’ve done is staggering and that’s a multi-million dollar marketing lesson right there.

And it’s also a great copywriting lesson when you go through and start looking at titles and fascinations or bullet points. These people, especially for magazines like The National Enquirer, they have some of the highest paid writers in the world because these guys have figured out how to move these magazines.  And so that’s where I go to research, not only research markets and figuring out where to sell products and what kind of products to sell, but also copywriting research too—figuring out what the market responds to looking at magazine covers, looking at different designs, colors they use.

I had the good fortune of meeting one of my childhood heroes. I started bodybuilding, when I guess I was like 15, and every month I’d run to the local bookstore and pick up a copy of Musclemag International founded by Bob Kennedy.  And a few years back I had the good fortune to meet him and not only meet him, but actually work for him, write some copy for him.  And I’ve always tried to pick his brain about magazine marketing because it’s amazing to me. Every few years he’ll usually redesign the look of Musclemag because what people respond to sometimes changes from year to year. And these guys like I said, literally invest millions in figuring out how to sell these magazines.  I mean they got just a couple seconds to grab your attention in very little space to do it. So that is my big secret for product research.

If you go to the bookstore and you see there’s a magazine in your niche, you’re researching a niche that you think you might want to sell a product in, whatever that is, I’m just gonna pick something at random, let’s say pocket knives, and you go to the bookstore and you see there’s a magazine on pocket knives.  The simple fact that there’s a magazine in that niche is quite a lot of proof that there’s, that that’s a strong enough niche to support a magazine and that’s a pretty good niche to be selling products in.  When you see multiple magazines servicing that niche, then you know you’ve got a very hot niche, and I’d get every single magazine I can get my hands on in that particular niche and just tear that thing apart. I look at what’s on the cover, any bullets or fascinations they’re using, actual layout and design and colors and ads that are in there too.  There’s gonna be a lot of probably crappy kind of image ads. But if you see a lot of direct response ads, then you know that that is definitely a hot market. That is my big secret for product research. That’s, to be honest with you, that’s where I recommend you start before you even go online.  Go to a big bookstore—Barnes & Nobles or B. Dalton or any of those—and do your research there first and buy whatever books are real hot in that market or magazines that focus on that niche, and bring them home and just tear them apart.  Analyze the copy they use, the headlines, analyze the ads in there and that’s how I recommend you find hot markets.  After you do that, that’s when I’d come home and do your online stuff.  Check out Google and Amazon and SRDS.com.

Ben or Caleb, you want to add anything to that that you guys do?

Ben: Well, a couple years ago—I’m not gonna say this is the best way to do it—it’s certainly not, this is kind of a fast way of doing it actually.  A couple years ago I was looking for a niche to go into besides just talking to copywriters all the time. And I made my little list of things I’m interested in and all that like we’re all supposed to do. And I went to Google News and I typed in different phrases, things I’m interested in and to see just how many news articles there are about certain topics.  In this case I chose the topic of dogs.  And there was just a ton of news articles about dogs and here’s why this was important is because all these news articles were talking about problems related to dogs.  Like you know people leaving their dogs in their cars in the summer, you know training problems and vicious dog bites people and you know how do they, what do the trainers say to do.  What do the trainers say to do if a dog is overheated.  I mean all these tips and stuff are in these news articles.  And so not only did I find a niche that was pretty big and everything but I already knew it was big, but the thing is that all the market’s hot buttons were contained in all these news stories which the news people get paid to find out what people are scared of and what they’re doing because that’s what they do.  They try to keep people scared all the time.  So you have all these problems in a niche just handed to you on a silver platter, and I just wrote the book right out of the news articles.  I just picked those topics and then wrote my own, did my own research on the problems, but it was all laid out for me and I didn’t have to do a whole lot of research on it.  I just kind of went article by article.  Okay, this has been in a lot of articles, this exact topic, so I’ll pick that. That’ll be Chapter 1.  Here’s one that’s in a whole bunch of news articles on Google, Chapter 2, and I just went through like that.  You know.  I think you can do this with any topical type of market.

Dan: Good stuff.  Yeah.  Alright.  Next bullet point is “How to use proven systems to generate hundreds of thousands of pre-qualified leads every day for your products and services.”

Well, that is pretty easy.  Google Adwords, squeeze pages—if you know what a squeeze page is, it’s basically a way to get somebody’s email address by offering them some kind of information in exchange for the email, offering free reports.

One way I really like to use to get a higher qualified lead is offering paid reports. Basically use a lead generation piece either offline in a space ad or direct mail or online and you offer your report but you have to make them, you make them pay for it.  Even if it’s just a couple bucks.  It weeds out all what I call the moochers, the freebie seekers, and if somebody’s willing to pay for that report you have, in most cases, a much higher quality prospect.

Offline stuff, two-step ads, lead gen ads, you know, “Free Report Reveals the Most Important Question You Should Ask Before You Ever Hire a Plumber.” I’m just making this up as I go along.  You know, stuff like that. Same thing, lead gen and direct mail and postcards, autoresponders. All these things once they’re working, you know they can pretty much be put on autopilot so you’ve got a series of leads coming in every day.

Number 7.  This is a question I probably got 10 different times in response to my asking for questions for this teleseminar.  “If I had to start all over again today with no money and no experience in copywriting. . . . here’s EXACTLY how I would do it.”

Let me tell you a little story. I’ve been playing guitar for years.  I’m self-taught.  I actually started when I was seven. So let me see, that means I’ve been playing for like 20 years now.  That’s a lie.  It’s way longer than 20 years but it’s none of your business.  Anyhoo… I’ve been playing a long time. And a few years back I decided I wanted to learn jazz. Jazz is way more difficult than playing rock because you really have to understand some pretty complicated stuff about harmony, and so I started buying all kinds of courses. I paid for some private lessons with some guys.  I went to some seminars with some guys from Musicians Institute of Technology, a real high falutin music school.  I bought more and more courses.  I practiced.  I just couldn’t get it.  It just wasn’t working, you know. I was learning some of the theory but it just wasn’t coming out in my playing. I still just couldn’t play jazz.  Hardly at all.

And finally I found this teacher not far from here in Tampa, a guy named Larue
Nickelson, who’s one of the best jazz guitarists in the world.  He actually has won an international competition for jazz guitar, so I pay for a private lesson and I go down there. And he’s asking me what’s going on.  I say, “well I want to play jazz. I’ve bought every course in the world.  I’ve studied them.  I can’t, you know, I get the theory but it ain’t coming out in my playing.” And so he says, “let me show you something.”  And he goes “this is probably the only lesson you’re ever gonna need from me.  You don’t even need to come back.”  He goes to his closet and he gets out this big, thick, thicker than a telephone book, 3-ring binder and he tosses it down on the table and he opens it up and he goes “this is my transcription book.” He goes “anytime I’ve heard a lick on a recording that I like, I transcribe it.” What he means by transcribing it, he learns the lick, note for note, the exact phrasing, exactly how the guy played it, the dynamics of how he played it and he transcribes it, listening to that lick, you know, time after time after time, getting it a note at a time, and then learning it on the guitar and writing it down.  He goes, “you need to start keeping a transcription book. Anytime you hear something you like, you know especially if you hear a lick from a highly successful player like Coltrane or you know one of these guitarists like I like, like Pat Martino and Mike Stern, you need to transcribe that lick.”

So I started doing that and an amazing thing happened.  What the years of theory and book learning that didn’t help me at all, after I started transcribing this stuff, all of a sudden I’m playing jazz and I’m getting more and more fluent. And I got to thinking about it and I thought “you know, I don’t necessarily understand some of the stuff that I’m playing.  I don’t necessarily understand the harmony or the theory behind it.”  Then after I learned it and was actually playing music is when I went back and studied the theory behind it and figured out “oh, okay, what I’m doing is I’m playing a major 7th arpeggio up a third over a minor 7th chord and it gives me these chord tones.  I get the 9th, the 11th, this and that.”  So after I was already playing jazz is when I figured out the theory. I think you see where I’m going here.

If I were to start over, what I would do is I would get my hands on some controls —winning copy. You know stuff that’s done blockbuster success, stuff by Clayton Makepeace, John Carlton, Gary Halbert.  I don’t mean to leave anybody out, but those are the first three that came to mind. And I would, exactly like Gary Halbert said, I’d start writing that stuff out by hand.  And I know it’s grunt work and it’s not fun.  It’s not sexy and it’s not exciting but that’s what I’d do to learn, to kinda get that ingrained in your brain—the words they use, the rhythm they use, exactly how they write copy.  I’d write that stuff out by hand, you know, just like transcribing a guitar lick.

And then I’d start using that stuff in my own copywriting. Like if John Carlton used you know a bullet you know like, “The Secret I Discovered from a One-Armed Blind Golfer That Allowed Me to Hit a Golf Ball Farther Than a Howitzer Cannon.”  You know, I would take the gist of that, I wouldn’t copy it word for word, but I’d take the spirit of that and adapt that to whatever I’m  writing about.  I think you get what I’m getting at here.

If you’re writing about dog training, you write “The Secret I Discovered from a Deaf Dog Trainer to Get a Dog to Listen to You and Do Exactly What You Want Every Single Time.” Does that kind of make sense?  Ben or Caleb, you guys are both excellent copywriters. How would you answer that question, “if you had to start all over again today, what would you do to learn copywriting. You got no experience and no money?”

Ben: Well I would do exactly what you said.  It is what I did.  I copied everything out I could get my hands on by Gary Halbert—by hand—and I did it over and over and over. When I’d get up in the morning, I’d do it. At the time I was working a second shift job and I just, I found some time. I just happened to have a job where I could actually, I had five, ten, sometimes an hour, five, ten minutes or an hour of nothing to do. I was duplicating videos all day, and I would actually sit there and just copy out ads by hand.  But the thing is is then what I didn’t do, what I would do now as far as getting started and actually monetizing it, is I would have found out who’s already hiring copywriters. There’s marketers out there who just have projects coming out of their ears and they need writers, and I would have contacted them.  And I would have just been you know relentless about that and at the same time I would have done some projects for straight commission.  I mean I know I’m not gonna get paid anything from most people when you do straight commission but you know you might.  But the point is you want to get something in your portfolio that you actually did.  And if you’re copying out ads by the best people, you’re gonna write some pretty good ads.  I mean you may not be the best in the world, but you’ll be writing some good ads—enough to impress probably someone who will pay you sooner than later.  So that’s the way I would have done it.

Dan: Yeah.  Good point.  Caleb?

Caleb: Yeah, that’s a great, that’s just the best tip. I think people probably heard that but maybe they just haven’t done it. I know that, I’ll tell you this. I started my copywriting career and I didn’t read any “how to books” on how to write copy.  I did exactly that. I saw lots of sales letters, you know I started reading. There’s so much free information online. The Gary Halbert Letters are just a plethora of ridiculously profitable information that’s there. Ben Settle’s website is awesome too. Definitely Clayton Makepeace. That guy just gives away the farm and there’s just so much stuff out there now for free that you know the mechanics and the theory and all that stuff is just readily available.  And what you can’t get there, I’ll let everybody in on a secret, I built my whole copywriting business at the library basically for the first year.  I just walked to the library, it was you know not more than a mile away from my house.  And you know, you got free internet at the library, if you’ve got a laptop which you can get cheaply, you can use it there. And just every copywriting book you want is either there already, or if you can’t find it there, you can get it interlibrary loan.  You’re not gonna be able to get the fancy pants home study courses or anything like that, but you know all the good books, the classics are there. I’ll be honest with you, even today, I haven’t even read all the classics.  I’ve read you know some important ones and they help, but this is all after just paying attention to what lands in either your mailbox or your inbox or that you see the successful direct response companies doing. And a lot of that comes down to you know what Dan was saying, going down to the bookstore and seeing what’s selling, seeing the big magazines and paying attention to what’s actually moving you know, magazines on the shelf.  And then combining that with what you’re reading from these free resources online about the mechanics of how to write copy and then, yeah, just start writing out sales letters by hand and you’ll just be surprised how, like Dan said, it just gets in, you learn the rhythms of it.  It’s almost like it gets in your nervous system.  You know how to put a sales pitch down on paper.

So that’s pretty much the best tip I can say and someone said it, the biggest, the best way to get better at writing is “writers write,” you know.  And kind of going back to what we were talking about before, if you want some low cost ways to get started, you know, starting a blog, doing articles and things like that.  Like, that’s what I would do if I had it to do over again. I got into the habit of where I was like “well I don’t want to do this because it’s going to take too long you know.  I want overnight success, whatever.” But a lot times it’s those little daily actions that are gonna add up over the long-term.  And like Ben’s been really good about it, if you pay attention to him, his whole website is a blog with just you know hundreds of articles. He’s written articles since, I think I met Ben like two or three years ago, back when I first got started and you know, he’s just always been pumping out articles—and that right there is practice for your sales letters.  Everything that you produce is practice for your sales letters.  And if you’re writing out these sales letters by hand then you’re going to get that same rhythm that comes to writing good effective sales copy.  You’re gonna put all that into your articles and people will notice.  People will pick that up and you’ll just be all the better for it.

Dan: That’s true.

Ben: You know, just to piggyback on something Caleb said.  If you, one really good way to get good at this in addition to handwriting stuff out by hand is to write articles every day in copywriting forums. Persuade somebody to click a link at the end.  It’s just practice, practice, practice and to add more to it, as you’re doing these every day, like I said, you just did one a day or five a week, within a couple months, you have a book written.

Dan: Yeah.

Ben: And now you have something you can hand people and say “hey, I’m a copywriter.”  You know, even if you’ve never had a client. Look, you just produced all this writing and it’s good.  It just, it really helps.

Dan: That’s true.

Caleb: That’s a million dollar tip right there. Yeah, cause that’s something I did in one of the niches I was in. The easy way to do this is to get a blog, start writing one article a day, just like Ben said, not even every day, like every week day. You just make it a part of your routine. You get up in the morning and you do it or when you go to bed, whenever you’ve got that extra time that you’re not working your nine to five. And if you kind of map out like an outline of a book that you want to write, you know in no time at all, in a couple of months, two or three months, you know you’re gonna have a book.  And then, especially if you’re a copywriter and you’re trying to promote yourself, you know if you write like Ben said and focus on making each little article its own little sales letter that sells itself, you know, using these techniques that you’re learning and just making each article readable, and then at the end of three months you have a book—you’re the most respected… you know how many copywriters that are just getting started have just written a book on like copywriting, you know?

And whenever somebody writes a book, you’re an expert automatically, that’s what you’re perceived as. So you may have a few samples in your copywriting samples and they’re gonna be good too, and you do a couple of commission jobs, maybe like Ben was saying or get somebody just to pay you just a couple of bucks, plus you got a book, I mean you’re golden.

Ben: Two of my best clients, multi-million dollar marketers—there was a time when I wasn’t getting any work, this was just a few years ago—I just had this dry spell. All I did, I was writing up to five to ten articles a day and just submitting them.  I had nothing else to do all day.  And now those are in, they’re in now what I call a free ebook on one of my sites that I give away when people opt in about copywriting. And my point is is that two of my best clients hired me just after reading that. They didn’t even care about my portfolio or any of that. They didn’t even ask anything about any of that stuff.  They just said, “man, I read your book, it was just awesome.” I mean, they just loved it. And it’s just copywriting information. You’re just demonstrating what you know. And of course I had ads that I could have shown them and I’d say, “you know, you want to see some ads.” “Naw, naw, don’t worry about it.  I can tell just by looking that you know how to write.”  It’s true.  There’s so many flaky copywriters out there that if you just are responsible and actually put out work, you’ll stand out like a sore thumb.

Dan: That is true. That is true. The bottom line is writers write. You can go to seminars. You can read about it.  If you’re not writing every day, then you know, you’re not gonna learn. I’m sorry. You learn by doing it. And you know, I read, God knows how many courses about using the melodic minor scale over dominant 7th chords, but you know what, reading 40 courses about that is way different than me actually going out to a gig in front of people and playing a melodic minor scale.

You know, you learn by doing. You learn way faster by doing. So the bad news is, yeah, it’s work. You’ve got to study those winning promotions. Get your hands on that stuff. Study them like a 14-year old kid studies Playboy. You just start writing them out by hand and set aside time every day to write.  Cause that’s how you’re gonna get good at doing it.

We got to move on. A second part of that question which kind of covers that bullet and the questions I got was about starting over today with no money and experience and getting involved in a direct response business or mail order business. I consider myself more like a direct response entrepreneur than just strictly a copywriter.  So if I were starting over today and I wanted to start a mail order business or an internet business, here’s what I’d do. I’d find a very hot market and a company that is selling products in that market that is doing real well and I’d become a customer of that company. I’d buy their product. I’d study their marketing. I’d study how they marketed to me before the sale and after the sale.  I’d study their product and find out what’s working for them.  And then I’d find the holes in their marketing and I’d find the holes in their product. And I’d develop a product, basically you know that fills those holes that are in their product, and I would develop marketing that fills the holes in their marketing and I’d start selling in that market. That’s the fastest way I know, you know, how I would get started again with no experience and no money.

Next bullet point is “How to Successfully Marry Online Marketing with Offline
Marketing.”

Gary Halbert told me when one of the times when I first talked to him personally on the phone, he asked what I was doing.  At that point, I had abandoned all my offline marketing and was focusing on online marketing and he told me what a huge mistake that was.  And he said whatever you’re making online right now, add a zero on to it, and that’s what you could be making if you were doing offline marketing.

So it’s actually very simple to do—not necessarily easy, but simple. Test, like I said earlier, test your process online. If you’re doing a two-step with Google Adwords and a squeeze page and collecting emails, do that. Test that online and do your tweaking there. Tweak your lead gen ads, your squeeze pages, your autoresponder emails to sell your product. Get that tweaked and performing as well as it can and that’s when you start rolling out offline—in magazines that target your niche, space ads, direct mail.  More than likely there’s lists available that you could send direct mail to—you could rent lists.  And then my big secret again was you’re generating leads or sales online, you’ve got to market to those people offline by direct mail.

And another big secret is about 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your sales.  So you need to know enough about how to segment your list of customers to kind of cull out those 20 percenters, and I would mail those people at the very least once a month and probably even more often than that.  I would focus on those people. You know, mail the rest of your list too, but the ones you really want to target for backend promotions by direct mail are that 20% list.

Next bullet is “Are you using Google Adwords?  Get THIS wrong and you’ll lose your advertising dollars faster than poop through a duck.”

I actually wanted to use a different word than “poop,” but I was kinda worried about offending somebody, but then I thought “well now I probably shouldn’t worry about offending people, when I’ve already called people ‘shit weasel’ on my website.”  So but there it is, “faster than poop through a duck.”

Here’s what I’ve learned about Google Adwords. If you don’t know what Google Adwords are, let’s say you’re selling to the bodybuilding market and you bid on a keyword “bodybuilding supplements.”  That means when somebody’s on Google searching for “bodybuilding supplements,” the organic listings come up on the middle of the page, the paid ads come up on the right side of the page or in many cases the first top two appear at the very top. What I have discovered, you do not necessarily have to be number one—have the number one or number two position for your keyword. In fact, a lot of times, that’s a big mistake because you’ll pay more.

Let’s say you’re bidding on “bodybuilding supplements” and you want the number one position.  That may mean that you’ve got to pay $2.00 per click.  In other words any time anybody sees your ad and clicks on it, Google just bills you
$2.00.

But guess what? You can get the number five position or sometimes the number six or seven position and still be on that first page of those search results for a lot less than that, you know.  It may be twenty-five cents a click as opposed to two bucks a click. And I found the response is not affected that much when you’ve got the number five position as opposed to the number one position. Sometimes having the number one position not only is costly, it’s not an advantage. You get more people clicking on that that actually really aren’t all that interested. They’re just kind of curiosity seekers. And every time somebody clicks on that, you’re charged two bucks. So I’m not an expert in Google Adwords. I actually know people who are and I hire them to manage most of my adwords account. But that’s a big secret I learned about Google Adwords.  So get your keyword bid so you’re showing up as probably maybe number five, if possible, or even number six and seven.  You’re showing, not in the top one or two, but you’re still showing up in those first pages of results.

Okay, next bullet is “How to put your business on ‘auto pilot’ so you have the time freedom to do what you want when you want.”

You know I’ve been doing this for a long time. I think I’ve been doing this since ’98. It didn’t take me too long after having a mail order business to figure out that I don’t want to do anything involved in the mail order business other than writing copy and developing products. The rest of the stuff is not fun for me. And I figured out way before, who’s the guy who wrote “The 4-Hour Workweek?”

Ben: Timothy Ferriss.

Dan: Yeah. I figured out a long time before Timothy Ferriss came out with that book, figured out how to have a 4-hour workweek and that is farm out everything. The only thing I do are the things that I’m good at which is researching markets, coming up with new products and writing copy. Everything else—customer service, people answering your phone, you know the fulfillment, the packaging and shipping of the product, the direct mail, stuffing envelopes and sending direct mail—all that can be farmed out.

And you know what, those people do it for a living and they do it way better than you could probably do it anyway. And you don’t want to do it.  It’s worth paying somebody to do it.  So when you get to the point when you can do that, farm all that stuff out. Otherwise, like I said, I’ve done my own shipping when I lived in my little apartment and started my mail order business and I figured out real fast as it started to grow, I had a job, and not only did I have a job, I had more than an 8-hour job and if I was sick or wanted to take time off, nobody else was gonna do that stuff. So farm out everything—practically everything.

Next bullet is “How to protect yourself and your money from all the money
grubbing commies who will try to steal from you.”

Gary Halbert did pass along all the secrets to me about this. You know Gary either said in a seminar or wrote on his website that he would share these secrets with somebody if they would meet him down in Miami, go to the beach with him and strip down to their swimming trunks and go out in the water with water up to their neck.  That’s when he would share this stuff.  And after I wrote that bullet I regretted putting it in there, but it was too late cause I had already sent the message out. And I’m gonna give you a brief overview but I’m not gonna share all the secrets because, well, frankly, most of this stuff is still legal to do, but the minute you try to protect what you’ve earned, you’re automatically an enemy of
the state.  And I won’t go into details about that.

But the bottom line is own nothing, but control everything. And there’s a lot of ways to do that.  And it is still legal to do that.  The U.S. Government is making it illegal, little by little. You will soon have no privacy about financial affairs whatsoever.

But Gary told me that everybody thinks they should have you know good credit. And the first thing a lawyer does when they’re looking to sue you is they look up your credit, and they’re looking for the guy with good credit and a big bank balance because that’s the guy they can suck money out of. But if you have nothing that they can find, you’ve got $500 in your bank account, you’ve got bad credit and you’ve got judgments against you, you’re a really poor prospect to sue.

So I’ll just throw that out there. You can figure out the details. But a book that I’d recommend. . . . . you know what, I won’t ever share any of this stuff on a public forum.  I’ll only share this with people I know or if somebody I’ve been working with for a period of time and I can trust, I’ll share this in detail. But unfortunately, I’m sorry I put that in the promotion because I’m not going to go into the details about this. But you can find a lot of them out in a book called “How to Be Invisible” by J.J. Luna. And you’ll figure out how to make yourself a very unattractive target. That was even one of the questions I got. Some lady said her neighbor makes his living by suing people. So you need to make yourself a very unattractive target for a lawsuit.

Last bullet is “How to use direct mail to make wheelbarrows full of cash. . . . and
how to start as cheaply as possible.”

The big secret to that is mail your own list—your list of customers. Generate your own lists so you don’t have to pay a list rental fee.  In other words, do some lead gen advertising. Get people raising their hands that say “yes, I’m interested in this topic, please send me more information.”  Now say you got a list of interested prospects—like I talked about earlier, segment your list. Find your top 20% best customers and mail those people frequently, and you probably can’t mail them frequently enough. Even if it’s every week, that’s your list that you want to mail as frequently as possible.

And as far as like starting to use direct mail cheap, when my back was against the wall, I did it myself.  I went to the printer, had the letters printed up. I brought the things home. I stapled them. Me and my wife folded them, stuffed them in an envelope. I stuck the stamp on. You know, we did 500 at a time. 1,000 at a time. And as the orders came in, we’d roll all that money into more stamps.  So if you have to start out cheaply, that’s the way to do it.

Once you start, when you rent a list to test, a commercially available list, the minimum number of names you’re probably gonna have to rent is 5,000. That doesn’t mean you have to mail all 5,000. If you’re starting cheap, you may only be able to mail a couple hundred or 500 or 1,000. Well mail whatever you can mail. If the orders start rolling in, roll that money into more stamps and continue to mail out that list. I’ve met a bunch of people who are mail order, direct mail millionaires that became millionaires that way. They learned that exact technique from Gary Halbert. You mail what you can afford to mail and as the money starts coming in from those orders, you roll that in to mailing out more and more. That’s my secret for using direct mail and doing it cheap.

I want to go ahead and get into some of the questions I got. Because I got some really good ones. I’m definitely not gonna be able to cover them all. But let me see, Paul—Paul filled one out here. We already covered this part “how do you discover and measure hot selling markets.” We covered that but “do you have any specific marketing books that you’d recommend?” I guess, you know, the classics are Tested Advertising Methods, My Life in Advertising. I’m blanking out for some reason.  Caleb and Ben will have to jump on a few of those classic books.

Ben: Breakthrough Advertising is a good one.

Caleb: Breakthrough Advertising is amazing but I warn people, I just recently started reading that again and when I first got started, it didn’t really make sense to me and I couldn’t get through it.  But Scientific Advertising, I think you said that.  My Life in Advertising.

Dan: Yeah, those are all good. Breakthrough Advertising is really good and it’s really advanced though. I don’t know if I’d necessarily recommend that for a beginner.

Caleb: Dan Kennedy’s got a good book.

Dan: Pardon?

Caleb: Dan Kennedy, like the Ultimate Sales Letter book and–

Dan: Yeah. The Ultimate Sales Letter is a great book. That’s one of the best books I ever read on copywriting.  Yeah.

Ben: And also Marketing Plan is an excellent, I mean anything Dan Kennedy does is really good beginner stuff, or advanced stuff. I mean I still learn stuff from this. But he just really knows how to communicate.

Dan: Yeah. That’s for sure. A lot of valuable information online— TheGaryHalbertLetter.com—a multi-million dollar education in direct response marketing. Same thing with MakepeaceTotalPackage.com—one of the best copywriters in the world today revealing everything he knows about direct response marketing. That’s just a few resources for you there.

We got another guy who wants to know, Bucky wants to know “how to find profitable markets and develop a product that actually delivers on its claims.” We’d already kinda covered that. Find your market. Find a successful company in that market. Buy the product. Find the holes in the product and make a better product. You know what I thought was interesting about his question was, he says “how to market in getting rich biz ops are starving crowds with excellent margins that everybody tries to exploit. If you watch what the gurus do, and not what they say, how many people make any money outside of the above-mentioned markets? And look at the gurus’ testimonials. They’re all from fellow marketers he probably joint ventured with.” And then he says, “I wouldn’t mind marketing a biz op product or get rich product if I actually did it first.”

Well, how bout that? A guy with integrity. I’m so glad to hear that because there’s a lot of people in the guru market that can’t claim that and I won’t get into that.

Here’s one from Angel. Well, we already covered this. He’s asking about if I “had to start all over again learning copywriting from scratch,” which we already talked about. “Were you originally a great writer or did you work at it?”

Yeah, it was all work. I wasn’t a good writer. You know really copywriting is not so much about writing as it is about selling. And I had to learn how to sell and then how to properly do that in print too.  So yeah it was. . . . it’s like anything else. It takes work and study.  It wasn’t a natural ability.

Paul had a question, “what would you put in a Google Adwords ad? Is it an
analogy to a sales letter, headline or something like a USP or should it contain a
specific benefit or just fire a target audience’s curiosity?”

I’ve used all of the above. But most of the time I consider a Google Adwords ad just like the old-fashioned classifieds. You’ve got very little space. You got a headline to grab your attention. You know, I’m trying to think of the headline on one of my ads—“Free Bodybuilding Book” or something like that, and then you have very little copy left to copy the attention. “Free Book Reveals the Secrets to Gaining 10 Pounds of Muscle in 8 Weeks” or whatever.  Basically, a Google Adwords ad is just a classified ad. You can study some of the classic classified ads that have worked for decades and figure out how to write your Google ads.  Ben or Caleb, you got anything to ad to that?

Ben: Yeah. I mean I was gonna say, comic, old comic books ads. Anything before 1990 basically when they used to use direct response. I’m not saying you should swipe them word for word or anything. They were forced to get inside your psychology in one or two lines, and we’re talking to younger people with much probably shorter attention spans than most people have. I mean you want to buy these stupid things they’re selling in just one or two lines. They’re just great little structures for your adwords.

Dan: That’s a good idea. Yeah. If you can get your hands on some of those old comic books or even back issues of, I’m forgetting the name of the magazine. What’s the science magazine that always had—

Caleb: Popular Mechanics.

Dan: Yeah.  Popular Mechanics.

Caleb: Yeah, I was just gonna say like Popular Mechanics and those. . . . those kind of have, some of them are two-step and some of them try to sell right from it though. I would just be wary of trying to sell too much from the Google Adwords. I’d like to kind of invoke a little bit of curiosity, hint to the benefit and then get them to click through because, you know, you got unlimited space to do the selling job with your sales letter on your website and you just kinda want to call out prospects that might be interested and get them into reading your sales letter, you know.

Dan: Yeah, exactly. Good point. You don’t have enough text or space to really sell anything from your Google Adwords. All you can do is sell them on clicking on it to go get more information about whatever it is you’re, you know, trying to promote.

Chris asked a question, “Gary mentioned in the Boron Letters, even when the idea was his he was able to get somebody else to front the testing money and then split the profits. He was also regularly looking for new clients to partner with. Did he prefer this over fully running his own company or did he find it easier with partners?”

The answer is “yes.” He much preferred to do that and basically come up with the idea and the copy and the product and have somebody handle the business end of things.

And after starting numerous businesses myself, I can see the advantage of that and I’m actually looking for people to do that with too. But I’d have to start a whole new business. It’s way easier to find somebody who already has that going, you know, and you be the marketing guy, come with the products and the copy and then let them handle the business end of it. And that’s what Gary preferred to do.

You know we got a lot more questions. I’m only gonna cover one more question because I got that fourth bullet that was the most important thing that I really want to get into.

Chuck from Tulsa said “I have trouble finding a product that is worth a damn and that you can charge enough to make the finances work.”

Well, I can relate to that. What I’ll say about that is, that’s one of the reasons I like information products. I’ve been in the information business numerous times in numerous niches and when you’re selling information, you’re selling you know pieces of paper or a DVD or a CD which costs nothing, you know, practically to duplicate. But people aren’t paying for that. They’re paying for the information that those things contain. So you know, something that costs you four bucks to duplicate, you can mark up to $40 or you can mark up to $400, or $4,000.

You know, Marilyn Monroe in her prime, if she would have given you her telephone number on a dirty bar napkin written in lipstick, you know you wouldn’t give a crap that “well, I’m not gonna accept this because I want it written on parchment in a nice plume pen.” You know “hello”—you’d be like “alright, this is worth, this is extremely valuable.” So people are paying for the information not how it’s delivered.  That’s why I like information products.

But also, here’s a common problem people make over and over and over again— even experienced business people. You’ve got to begin with the end in mind. And what I mean by that, is where you really make your money is at the back end.

If you’re relying on the front end of your business to make money, you’re probably gonna go broke because it’s gonna cost you a certain amount of money to get a new customer because of advertising costs. And so in most cases you’ll be extremely lucky to make money on the front end.

In other words, when you get a new customer consider yourself lucky if you just made money getting that customer. If you broke even, you’re doing great. Say it cost you fifty bucks to get a new customer and they paid fifty bucks so you’re at break even. You haven’t lost any money. You got a new customer on your list. In many instances, you’re actually gonna go negative getting a new customer. You know, it’s gonna cost you fifty bucks, sixty bucks to get this customer and he’s coming in on a $40 product.  So now all of a sudden you’re $10, $20 in the negative.

So how do people make money then in these businesses? The backend! That’s why I said it time and time again.  If you’re not marketing the backend products, and especially you online guys, if you’re not selling to your existing customers by direct mail, you’re screwing up because that is where your money’s gonna come from.

And so when you’re figuring out a product to sell, you know, you got to begin with the end in mind. You’re probably not gonna make money on your front end product. You need to figure out how to use your front end product to cover your costs of getting the customer and then figure out what to sell him on the backend to really make the big bucks.

I want to get into now that fourth bullet which was, the one I said “ The MOST important thing you MUST master if you want to make the big bucks.”

And I certainly hope I do this justice. Because this is extremely important. I’ve never presented this—I’ve never presented this before in my life to anybody. Not even my family members, and I feel extremely passionate about this because if you get this and understand this, I know you’ll be as wildly successful as you want to be.

But since I am quite passionate about this, I’m really gonna try to watch my language but a couple things might slip out, but you know, overlook that.

I’d like to start out by reading a quote and then you’re gonna see how this all figures in. And I can’t even pronounce this guy’s name. It’s Heracletus from 500, I think it was Greek, 500 years before Christ.

Ben: Heracletus.

Dan: Thank you.  You’ve heard this quote before.

Ben: Yeah, I know. I love this quote. Go ahead.

Dan: Here’s what this guy said: “Of every 100 men,” (he’s talking about going to war) —“of every 100 men, 10 shouldn’t even be here. 80 are nothing but targets. 9 are real fighters. We’re lucky to have them. They make the battle. Ah….but the one, one of them is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”

I’d like to tell you about a couple friends of mine. One of them is Gary Halbert.

Gary Halbert and I had, our backgrounds were so similar it was almost scary. Born in the exact same city, born to the same type of parents, same type of environment.  Gary was born in Barberton, Ohio. Very working class, lower middle class, broke-thinking town. Born to broke, poverty-minded parents.

Gary Halbert didn’t have any special abilities. Didn’t have any advantages. If anything, in my opinion, he had a whole lot of disadvantages. When Gary started figuring out he wanted to be in the mail order business, he time after time after time, had so many failures, I can’t even remember them all—Gary couldn’t even remember them all. I asked about them. He told me about some of them but he couldn’t remember them.

Time after time, for years, four to five years, every single mail order project he started failed.

There were times where he was sitting in a dark house with no running water waiting by the mailbox with his wife, waiting for orders to come in because he used his utility money to pay for stamps. So he’s waiting for orders to come in so he can pay his utilities.  Orders that never came in.

Gary endured so many failures time after time. You know what? After those failures you know what he did? He went and started a different mail order project, a different direct mail product. Wrote the copy for it, rented the lists, printed letters, stuffed the letters, mailed them out. Failed again.

Sitting in a dark house trying to figure out how he’s gonna feed his family. Time after time after time for five years—but he kept getting up and doing it over and over and over.

Well, he finally had a project that kinda worked. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. It was called the “Coat of Arms Letter.” It now, I believe its record still stands as the most mailed sales letter in the history of direct response marketing.  It was a huge, huge hit.

At one point he had to have over 40 women on his payroll whose sole job was to take the checks and the money orders out of the envelope and deposit them in the bank. 40 women.

He told me that back in the early ‘70s when this project hit, he was making approximately $25,000 a day with that project. Now that’s in the early ‘70s. The cost of everything doubles every year so when you extrapolate that out in today’s dollars, it’s an ungodly amount of money. That was his first project that ever worked and it was huge.

I’d like to tell you about another friend of mine.  His name is Glenn Stoudemire. Glenn is a friend and a hero of mine. We met playing in a band, of all things. And Glenn was an army paratrooper. He was in the Airborne and also a medal of honor winner. Since the U.S. Government started giving out the Congressional Medal of Honor, he is one of only a handful of African Americans to win a Congressional Medal of Honor. I don’t know how many, but it’s only a couple thousand. First of all, there’s very few Congressional Medal of Honor winners and he’s one of only a few African Americans.  And he won that from his actions in the Panama invasion.

A few years ago Glenn was diagnosed with stage 4 bone cancer. And they gave him six months to live—and Glenn rejected that—and he rejected the treatment which was chemotherapy. He actually took one course. He said after that he knew that if he continued with the chemotherapy, he definitely would be dead in six months or less.

But instead, unfortunately, Glenn’s cancer was so advanced and it took so much of a toll on his body, he was not able to continue in his employment. He was pretty much a big shot in the private prison system for juveniles. He was a regional director of that and had to travel a lot and the cancer just didn’t permit it anymore. So unfortunately he had to leave that job.  And nobody will blame him if he stayed in bed and gave up and rolled over.

But Glenn is a warrior. You don’t get a Congressional Medal of Honor for not being a warrior. Glenn is a warrior. So what did he do? Glenn got up every day and started focusing on the projects that he wanted to do. The band that we were in at the time, he pushed us to a level of success that we probably never would have experienced without him. We got a lot of regional success, airplay on radio stations, headliners at several large regional jazz festivals.

When those guys didn’t want to pursue that project anymore, Glenn came up with his own CD, started pushing that. He now has national airplay and international airplay, is getting invited to play at some real swanky places like Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

In addition to that, he’s starting his own recording studio. Starting a pest control business. He’s got every excuse to quit in the world. And you know what? Nobody would blame him. But he doesn’t quit. He gets up every day.

And I know when he feels bad. And when he feels bad and says he’s not feeling good, that’s probably the biggest understatement of the year. Because this guy’s a man’s man. And when he’s not feeling good, he’s probably feeling frickin’ near death.

But you know what he does? He gets up and he starts working and he goes to working on these projects.

The next person I’d like to tell you about is old Doberman Dan here, your host.

I had a civil service job that I had started to hate. It was a dead-end job. I knew I would never make much more money than I was already making. Most of the guys in that job were dead within five years of retirement. First of all, most of them never made it to retirement. They either were you know disabled, unable to work anymore. The ones that did make it 25 years to retirement were dead in five years or less after that.

So I started looking down the road and figuring out that’s not what I want. So I figured out real fast that well, I didn’t have a college education so I’m not gonna be a doctor or a lawyer. I figured those were the people making the big bucks so I had to figure something else out.

Well somebody got me into the Amway business. Ben and I have a similar story about that. I did everything I was told. I spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to get that going and that just failed time after time after time. But at least it got me pointed in the right direction. I knew that I needed to be self-employed.

At that point I was a serial entrepreneur. I started business after business after business. All of them pretty much failures with one semi-base hit success. So many that I don’t recall them.

A couple failed vending businesses. That sucked because you had to buy the machines and all of a sudden I’ve got these vending machine that weren’t making any money but yet I had all the money tied up with them.

So since it didn’t work the first time I thought maybe it’d work the second time. I went in the vending business again with these little fountain coke dispenser things. It was a nightmare. It failed. The machine was a nightmare. Business after business after business failed like that.

I left my job and had a little bit of income coming in from this other multi-level marketing thing which failed shortly after that. But it was enough to cover my bills and I just had to get out of that job.

I left my job and got $40,000 from my pension fund. That got pissed away on more failed businesses. Investing in businesses, getting them started. The forty grand got pissed away to nothing. Still no success. I had to work jobs. I had to get another job.

I got a $45,000 inheritance when my grandma passed away. Same thing. Started another business, numerous businesses. Those all failed. Forty-five grand pissed away.

You know, I think maybe a somewhat intelligent person probably woulda quit a long time ago and just accepted their fate at the miserable dead-end civil service job, you know. And saved the money that I pissed away from my pension and from my inheritance. I just couldn’t do that. I knew I had to keep fighting because I knew that I could be a success.

It wasn’t blind faith. Other people had succeeded. I knew I could do it. I just kept getting up every friggin’ time I got knocked down.

You know why? Because I’d feel less of a man if I didn’t. I mean who gives up in the middle of a fight?  I just kept getting up and starting project after project.

Luckily, when one of the other businesses I started had failed, I found Dan Kennedy because he was selling his “Magnetic Marketing System.”

Well, it wasn’t enough. It was too late to help the businesses that had failed, but I watched how he sold that system to me and I thought, “I’ll be damned. I just bought some mimeographed, some Xeroxed papers in a 3-ring binder for $400, and I did that by letters he sent me in the mail. This is kind of cool.”  I figured, “I wonder if I could do that.”

And that’s when I started that bodybuilding business, that self- published manual I told you about.

Guess what happened after all those numerous businesses that had failed? Guess what happened with that business? It failed! It was a miserable failure!  BUT I had a gut feeling that I can make that work because there are other people selling products in that market.

So I sought out the people who knew how to do it and I tweaked that until it started working. And that was the first real success I had after five years of business failures. And basically that business still exists today. It was rolled into a different business. The name’s changed but the same business is still going today. It’s still supporting my bad habits of sleeping indoors and eating and still doing quite well.

My point to all this is—YOU DON’T QUIT!  YOU DON’T GIVE UP!

Failure is part of success.

So big deal, so your project failed. You started a website. You started a squeeze page. It failed. Nobody signed up. Nobody bought your doohickey. Big deal! You know, you got a couple of choices. You can roll over and piss on yourself, or you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and go at it again.

Now there’s a difference between being stupid and being persistent. I think, you know, internet marketing, direct response marketing, mail order has been proven to work. It works in about a million different niches. So there’s nothing unproven about that.

You know, you don’t want to continue in something that has no chance of success. But as long as you picked a good market that is proven to buy those type of products, all you have to do is persevere long enough until you get it right. And that might be a matter of getting the information you need, tweaking a headline there, seeking out people who can tell you what you’re doing wrong and how to correct it.

But here’s the big problem I found why people never get to that point of success.

They don’t have the spirit of the warrior. They’re not a warrior. You know what they are? They’re one of those 100 men.  They’re either the 10 that shouldn’t even be there, or they’re the 80 that are nothing but targets.

I got good news for you. I did not start out a warrior. I developed into a warrior and how I did it was every single time I got knocked down, I got back up and went back at it. You don’t lay down in the fight.

But what amazes me is most people never get started. They got the “paralysis of analysis.” They quit at the first problem.

Well, you know what? You get exactly what you deserve then. If that’s what you’re gonna do, then your reward is exactly what you deserve. Nothing.

They’re afraid of failure. I just heard this a couple days ago. “Well, you know, I’m afraid to start, I’m afraid to fail.” Guess what?  Failure is a part of success. Fail fast. The faster you fail the better because you can figure out what doesn’t work. There’s no way of being successful without failure.

You know you just gotta have a little courage. Fear is gonna be present whenever you’re starting something new like this. You’re starting a new business. You’re starting a new online site. It’s the unknown. It’s little fear, you know. “Is this money I’m investing, is it just gonna be pissed away and I’m gonna lose my thousand bucks or whatever?”

Well, yeah, it’s possible but you know you can experience the fear and move forward and move ahead or you can let it completely paralyze you. Well if you let it completely paralyze you, you deserve exactly what you’re gonna get—which is nothing.

So the message is—you’ve got to get started. You’ve got to start moving forward. And you’re gonna get knocked down. I guarantee it. You just gotta get back up.

Very recently, just within the past few years, I had a blow dealt to me that just came out of nowhere and I literally was homeless. I was living in my car. I was living in fleabag motels. I had basically stopped working in the niche I was working in to work with Gary Halbert and then that gig ended. So all of a sudden I didn’t have freelance work coming in. And I had neglected my business and had no money. And the other part about being homeless involves a woman but we won’t go into that.

You know, I felt defeated. But guess what I did. I got up and started working and moving forward. The message is you never give up. You’ve got to overcome the fear. You have to fail fast.  Keep moving forward.

There’s something that happens. The universe rewards those who don’t quit. And you know what? There are very few of those. It’s just like the guy said about the warrior. Out of the 100, there’s one—the guy who doesn’t quit. You just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Even when it looks like you’re making no progress until you finally, you push through that barrier. You gotta get some brass balls and just never give up.

There’s people on this call who’ve been to seminars. They’ve bought the courses. They’ve never even gotten started on a project. I’m telling you. You just gotta get started moving forward and never give up.

I don’t understand why it works. Like I said, it’s taken me almost 20 years to figure this out from my personal experience. But it is the truth.

The harder you throw the ball against the wall, the harder it bounces back. The bigger the challenges, the bigger your reward. If you’re not willing to pay the price and experience the big challenges, the big problems, you are never gonna experience the big rewards.

These are tried and true principles. The more “the man”, you know, puts his boot on your neck, the stronger the retaliation.

Like I said before, I’d like to wind this down, I get a little bit too passionate about this and excuse any bad words that came out.

You don’t have to be born a warrior. If you’re not a warrior right now, if you’ve been sitting on your hands and stuck with the “paralysis of analysis,” it’s okay.

If you’ve been sidelined because you’ve had a little failure or life dealt you a blow. I understand. I can appreciate that. You gotta get back in the game.

You gotta be a warrior and how you become that warrior who is going to experience the big rewards is by continuing in the fight no matter what the obstacles.

I have never in my life taught something that I’ve not done. That’s why I’m not on this call telling you how to write direct mail controls for Agora and these big companies because you know what, I’ve never done that.

But right now I’m teaching you the most important thing I’ve learned in my entire life and it is because I’ve lived it. I’ve done it. And it’s a never ending process. You don’t get there. You don’t arrive. You don’t make it when then all of a sudden you don’t have to be a warrior anymore and continue pushing and picking yourself up after failures. It never ends. You just stay in the fight and keep getting up and moving forward and failure is part of success.

Not every new project I start is a success. To be honest with you, in most cases, seven out of ten are probably, they just fall flat on their face. But you know what, if I would stop at number five or number six or number seven, I’m not gonna get to number eight which might be the multi-million dollar project that makes me enough money to retire and have a great lifestyle and really never have to work again.

So I hope I’ve made that point clear. That is the most important thing you can take away from this call. You gotta be a warrior and just keep getting up and moving forward.

And you know what? I wrote an online newsletter about this.
Star out by devoting a half hour a day to getting started. You may still have a job… a half hour a day. You know what, a half hour a day spent doing product research, looking for lists on the SRDS, writing copy. You’re in the fight as far as I’m concerned. And as long as you’re in the fight, you’re a warrior in my opinion and as long as you’re a warrior and push past all those failures and keep fighting, you will experience the success that you want.

It’s a principle of the universe. It doesn’t fail. It has never failed me before.  It will not fail you.  Trust me on this.  My hand to God.  It is true.

Thanks guys for being on the call. I really appreciate it.

Ah, I told you I was gonna give you a free book and I am gonna give you a free book. It’s a book I co-authored with Dr. Wayne Dyer and Brian Tracy and has information in this book, exactly what we’ve just been talking about, how to be a warrior. And how you can get it is go to my website DobermanDan.com/freebook and there’s a form you fill out with your name and address. I’m gonna open that up to everybody who was on this call, but you’ll need to submit that information you know as soon as you can so I can get that over to the fulfillment company within the next day or two to have them send you your book. It’s called “Wake Up….Live the Life You Love” and you can get that from DobermanDan.com/freebook.

One last thing. People have been bugging me about this for years. I’m reluctantly, extremely reluctantly going to do it.

I usually don’t have time to do one on one consultations with people but I will offer this to people who have been on the call.

I’m going to open up 11 spots for a one hour consultation, and the price is $697, payable by check. And the deal is you’ll need to send me an email immediately to reserve a spot. You can email me at dan@DobermanDan.com. Just email me your name and tell me that you want to reserve one of the one hour consultation spots.

You’ll need to do it right away cause there’s a bunch of people on this call and I’m cutting it off at 11. I’m not kidding about that. So send me an email to dan@DobermanDan.com telling me you want one of the one hour spots. At that point I’ll send you an email of where to send a check for $697.

Here’s the deal. Once I get your check, I will schedule, I’ll give you a choice of three different days and times for your one hour consultation. I will not cash your check until after the consultation.

After the one hour consultation if you feel that you have not gotten your money’s worth, I’ll either mail your check back to you or I’ll run it through my shredder here and you’ll pay nothing.

You know, you’re gonna have to send me some information with your check like information specific about your business. But I’ll send you all that information once I get your email. So to reserve one of those spots, send an email right now to dan@DobermanDan.com.

Thank you for being on the call. I hope you got a lot of value out of it. I appreciate your time and maybe we’ll do one of these again real soon.

Thanks guys, take care.  Bye bye.

“Of every 100 men, 10 shouldn’t even be here.  80 are nothing but targets.  9 are real fighters.  We’re lucky to have them.  They make the battle.  Ah… but the one, one of them is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”

Heracletus (500 B.C.)