ReEngager Podcast: Ecommerce Email Marketing For O

In November 2021, I ran a special Black Friday promotion on Drop Dead Copy. 16 world-class copywriters contributed 2 products each. One for the front-end offer. One for the upsell. Since we tracked everything and commissions increased as you ranked higher, each copywriter competed for the top spot. The more you sold, the more you made. Plus, if you won… you got the bragging rights. You could say you beat everyone else. That’s where Daniel Throssell comes in. This skinny kid from Perth was the underdog. He’d been writing copy for less time than most of the other copywriters in the promotion. And yet, despite his newbie status, he sold more than every single other copywriter combined, making it damn near impossible for anyone else to win. Plus, he did it in 4 days while everyone else used the full 10 days. I remember looking at my computer screen as the sales rolled in wondering what the hell was going on. It was insane. So, like anyone interested in improving performance, I starting thinking: How the hell did he do it? How the hell does a skinny kid from Perth, a relative newcomer to the copywriting industry, dominate a competition with some of the top copywriters in the world? How does he think about copywriting and marketing? Why does he ruffle feathers, court controversy and stir up “high school drama” any chance he can get? How does he think about storytelling? That’s what today’s podcast is about. If there’s ONE podcast you listen to this year, make it this one. But before you do, a warning: Daniel isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He likes to… how do I say it… ruffle feathers. He actively courts controversy as a marketing strategy and he’s amazing at it. As for the haters, instead of letting them bother him, Daniel sees them as unpaid marketing consultants. They run around the internet complaining about him, driving more people to check Daniel out, and they don’t even get paid for it. So keep that in mind as you listen. Stay open. Stay flexible. And learn everything you can from this cheeky, creative dude from Perth. Enjoy! In this episode, you’ll discover: How Daniel created his “offer to end all offers” for Black Friday 2022 (and how he used it to make as many sales as every other partner combined) How he secured a jaw dropping 100% upsell rate instead of the “typical but boring by comparison” 20-30% rate that most copywriters and marketers get How to leverage deep-seated psychological biases in human beings to dramatically increase your reach and drive more people to your offers The ideal length for promotions: 4 days vs 10 days (and why the answer is not what you’d probably expect) How to use controversy to drive sales (plus, Daniel’s surprising advice to his many haters) How Daniel manufactures “high school drama” to keep things interesting, entertaining and fun for his subscribers (and why he believes this is a critical part of marketing in 2022 and beyond) And much more! Mentioned: Daniel Throssell Campaign Conqueror (Daniel’s paid course on how he created his Black Friday 2022 promotion) Ian Stanley Matt Bockenstette Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO The post Daniel Throssell on How He Dominated Drop Dead Copy’s Black Friday 2021 Bundle Promotion appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

She’s one of the TOP copywriters in the world right now. She won AWAI’s prestigious “Copywriter of the Year” award… …got featured on Dr Oz… …wrote a promo for Oprah… …and now she’s here to give you 60 Kick-Butt Lessons on Copywriting… Business… and Life! from her new book Your Copy Sucks – You Don’t!. Let’s get into it… In this episode, you’ll discover: How Carline kicks imposter syndrome to the curb with a simple, short statement about you and your copy (Lesson 34) How to make people better off in ways they desire and are willing to pay for (Lesson 53) How to keep calm and carry on even when you’re having a HORRIBLE day (Lesson 27) 3 simple words you should use to end EVERY email, letter or note (Lesson 33) How to explain copywriting to a bunch of 10-year-olds with short attention spans (not a lesson – just for fun!) Mentioned: Your Copy Sucks – You Don’t!: 60 Kick-Butt Lessons on Copywriting… Business… and Life! My Life as a 50+ Year-Old White Male: How a Mixed-Race Woman Stumbled Into Direct-Response Copywriting and Succeeded! Carline’s website (join her ezine!) Carline’s YouTube Channel Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO The post Carline Anglade-Cole on Why Your Copy Sucks But You Don’t appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Rob Marsh from The Copywriter Club says he’s a simple guy. Just a dad who writes words for a living. But he’s much more than that. In this episode, Rob lifts the curtain on a recent salary survey he did with his business partner Kira Hug at The Copywriter Club. They asked thousands of copywriters to spill the beans on their income, experience, niche and more. The weirdest thing they discovered? Experience doesn’t matter. What do you think makes the biggest difference in what copywriters charge? Is it their age, gender, niche, education level, country of origin, where they live now or the language they speak? It’s their niche. Turns out, if you focus on ONE niche (and one niche only), you’ll make 96% more than copywriters who don’t have a niche. Interesting, hey? To get the full story, grab a coffee, tea or a shot of tequila and hit the play button below… In this episode of the podcast with Rob Marsh from The Copywriter Club, you’ll discover: The weirdest insight from Rob and Kira’s “Copywriter Salary Survey” (ignore this and you could spend 10 years spinning your wheels) What factor makes the single biggest difference when it comes to pricing your projects? (if you want to earn double what most copywriters earn, this tip’s for you) The hottest and most profitable niches for copywriters to focus on (no, it’s just the standard “health, wealth and relationship” niches) The surprisingly simple reason why most women earn less than men when it comes to copywriting (plus, how both sexes can use this simple insight to double or triple what they currently earn) The 4 things that drive your price and income (if you want to earn more as a copywriter, fix these 4 things first) Mentioned in this episode of the Email Marketing Podcast: The Copywriter Club (Rob’s website) The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Club Podcast Women Don’t Ask by Linda Babcock Copy Chief Copyhackers Kira Hug (Rob’s business partner) Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO The post Rob Marsh on How To Earn Double What Most Copywriters Earn appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

His client calls him “Australia’s best copywriter”. He’s one of the most innovative copywriters in the game at the moment (just wait until you hear me read his welcome email out on the podcast – it reads like a horror movie, alongside scary music on the podcast). He’s also one of the most down-to-earth people I’ve met – great attitude, endless passion and tons of fun to talk to. If you want to have some fun (and maybe get a few unconventional tips too), you’ll love this podcast with Daniel Throssell, one of the “best copywriters in Australia”. In this episode, you’ll discover: How Daniel beat far more experienced copywriters at their own game when he won Ramit Sethi’s Sales Letter Competition – despite being a complete beginner with no experience and no clients (hint: it has something to do with how he convinced his wife to let him buy a $200 book) How Daniel started with ZERO experience and NO credentials on Upwork, won paid copywriting work in his very first week and raised his rates to $200/hr within his first nine months How Daniel gets insane engagement rates on his welcome series by treating it like it’s a “choose your own adventure” horror movie (I read it out LIVE on the podcast with some scary music in the background – NOT for the faint of heart ) Why you need to STOP using the same tired, worn-out copywriting formulas that all the “copywriting hamsters” use (and what you need to do instead if you want to stand out in today’s market) How robots once invaded Daniel’s copywriting lab hoping to steal his spoils of war but Daniel beat them off with the stick of P___O___I__ Mentioned: The Persuasive Page (Daniel’s website) Ramit Sethi The Robert Collier Letter Book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think The Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO The post Daniel Throssell on How To Break All The Copywriting Rules And STILL Win Big (Warning: Not For The Faint Of Heart 😱) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Kim Krause Schwalm is a hell of a copywriter. She beat the late, great Jim Rutz in a head-to-head battle. Impressive stuff. Brian Kurtz called Jim Rutz “the copywriter closest to God”. If that’s true and Kim beat Jim, what does that make Kim? In any case, Kim’s back on the podcast today to discuss some fascinating topics… such as what to name your upcoming mice supplement product (among other things). Check it out if you dare. In this episode, you’ll discover: What is the most dangerous number in business? And what can you do about it so it doesn’t leave you dead in the water? How to prepare yourself as a copywriter for the “AI Revolution” (plus, find out which copywriting jobs Kim thinks robots will NEVER be able to do) When to work for a direct-response company and when to work for yourself (Kim’s answer will surprise you) The personality defect that gets even seasoned copywriters into BIG trouble (This one’s extremely common but rarely talked about) Simple, easy tricks to manage your money as a copywriter (so you don’t end up with a boatload of debt that acts as a prison) Mentioned: http://copyinsiders.com/ (Kim’s mailing list w/ free resources) https://www.kimschwalm.com/ (Kim’s website) Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO The post Kim Krause Schwalm on Dangerous Numbers, Personality Defects and The Coming AI Revolution appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Worried about the coronavirus? Don’t know if you can trust what the media says about it? Want to find out how it actually unfolded in China – from someone who’s lived there for the last 10 years? This podcast episode is for you. Brian Miller is an American entrepreneur running a company called Easy China Warehouse. He lives and works in China full-time so he has a unique “up close” perspective on how the coronavirus crisis actually unfolded. Find out what happened in this juicy episode… In this episode, you’ll discover: how the coronavirus actually unfolded in China (from an American living in China at the time of the outbreak) how the coronavirus will affect the Chinese and U.S. economy differently (and how it will probably take much LONGER for the U.S. to recover) why China (and Asia) have dealt with the coronavirus so well compared with Western countries how to survive and thrive the coming months and years (and what to expect in terms of marketplace conditions and recessions) how to avoid getting fooled by all the B.S. coronavirus conspiracy theories floating around the web (save time and stop putting energy into stuff that doesn’t matter) Mentioned: Brian’s company Easy China Warehouse Brian’s LinkedIn profile Emily Writes: Down the rabbit hole with the Covid-19 conspiracy theorists Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO The post This Is How The Coronavirus ACTUALLY Unfolded In China appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Stephen Somers was young (23) and in need of direction. He didn’t want to take the corporate job route… and wished he had an online business mentor. When his aunt introduced him to Robert… it changed his whole life. Robert was selling on different online marketplaces… and Stephen got a tried and true “in the trenches” apprenticeship. Working for free for an entire year doing all the manual grunt work… Paid off big time as he learned the ins and outs of Robert’s systems. Fast-forward to today. Partners in several companies who are killing it… listen as Stephen retells the struggle and climb he and Robert went through… to build several businesses… include the 8-figure “Marketplace Superheroes.” It’s a true Irish fairy-tale of sorts as Stephen regales us with everything they had to learn on the way up. It’s a fascinating take of brute force and whip-smart strategy… as Stephen applies direct-response principles to physical products on Amazon… as well as a freight business.. an accountancy practice… and more. Listen now and keep your note-taking hand ready as Stephen drops a virtual pot of gold along the way! The rewards are yours for the taking. In this episode, you’ll discover: Sell THESE kind of products and ditch following your passion. Contrarian advice based in real-world success. Business-killing reasons why Stephen and Robert stay away from black and grey hat marketing techniques on Amazon. The real question you should be asking yourself if you’re selling online. So simple and yet overlooked. Simple ways to build up a business from absolute zero. Don’t reinvent the wheel – do what works. Jump-start your idea machine. The intriguing “full-circle” journey Stephen and his partner went on… will get you thinking. Mentioned: Marketplace Superheroes Stephen Somers on Facebook Case Studies David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO The post Episode #208 – Stephen Somers on Irish Direct-Response Strategies To Find “Boring” Pots Of Gold. appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Nick Carpenter comes from a military family. He went into the air force because college had no appeal. 6.5 years later, deciding he didn’t want to go back to Iraq one more time, he got out. You have to hear his brief thoughts about the real Iraq. He decided to jump into real estate and so picked up his license in Texas and went ot work for a large corporation. For three years he helped people buy and sell houses. A bad breakup had him shift to a new company and a new office where he started training and onboarding new agents. In short order, agents recruited Nick to help open a new company. He was now in charge of all the marketing and training. The hoops he had to jump through to even get paid were ridiculous… listen to his golf course story! He heard a big mortgage company was looking to create an in-house marketing team and so with the arrival of his second child… he joined them. Hiring web developers, graphic designers, and video editors etc. So since 2011, Nick has worked only with loan officers. By 2014, feeling restricted and looking for his own opportunities… he left to start his own agency. Listen where he took it next… In this episode, you’ll discover: 3 early “survival” steps Nick had to focus on to get his company off the ground. Listen to the number of ideas he went through. The one simple change which caused potential customers to go from saying “no” to “yes”. How Nick reframed his business to create a new emotional appeal.. and attract his own “congregation.” One strategy Nick employs two ways to continue his rapid businesss growth. (Nick includes all the details) Two massive, soul-crushing mistakes loan officers swear by. Listen to Nick and get rid of these two issues forever. Mentioned: Nick’s “Legion of Loan Officers” Nick Carpenter on Facebook Bobby Stocks Mitch Miller David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey everybody, I’m David Allan. Happy New Year. Our first guest of the new year is a guy I’ve heard a lot about – he’s in a niche I know literally nothing about. He’s very successful and has risen up through the ranks, so to speak – I have been seeing his fabulous posts on Facebook, I’ve been hearing a lot about his results, we have a lot of friends in common – we’re in the same circles…so I would love to welcome Nick Carpenter to the show…Hello Nick! Nick Carpenter: Hey man, thanks for having me, I’m excited to be here. David Allan: Yeah, this is really great. Here we are, brand new year – wipe the slate clean – however, you want to say that – people tend to set new goals and put new motions into action to try to get everything rolling… Maybe take us back, like we usually do – We like to go back and see where you came from and how you ended up where you are now…so take us back – we wanna know what got Nick into treating and serving loan officers. Nick Carpenter: Yeah, that’s such a good question. It is definitely an interesting path you know The post Episode #207 – Nick Carpenter on Mastermind Secrets Of Companies Who Dominate Their Niche appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Chris wanted to be a school teacher. It took him precious little time suffering through 12-hour workdays to understand… teaching school was NOT his future. He started online by emulating his friend and mentor Zach Evanesh… with a weekly podcast and blogging on strength and conditioning. Trying to cut down the time curve, he began to focus on what he enjoyed doing best… writing email. The last five years he’s spent honing… and expanding his copy skills. Now he’s even back teaching. Yet this time it’s email copy and client-getting skills. He’s made all the mistakes getting his freelance copy career rolling so you don’t have to. His students now snag retainer deals in mere weeks… something it took him over a year to do. Hence the value of a mentor. It all changed for Chris when he began to place himself in the customer’s shoes. How do you do it? Listen now and reap the battle-tested, in-the-trenches knowledge Chris brings to this episode. In this episode, you’ll discover: 2 simple changes he made which immediately resulted in new clients. Are you making these same prospecting mistakes? The “Where are they?”client advice Chris recieved from an “email guru”. You too will smack your forehead when you hear it. Never be at a loss again for finding new clients when you hear Chris’ “Poconos” story. Retainer deals: The ins, outs, and the number one idea behind finding one. The premier win-win arrangement for copywriters and business owners. Greatest value for dollar and least hassle. Mentioned: Chris Ozechowski’s website Chris Ozechowski on Facebook Zach Even-esh David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey everybody welcome to another edition of the podcast I’m David Allan, we have a great guest for you today especially if you’re a copywriter – a freelance copywriter. He’s been doing this for a while now he’s had some very public things we’ll get into here shortly I think which will be interesting…Chris Orzechowksi, welcome to the show. Chris Orzechowski: Thanks a lot. Super pumped to be here. David Allan: yeah it’s really great to have you I sort of probably that’s how I became aware of you I think you had sort of a a public spat if you will with another copywriter who has been on the show in the past and it’ll be interesting to delve into the mechanics of what actually happened here I think which will be illustrative I don’t know, cuz I don’t know really know how it exactly went down myself… And then we’regonna jump into some talk about retainer deals structuring offers if you are a freelancer so people listen to this if you’re already in this maybe you can improve what you’re doing or if you’re looking to get into it you’ll get another perspective from somebody who’s doing it. Chris let’s just jump in with your origin story or your superhero origin story tell us how you got into email copywriting and so forth and just where you were before… Chris Orzechowski: Yeah, absolutely. so I like everyone else to know as a copywriter I actually started off as a teacher I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do I was a wrestler in college. and I knew I want to coach wrestling so I was like okay I’m just gonna go be a teacher I’ll coach wrestling and let’s do that so as soon as I started teaching I very quickly realized that it wasn’t for me and I say very quickly I realize like the very first day I was like oh man I’ve made a mistake I don’t know if I want to do this I think I forgot something else to do and at the time I had this guy that I worked for on the side this guy’s a Kevin Nash he was kind of like my mentor growing up he’s a strength coach one of the early publishers of strength conditioning you know infoproducts of courses and those kind of things and I remember like watching him as I kind of like grew up you know going to his gym and like seeing all the stuff he was doing online and he was like making money on the internet I was like how the hell does that work I was like what you know what is this like how come this dude just makes so much money like selling all these things I was like what you know I gotta learn more about this whole world because I’m so enamored by it so um I started kind of studying what he was doing I actually started like blogging and trying to do a very similar like strand condition type thing like he was doing you know using him as like my model and it was kind of hard you know it was very hard to get traction is very hard to get started this is this years ago but uh you know I started doing this wrestling website and I have like this weekly podcast on wrestling coaches those articles I had an email list those are any emails every single day and I was like trying to sell affiliate products know do all the stuff I wasn’t really great at it I’m you know starting to build a following get some traction but after late you know eight months of doing that not really making any money I said okay this is taking a whole lot of time um I think maybe what I should do this whole online thing is pick the one thing I like the most and that gives me the most energy and just focus on that and so I started looking all the different options of the online marketing landscape and the one thing I really did enjoy the most was writing emails to my list and the whole copy aspect of it so I started doing some research and apparently there’s these people called copywriters who get paid a shit ton of money to put words onto a Google Doc and then saw about to a client and I was like this is unbelievable like I can’t believe this is a real thing like I can just write words and then get paid for it get paid pretty well for it so obviously we know it’s a little bit more nuanced than that but I was just so like intrigued by this idea I said I’m gonna go super deep and just become really really good at this one thing and the reason I kind of chose email marketing and email copywriting was because out of all the different types of copy that I could write you know as a someone who had a day job you know when I started off as a school teacher I was doing my 12-hour days that first year I was coming in two hours early I was staying two or three hours later I was also coaching wrestling so like I didn’t have a huge amount of mental bandwidth to sit there and be like okay I’m gonna work on this 97 page sales letter you know like for some of these super competitive spots right I just want to write like 200 300 more emails and you know I’ll do like one or two or three of those every day and I’ll be good to go so that’s kind of what I started doing and past you know five five and a half years that’s really what I put my focus into that’s that’s very interesting because that’s right around I started as same time and listened to your story is almost like staring into a mirror for me slightly different sort of origin story I did not have anyone to model but you know I sort of uh I guess I did in a way because I sort of found out Gary Halbert it sold sold me something something he wrote sold me so he became sort of my model I guess in a way but it’s fascinating to I’ve heard of Zac of course anyone who’s been in online marketing probably heard of him before so that’s interesting that was your your origin now we said we were gonna talk about you know maybe we’ll start with the offeror thing so when you became a freelancer I know I’ve always sort of like gone back and forth on this what sort of ways at the beginning did you try to offer your services and and how has that sort of evolved up until now well it’s gotten a lot better and the reason I say that is because I was just not good like I sucked and I’m not afraid to admit that I mean it took me a very very very long time to figure out how the structure offers how to pitch my services I don’t even find the right people and I shouldn’t talking to um you know it took me probably a year and a half of really like focused effort to get that first paying client and then it took me you know a long time after that to really get steady work and it’s funny there’s now like I you know I coach a handful of freelancers people reach out to me and ask me probably advertise it but um you know I they get results in like you know seven weeks one guy that I’m working with got a retainer and in like seven weeks another guy got one in like twelve weeks I’m like Jesus Christ I’m so jealous you guys because like you know all my mistakes but I kind of just did everything wrong like what I was doing was I was you know sending direct mail to local businesses which are just do that to some you know get it by a list and write a sales letter and send to local businesses and I was sending it’s like to look like each fax and like you know the local pizza place like these people don’t even know what the hell a copywriter is what alone are they gonna be willing to pay like five or ten grand to someone you know so I just wrong I was called emailing I was even cold calling and that was humiliating as I got the phone slammed on me like dozens of times it just sucked like it was just a grind because I just listened to all these people who were using these methods you know some of these methods people talk about it might work if you’re you know later on in your career and you have experience and samples and all these things but I I just tried everything and learned tried everything I rejected so many times and then finally I started to meet people who knew what the hell they were talking about it kind of guided me in the right way so when I started doing once I started going after number one people who knew what a copywriter was number two who actually wanted help with copy those are like you know the two like stupidest simple things but they made all the difference in the world and then after that it was just a matter of really you know and this is kind of a latter part of my journey I’ve just really got a brand new earth understand that what are these people’s problems and how can I be the person that goes and it solves those problems right because what I found is you know before you make any kind of offer you structure any type of deal it always has to start with that problem much like any sales letter any piece of copy s to start with the problem right like we’re always looking okay like what problem does this product solve and that’s where we start all over our research and that’s what we based its our hook around for ourselves our sales letter our email or VSL or webinar whatever we’re doing but then we’re copywriters and we go and approach a client we just say hey you want to pay me to write copy and then like know that sounds a burly shitty experience right like who actually wants to go and pay some writer that they’ve never met thousands of dollars to get a Google Doc with words on it like no one wants to do that that’s not you know that’s not like an attractive offer and that’s what happens as most writers approach it that way but what I and I did that for a long time so I’m not saying I’m like there’s only one I just figured this out after failing so many times but I figured out it’s like hey why don’t we just find out what their problems is let’s look for their pain points and figure out ways to solve those problems and if we can solve those problems usually when you solve those problems they’re very profitable experience to these clients and if we could solve a problem make them a lot of money then them turning around and giving us money to do that the first time then do that again again again make you know it’s it’s a win-win situation for both parties involved so that’s kind of like the evolution of how I started to think about all of these things that’s that’s interesting I know I feel the same way and that’s a great great way you’ve put it because it’s true like you know these are the things you learn when you become a copywriter but often they’re not you don’t apply them in the same way as you’d apply them for somebody who’s not yourself and so things like what you’re gonna say who you’re gonna put it in front of and stuff is off them like the mistakes that you make as a copywriter when you’re trying to sell your own services yeah and it’s funny actually got that from then settle I was a member of his newsletter and I you know one of the perks of being a members newsletter where you could ask them questions so I reached out was like hey man like who should I go after if I want to be an email copywriter and he replied back and he was like look for people who are sending a lot of emails and I was like Oh duh like yeah that makes sense right like find someone if they’re doing this you know they’re either doing a good job or a bad job most companies they want to approve everything that they want to do anyway so that was very sage advice from him which I’m very thankful for that really you know kind of helped me pivot in the right direction but um yeah it’s one of those things like it’s just a matter of finding people who have a problem offering them you know what I like to call a dream come true result and then proving that you could actually do it and then after that making it as easy as possible to get started look if you can you know identify all four of those phases of your marketing you’ll never go hungry you’ll have clients lined up but it’s it’s at the beginning and you don’t know I mean you’re starting out it’s very hard to figure out those things especially if you don’t have a model to follow or especially if you’re following the wrong advice or if you’re going into your facebook newsfeed to find value bombs and try to piece together your marketing education that way I’m very against that whole philosophy I believe in you know finding people who are at the top of their game and learning from them and that’s what I’ve tried to do on this I still continue to do so I’m very big on that yeah I think that’s a very important point you’re making there’s like I’ve always considered myself to a student of students of students so it’s like you got to put the your ego aside and attempt to learn and they because you can learn from base every situation whether that’s a positive outcome or a negative outcome in then you have to use those almost like little mini parables for yourself to move forward yeah I mean I know for me personally I can only speak for myself but I feel like the deeper and deeper I go into this whole copywriting marketing thing the less and less I know you know it’s like more like you you become aware of everything around here like I know so little you know but it’s a cool thing because there’s just there’s there’s so many thanks to the internet and thanks to where the world is now there’s just so much you know ability that you have such an ability to learn so many different sources and to really you know it’s kind of cool like going from the public education sector to what I would now considering it’s like the private education sector with you know a lot of the clients I work with we we sell information you sell coaching yourself expertise we sell those kind of things it’s really cool to see that you can pay you could learn whatever you want right like whatever skill you want to learn you know you have an opportunity to buy that knowledge and to apply that your life and to transform your life that’s kind of what I’ve done I have invested a lot and uh that’s something I’m also a huge on but yeah I mean that’s that’s kind of what it takes now yes so like maybe speak to like something else that I get a lot of questions about that and I’ve have my own opinions but what do you say to people like I’m sure you get the same questions which was like should I knees down what me should I go after these kind of nice questions that’s a good question you know I’ve heard arguments on both sides and it really imma give it crap the answers say it depends you know personally I know for me my evolution I was like a general copyright or I was like hey you pay me and I’ll write your copy and then I was like maybe I’ll just focus on emails because that’s what I really like and it seems like there’s a need for that and once I started doing that jobs that easier and easier and then I kind of switched my niche to you know I started getting an ex to do LAN launches and I became this like a lunch operator that’s still kind of what I do a lot now and then you know all my clients to me the launch is also started you never green stuff so I’m starting to become known now someone who could turn launches and evergreen stuff so like I think number one it’s a matter of picking something and then just being okay with that evolving over time because I know a lot of people I know even for me now some days when like oh I’m thinking about how i market myself I’m kind of scared to be like oh I’m gonna be the you know the person who specializes this because as soon as you say that to yourself you start to think oh that’s the only thing I can do and I can never do anything else what if I six months down the road I hate this and I want to change and you sort of freak yourself out right and I think a lot of people have that fear and have that someone blocked but the way I look at it it’s like it’s okay to pick something start doing it and if you love it then you’ll keep doing it and if you don’t love it you’ll probably find a way to pivot to something that you like a little bit more in terms of the actual nitty-gritty of like finding what you want to do I’m a big believer and this is just my personality everyone is not like this so you don’t have to take this advice but me personally I was always a big believer that’s a lot easier to sell when you niche down by medium of what you’re selling rather than the industry you know some people like oh I write alternative health copy and if you’re one of those a-listers you’re at the top of the game and you know there’s 10 or 12 companies and they pass you around you just write controls rolling them like yeah that’s probably pretty cool but I knew for me starting out I didn’t have this connections I don’t have that experience so what I said was I’m gonna niche down by the medium I’m gonna become really good at email that’s one thing right this one kind of project because it’s very easy for someone who’s a business owner to turn around and you know I don’t know if every business owners like man I really wish I could find a writer who specializes in you know I guess I guess they do right like if someone’s like oh you know I have a software business I really wish I could find a copywriter specialized in software and people definitely say that I’m not saying they don’t it’s probably pretty common they say that but I think it’s also pretty common that people say man our emails really suck we need to find some look at help this or man you know our web copies just terrible does not think the kid I rested at all we need to find some that would help us with this so I almost felt like it was easier for me to grasp to kind of get started marketing myself if I choose chose a medium and then I could go really deep in that one specific medium and the thing is it’s like even with that you know people still might have the fear of like oh I’m just gonna do this one thing and what if I want to write a facebook ad or what if I want to write a video script like you could do that stuff too but I’ve always found this like yeah I specialized an email and then clients hire me to do that and they say hey can you help us to and I say absolutely I can and then there’s project number two number three number four number five yeah I agree I agree completely because I think that’s why I started with email and continue to love to do email probably the most is because it’s kind of like I think of it as like a gateway drug you’re a drug dealer you know it’s like because email still has the highest ROI there’s cost nothing to send an email really but also it’s like a lot of people are neglecting that side of things and then it leads to conversations about bitter things that they may be neglecting or that aren’t honed in sharply oh yeah – like with email that by the way email the gateway drug would be a great I also think I mean I just know for me like I especially when I started to shift my focus to wanting retainer clients where I get paid month after month after month I knew that okay all these clients like what’s the one thing they’re going to always need right like they might have a webinar that converts or a control ad that converts and/or for their main products right and maybe they make small changes but they’re not overhauling that but the one thing they’re always going to need month after month probably we have to read sometimes day after day is they’re gonna need more emails right and they’re probably not gonna want to write them all themselves and sometimes it’s a matter of they don’t know how to do it themselves so they need to bring in you the specialist or sometimes it’s they need an ass in the seat because they don’t have the bandwidth to do it themselves and they need someone to fill that role so yeah just like you’re saying I always found that was my way to get the foot my foot in the door and that’s kind of like one of my first retainer clients that’s how I started I started just doing email stuff I started like rewriting affiliate emails for our list and it was kind of like you know the grunt work but then there was another copy right in front of me there’s one company and he ended up leaving to pursue some other some other things in life and they were like oh we need to find something to write all the front-end front-end acquisition stuff and I was like hey I can do it I know this company I know the market you know I know the products me and then I started to write to be a script the sales pages working the webinars and I started working the Facebook ads and all the other stuff so yeah it’s the perfect gateway because people that’s a need that they will always have and he knows never gonna go away I don’t care what anyone says it’s just not even if they put computer chips and our brains I don’t think it’s right there’s some place where that’s private that’s your own stuff that you sign up for you know it is the perfect gateway you know most people most business owners because they have their what they do best they’re they’re usually especially if they’re serious they’re usually good at like delegating to something that somebody else does best and they want like the best you know they want to form a team of like best at certain things and they don’t want to waste their time doing what they’re not the best at let’s talk more about retainer deals and stuff because now I’m certainly like that now and it sounds like you are maybe let’s talk a bit about how you go about doing that the way you sort of present it and so forth yeah absolutely so real quick the way I define a retainer is you know just a job where you get the point to say yes one time and they keep paying you over and over again and I’ve really started to shift my business toward that model not for every client you know was obvious I’m always evolving and Everett operators in the bobbum but when I was trying to leave my teaching job I realized that I needed recurring income because you know I had a mortgage I had a life I couldn’t just be like hey I’m just gonna take this big risk and hopefully I get some gigs you know it’s like no I needed to check at least one check coming in every single month and you know it’s just nice to have that stability so what I started doing was saying how could I be the person who fulfills that role on the team and how could I be the person who doesn’t have to how do I be that kind of copywriter who every time I do a project I don’t have to spend hours and hours and hours of research and learning a new market and learning a new company structure and learning about the client their origin story and learning all about the business right because that’s that’s the most exhausting part for most writers like that’s the part a lot of people like is the research stuff right about what happens when you’re doing just one-off gigs over and over and over again is that you know half of your time to spend doing all the administrative onboarding off-boarding stuff it’s been doing the market research and doing all those other things with retainer client you even spend most of your time writing which is what most of us got into this game to do anyway right everyone wants to write they want to get results they want to test campaigns they want to try all that cool stuff but it’s very hard to you know wedge yourself into a company like that if you’re only gonna stick around for a week to do a job and then you’re out so I started really just focusing on getting those kind of clients and I found is number one the people who are ready to hire a retainer client you usually make more money and you know some people reach out to me and they say hey you know I got this client you know I want to pitch then a retainer what should I do I say okay let’s look at the numbers right like how much revenue is this client making and they say although client was making you know three hundred fifty grand a year I say well they’re not how much they’re gonna pay you right like what I’m gonna pay you five grand a month I can pay you you know one sixth of their Copland pre-tax pre expense revenue like of course not all right so the numbers just don’t work out there so you start to think okay who are the companies that have will hire writers on retainer and what I found it’s not a blanket statement I’m sure there’s someone we’re not an example right but I’m just generally speaking usually they’re gonna be a seven eight nine figure company right those the kind of companies who have the resources they have the infrastructure and and more importantly they have proven offers right to get to that level right company can’t just be like hey we got this thing selling well and I hope it works next month but we don’t you know like a company by that time they’re proven they know they’re things selling right and they know that they’re scaling up they’re optimizing they’re doing all my doing you know CRO they might be split testing they’ve been doing all the stuff and now they need someone to fulfill that role because maybe that was the CEO before maybe that was the marketing manager and me now they’re growing the team so those kind of clients are the best for me I think that’s a perfect example is going about going after the right people it’s like who can afford to pay your retainer deal I mean that’s a big deal you can’t find just like Joe Blow local guys that probably got hakama before that unless they’re like to say making over seven eight nine figures and so you got to be smart about who you target and yeah I’m with you on the starting from scratch I mean you’re trying to catch lightning in a bottle and I’ve done that myself and people you know some people I think are delusional when they come to you they thinking I mean there’s so much that goes into that it’s not just as simple as like you’re gonna write the copy we’re gonna run some Facebook ads and it’s like tada all this is gonna work out for everybody you know yeah they’re like lottery captive clients you know they’re the ones who come to you and say they and a lot of time when they’re good people obviously like I’m not knocking them but what their worldview or their beliefs they over that well I understand the important copy everyone tells me conquer is important they’ll hear these stories like I always you know there’s that story about Jean Schwartz the guy who found a boardroom a camera one’s name is but he hired Jean Schwartz and you know Jean wrote in this letter and it launched this huge company that you know it’s still around today and like it’s a nice romantic story that doesn’t happen every day right yeah definitely happens but that’s lighting a bottle and it’s very hard to do that very very hard because it’s not just about the sales lending right it’s not just about the launch campaign it’s about the ability for the owners of that company to have a growth mindset and to have all the infrastructure and the team and the finance and all that stuff in place and so it’s a much bigger equation than just the copy so that’s why you know I’m just so big on goat you know fishing in the stock lake you know my my family we used to have the Poconos and there was this lake I remember and every year we try to catch fish and there were like there was like no fish in this lake I eventually found out years later I don’t get so pissed off for myself the best of my dad just like listened me like he’s like next year they’re stock in the labor in catch some fish we did right but all those years I was getting so angry myself because we were going up there and for hours I’d be standing out there with my pole trying to catch fish and there’s no fish in the freaking lake right so people do that copiers do that to themselves they get pissed off because they’re like man I can making Steel’s work I’m like look who you’re talking to right like you’re talking to people with no money and it’s not that you know it’s nothing wrong I’m sure they’re great people but if they don’t have money to pay you then you’re wasting your time talking with them unless you’re you have got like copywriting abilities and can make money appear and I literally appear out of thin air then yeah that can be a profitable relationship but otherwise you got to go to people who have money and who want to hire someone who want to pay someone to fill those roles now as we wind down here let me give people ways they can get touch with you work with you you know what’s the best situation in touch with Chris or Zukowski yes so you can check out my website it’s WWE male copywriter comm and the reason I chose that is because or Zukowski it’s kind of a nightmare to spell and you know my website so I chose the email copywriter calm yeah so I’m actually publishing a book on email marketing should be done that’s a couple weeks but that’ll be my new lead magnet so if you have my list I’ll make sure you get that yeah but uh-oh than that that’s what I got awesome man you know I want to really thank you for coming on the show and we had a delay getting you on I’m glad we were able to do it the next day you’re a real attribute to the profession I would say and I enjoy reading your emails and your and your posts and I want to thank you for coming on the show thanks Dave I will appreciate that I had a lot of fun and we’ll appreciate you having me for everybody else we’ll be back again next week hopefully someone is insightful fun and argumentative maybe that’s or is it Kowski until then The post Episode #206 – Chris Orzechowski On The Quick & Dirty Gateway Drug Into the World of Copywriting appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Straight out of college… Jeff wanted to dive into the lucrative field of pharmaceutical sales. Then he discovered the only people they were taking back then… despite committing himself to two summers of internship… were “very attractive women”. Reaching out to his network, he pivoted to a career in financial services and the world of Wall St. 14+ years later, he’s here to deliver some very good news. You can set aside your worry, stress, and the paralysis of thinking about your retirement. You can have your cake and eat it too. Jeff helps people take their assets… whether a mountain of treasure or a hill built up from years of back-breaking work… and shield yourself from future pain by showing you how to get your retirement… TAX- EXEMPT. So if you’re worried what kind of shape your in financially because you’re in your later years… or you’re young and the importance of setting yourself up right for the future is beginning to dawning on you… listen to this podcast now as Jeff has what amounts to a life-saving message. Wouldn’t you agree your future and your family is more than worth it? In this episode, you’ll discover: Why is it all the financial advice is about how to amass a mountain of assets? THIS is every bit as important. (9:34) What gets Jeff super-jazzed about people finding this retirement solution. Are you in your 40’s and haven’t checked “under the hood” at your numbers? Listen here (14:29) 40% of people will run out of money during retirement with their current plan…is this you? (What to do about it NOW – 10:57) The history of taxes and tax rates. How deferring your taxes could kill your retirement and your family’s future (19:01) Mentioned: Imagine Wealth Coaching Jeff Kronenberg on Facebook Schedule a Breakthrough Session with Jeff David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey everybody – welcome to another edition of the podcast, I’m David Allan – we’re back and today we’ve got an exciting guest because this is something I don’t think many people like to really think about but it is one of the most important things that you will encounter probably going forward in your life especially if you’re in business and if you’re a copywriter like a lot of our listeners are this is something that involves a little bit of planning perhaps which most people may not want to think about but we have an excellent retirement planner on a show today he’s got kind of a very interesting story and he’s got a very interesting offer that I think you’ll appreciate once you hear him – Jeff Kronenberg welcome to the show… Jeff Kronenberg: David thank you great to be here. David Allan: Yeah, it’s nice to have you on the show, man. I think this is one of these things that people are sort of like you know talk about and whispers maybe or don’t like to think about but it’s super important and you’re an expert in this field and you’ve been doing this for like you said the better part of like 14 years or sometimes right mm-hmm so this will be interesting I want you to sort of start though by taking us back like we like to do on this show we like to go back to see sort of how you progressed into where you’re at today so take us back into the early life of Jeff and sort of what led you to this… Jeff Kronenberg: Yeah, thanks so you know I when I got out of college actually what I wanted to do was be a pharmaceutical sales rep and that was kind of the hot job at the time so when I got out of college I had done this internship at a pharmaceutical company and they wouldn’t hire me and I’m like what are you kidding me of intern for you for two summers and you know for free and then I came to realize that well I was not a pretty girl and therefore they weren’t gonna hold me because that was the description of what they were looking for in that industry at the time so here I was getting out of college and I thought oh my gosh you know I’m gonna do this and it’s a great job but a great career and all that and you know I was like disqualified right away that’s okay I kind of just fell into the industry that I’m in I met a guy that knew a guy and know another guy and I started my journey in the financial services industry in New York City downtown downtown off Wall Street and I yeah thinking back to one of the first training classes that I had and I remember you know the line of expertise that I have is very out-of-the-box stuff you know we’re helping people essentially get their assets tax exempt so although retirement planning is kind of a boring subject when you say to someone you know they say what do you do and you say well I’ll show you how to get your wealth tax exempt their ears perk up because let’s face it it’ll definitely yeah no one wants to have to pay more in taxes than then they’re required to you’ve got to pay the income tax once but after that it’s really your choice as to what you want to do with your money I really just got lucky in terms of meeting the right people I think very very early on that were con ahead and and you know that were headed and heading in the right direction in terms of you know the knowledge they had in the information and the strategies that they shared with clients so I’ve been doing this work from the get-go obviously it’s progressed over time I’m still learning to this day so it’s kind of how it all it was just by chance so that’s fascinating I mean it says like you said I think it’s kind of an unsexy topic to talk about retirement and protecting your assets and stuff like that but it’s really one of the most important things I mean he doesn’t take much of a Google search to find out plenty of horror stories and stuff of people who have not fought ahead to to their retirement or to you know other people passing away in their family and coming into assets and so forth that aren’t necessarily yours to begin with but that you’ve been left from other people and so forth totally I think that you know for the most part if you picture a mountain as an example well we learn about all we hear about is how to get up the mountain how do we invest our money how do we get rates of return that are really good and this and Adam we hear oh you have to take a lot of risk on in order to grow your wealth but the reality is is that if you understand how the how money really works what’s more important than acquiring a large treasure chest of assets at the end of the day if we’re saving for one day when we’re not gonna work anymore we need to know how to get off the financial mountain so to speak in other words we’re never learning or hearing about how to spend our money in retirement you know and so I use the mountain analogy because I forget the statistic but I heard about 70 percent of the deaths um that occur on Mount Everest occur on the descent right that’s the great that’s great well yeah you’re right you know so if if I was a Sherpa you know knowing that you’ve got a much greater probability of dying you’d probably hire me as the Sherpa to get you down the mountain than the one that gets you up right yeah absolutely so what I’m helping people with is not just the accumulation of their assets in a much safer fashion without risks and without taxes but we’re also taking that to the next level and saying hey we need to also show you how to spend your money at retirement and if it’s done the right way and you can have your assets tax exempt that therefore then means that your cash flow coming off the mountain is also tax exempt so when you study it you’re gonna have a heck of a lot more cash flow and if you don’t do it this way and people love hearing that and they love seeing it you know it’s it it’s a game changer really a game changer and a life changer it’s freedom that’s totally true I would totally believe what you’re saying I mean a lot of people of course in the latter stages of their lives that may be listening to this and they’re also worried about you know what they’re gonna leave behind or what they’re worried about their family or their family members and so forth and so with the services program that you provide it’s going to ease those worries so those those latter years are stress-free which is super important as you get older yeah I mean I I have this kind of you know I guess you would maybe call it a spiritual view on money or whatever word you want to use but you know what at the end of the day money is a fake thing you know human brilliant human beings we were able to create this system of currency in this world here and it’s it’s really really interesting when you look at it from that standpoint like money runs our life some of us yeah yeah I mean it’s kind of silly when you take a step back because it’s like where did this all Evan come from and so my view is like you know it’s super easy for me to help people get what they want with their money and get what they want it retirement but what really jazzes me is seeing the smiles on their faces when that fear about how they’re gonna do it dissipates when they’re pumping their fists because you know they realized wow I just reached freedom I just reached that pinnacle of financial freedom that gets me going because what we’re doing is we’re saving people’s lives and they’re able to live a happier healthier less stressed-out life and then we reclaim control of not just their money but the way that they’re gonna live and enjoy those latter part of the years without having to worry and without having to have the sense of confusion and without having to know that you know there’s a risk right around the corner whether it’s the tax rates going up and changing or the stock market taking fifty percent of their money you know when you don’t have those concerns you can now live life on your terms and that’s uh and it’s a beautiful thing to see it’s a beautiful thing to know that you’re impacting you know your your fellow brothers and sisters in such a way you know we’re all connected at the end of the day yeah I think it’s one of those things that’s so nice to see because especially people of like my you know I’m in my 40s now my parents my deaf father as in his 70s maybe sort of a lot of those that day and age a lot of people were like living that sort of like deferred life plan work a certain amount and then you’re gonna save up like you’re saying and you’re acquire all these treasure chest of assets and then you’re gonna stop working one day and you’re gonna try to enjoy this stuff and people like to you know travel or do whatever they want to do and it’s a lot of people have found out that that’s not the case the way the world has gone and the economy has shifted here and there and maybe they’ve been burned a couple times and now their nest egg or whatever is not as large as I’d hope it would be and maybe some of those dreams are no longer attainable with something like you offer I mean it’s it makes that process so much more reassuring and worryfree totally and I can give you a really simple example as to kind of the issue that I think people are facing but then an alternative because at the end of the day what you described there is person a let’s say and person a retires and they have let’s just say three million dollars and that million dollars gives them let’s just call it a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year taxable for life or and that may work out for them or it may not most of the time it’s not working out you have three million dollars you’ve got to get a return on that money but also make sure that you don’t run out of money and so there’s this thing called a withdrawal rate I don’t want to get too hyper technical here but the withdrawal rate of your money so that you have a 60% chance of not running out of money is around 3% why on earth would you ever go for a plan and go and and strategically move yourself towards a situation where you have a chance 60% chance of not running out of money because to me that means 40% of the time you will it makes no sense that’s output so that’s why people can’t retire is they’re literally just setting themselves up wrong but they don’t we don’t know alternatives because person a with three million and a buck thirty of income as an example may or may not be attainable let’s just say it is I could make somebody or I could show them how they can make themselves be person B but person B has one point five million dollars and a hundred thousand dollars of cash flow tax exempt the who would you rather be at the end of the day knowing at in at the end when you’re retired it’s all about maintaining your lifestyle it’s all about cash flow that’s a person person be easy choice yeah easy choice so therefore would dad said that means that the folks out there who have acquired a treasured treasure chest have asks us but maybe it didn’t go as they had planned if they could just become person B and get those assets to spend as if they’ve got two times as much they’re gonna be okay and that’s what I help people do it’s powerful super powerful and of course we you know we probably all have people in our lives that have experienced some of those horror stories and we probably even listening to this when this comes out people will be thinking oh if only you know if only had known this sooner or my uncle Nick had known about this or whatever you know and it’s one of those things that like nobody likes to talk about because it is kind of scary I think too there’s like you know trepidation that comes along with thinking about being older especially if you’re younger you know and and often if you’re quite young then you’re not thinking about it at all because you feel like you’re impervious you’re focusing on your career and your family perhaps and it just doesn’t seem like something that’s like that’s super important because you figure you got the whole life to figure it out but I mean the sooner you get started the better yeah I mean it’s it’s certainly easy to procrastinate on it and it’s not as fun as going to a basketball game or a football game or skiing or sitting at the beach that’s for sure but admit when when people I found gets started on it you know younger and let’s say their 40s or something like that stead of their 50s or 60s it allows them to relax more and then go enjoy the things that you know they and they like to do and then subconsciously in the back of their head they don’t have this worry like shoot am I actually gonna be able to like not have to go to this job I don’t like or run this business that I don’t really want to run anymore or am I gonna have to do this forever and so when they what I found through experience is that when people get started younger and they know they’re headed in the direction that’s going to work a hundred percent of the time versus sixty percent of the time just better quality of life overall you’ve this subconscious worry is now gone yeah and then and then the trepidation and the fear perhaps of like I think I think that’s one of the things to which experienced people who were over 40 to is like you’re also thinking you know like you almost don’t want to know what you’re up against so you put it off because you’re just like I don’t if I’d actually check the numbers or do it it’s gonna be a rude awakening oh yeah yeah totally and and and when they start digging under the hood it’s actually worse I’ll give you an example most people have their money in these retirement plans right but right thing is though is that when we do these we we do them because we want to not pay taxes on our money today so we’re deferring paying the tax right but we’re also deferring the tax calculation right so we don’t really know what tax rates we will be in in the future but you know here’s the question you know do you think that it’ll cost more or less to run the government in ten twenty and thirty years that’s a pretty easy one I’d say yeah so we know what we know it’ll cost more therefore how do they how does the government make money to function they raise taxes so you could be putting money into one of these vehicles and then just setting yourself up to pay more on your money in the future in which case you’re doing reverse tax planning so you know no one would ever want to do it good news is is that if you get it it soon enough and you realize this soon enough and you address it soon enough you can reverse it that’s the good news I just as rebels and for anybody listening to this I mean to sort of encounter that is like yeah that’s a mistake a lot of people have made is like to defer all that stuff to later and I have family members going through that right now where they’re like trying to get that taxation stuff out of the way now when they’re in their early 40s because of because of that because of that you’re unsure what kind of rage and it’s funny though if you study taxes you know if you look at where they’ve been at between let’s just go back to mid ronald reagan became president taxes were between seventy and ninety four percent but it’s the highest bracket i mean that’s you know those are big numbers tears well really even before they stayed between 73 and 70 or the way up until around 1980 so then they came down but you know we’ve got we’ve got Wars like the Gulf War to still pay for we got we have all this stuff you know we we have to pay for it at some point we’re so high is that you know during those that period of time from let’s say say nineteen eighteen or nineteen twenty whatever however you want to look at it up until the carter administration then reagan we used to pay we used to fight a war that actually pay for it you know really they allow companies and pay for it or do we would pay for the things that we did for the citizens so we haven’t been doing that for a very long time but at some point we’ll have to and then therefore in order to be an informed consumer or an informed citizen it’s just important to understand where things were because it kind of gives you an indication of where things could go right now even though it’s think we’re taxed at such a high rate historically speaking we’re really not right good point Lee so that’s why it’s important to address it now before it’s too late I think you’re that’s a very good point and that’s some interesting historical facts are bringing to bear there it’s very interesting to me to how little people prepare for this kind of stuff I mean some people do and I try to slander everybody here today but it’s a subject that you know prevention is such a slow thing to sort of take hold in people’s lives because wherever they’re at in their life they probably feel good maybe about especially if they have some money and they’re like not particularly they’re worried about it and it’s usually like you said people get started like way way late or that they figure they’ve got it handled but they aren’t gonna end up paying big on the back end and when the tax rate perhaps may be higher you know obviously you’ve encountered a lot of these people and horror stories and stuff over your 14 year career in this maybe some of the listeners would benefit from maybe a few stories of people who were able to reverse it and sort of what ages they were at and so forth and sort of what’s city of the main names obviously but some sort of situations that people think themselves out of because of your expertise mm-hmm yeah sure so if we take the person a in person be example I had this client come in the door about five years ago and at the time he was 56 years old and he wanted to retire in eight or nine years was his goal so when he looked at what he had and he looked at a projection of where he thought he could go let’s just say he had $500,000 I’m just making the numbers part of it up because it’s kind of irrelevant what he actually had but let’s just say he had $500,000 and he wanted or he thought he could get that 500 to become a million in eight or nine years okay but the thing was is that when he count all right I stopped working and I’ve got a million dollars and I can get let’s just say four person on my money or five percent of my money well then I’ve got to pay taxes on that so my let’s just say it’s five percent my five percent of my million my fifty actually gets taxed huh and my social security I get is also taxed so he calculated for himself if he could even get five percent which is a whole nother story what he calculated when he came into my office was I’m a millionaire but I’m not going to be able to live even close to the way I want to live I’m not gonna be able to travel to see my kids when they have their own children which they have or what she thinks they’re gonna do now at the time he hung bright whose kids were younger um but he you know that was a hope every parent wants their their kids to have kids you know so he calculated out that he wouldn’t be able to travel he wouldn’t be able to maintain a Country Club membership he wouldn’t be able to do the things that he wanted to do and so you know it’s sad to see people come in who they’re working hard they’re running businesses whatever they’re doing and they’re trying to do all the right things but the system just has them set up to be set up wrong you know we just basically switch things around what made him person B and as a result of that he had much stronger cash flow he’s currently is set up to have much stronger cash flow and will have it throughout retirement and he’ll be able to you know he’ll be able to live the life that he wants to live and that’s that’s the cool part about it is five years have passed a lot of time has passed he’s happier now as a result of this the worries gone and then when he does get into retirement he’ll be good the reality is is that you can get your money working more than once for you doing multiple jobs for you and when you do that you can accomplish both of the is that all of the things whether it be paying for your daughter’s wedding paying for college buying cars buying real estate retiring all those things can really be accomplished using the same buck and we don’t need to segment it into a B dot this dollar for this I me need this dollar for that that’s the wrong way to look at money um so you know that’s a whole nother conversation just about efficiency but did that coming in to your question about yeah yeah I think that’s a very good answer and man as you shared with us here today I’ve just been like outstanding just a real sort of fresh perspective I think one that people need to hear and people need to consider that it’s not as scary perhaps as they first thought and then there are people like you out there Jeff that are can make things quite simple and straightforward yeah you know it is simple it’s not easy but it’s simple and we make it easy and we make it simple but it certainly also doesn’t have to be as scary you know people listening like you don’t have to be scared you just have to you know work with someone that does the right things that can validate and improve it to you that’s also important so no I’m glad that this hopefully this shed some light for the listeners and viewers for sure absolutely now if people want to get ahold of you personally Jeff where’s the best place to go how do they get in touch or get involved with you yeah so they can just go right to my website it’s wwm ajan wealth coach ENCOM forward slash apply and I would suggest going and and going going there watching the video that I’ve got up it’ll give you some great information we’ll expand even further on the things that we talked about today amen and do that go there now check it out check it out now and then go to the apply page and apply and book a call I mean we’re here only so many hours in a day and the scheduled debt does get filled up quickly but go there go there now go to WWF coaching calm forward-slash apply and pick your time for a breakthrough call and it’ll be the best 45 minutes when you book that call will get on and it’ll be the best 45 minutes you’ve spent talking and planning your retirement talking about in planning your retirement you have ever had and will ever had frankly awesome awesome great advice I really want to thank you for coming on the show today you really give me food for thought and I know the people listening this will be perhaps reconsidering the trepidation and so forth with getting involved with getting a head start and for the younger people to get on it now so that you can take advantage of that compound interest curve yeah thanks for coming on the show man it’s been a real pleasure listen it’s been my pleasure was really great speaking with you and uh you know to all the listeners out there thank you for tuning in and I hope everyone has a safe and healthy and blessed day thanks awesome and for everybody else of course hopefully we’ll be back again with somebody next week who’s as knowledgeable and thoughtful and informative as our friend Jeff here The post Episode #205 – Jeff Kronenberg On How To Set Yourself Free With A Tax-Exempt Retirement appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

His father left a sales job to start a business of his own. His mother was a school teacher… who made him promise if he ever learned anything… he had to teach it to someone else. In his last year of law school, he turned a hobby into a multi-million dollar business. Largest in its industry. With the taste of entrepreneurship… he has never looked back. He started into consulting to help others who asked. 40 years later a lot has changed by the principles are the same. Coming from the Dan Kennedy school of “straight-talk”… he lets loose on what it takes to win at business. I know after listening to Steve, you will no longer make excuses for why you’re not killing it… with YOUR marketing. Listen now. Then take MASSIVE action. The Steve Sipress way. In this episode, you’ll discover: Steve’s simple advice for 99.9999% of business owners regarding todays technology to build your business The “30 days of suck” strategy for sharpening your video skills Steve’s “Warts and All Strategy” of putting yourself out there. Drive new business to you like Steve with this authenticity “hack”. Simple “tells” a business is on the verge of disaster. Is your business in danger? Secrets of the celebrity marketing elite. Discover the techniques of Donald Trump and the Kardashians now Mentioned: Carlos’ Steve Sipress online Steve Sipress on Facebook Lessons Learned from Donald Trump podcast David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey everybody, we’re back with another edition of the podcast and we have a great guest here again today I’ve been looking forward to interviewing this person for some time yeah he’s done multiple podcasts over time and it’s fascinating to listen to some of them even had a Trump cast for a while which was hilarious and Steve Sipress, welcome to the show. Steve Sipress: Thanks for having me, pleasure to be here and by the way we still do have the lessons learned from Donald Trump podcast – we’re on episode 131 and still going strong. David Allan: Wow I wasn’t aware of that so I can’t even anticipate a time when there will not be lessons to be learned. I wouldn’t think so one of the fascinating things I learned about you is like you’ve had multiple podcasts of course in the past pertaining to sort of marketing you had – an interesting origin story – this interesting book that I’ve never eard of actually before and so maybe take us back into like where you were where you came from it was your origin a superhero or origin story. Steve Sipress: Well it’s pretty simple and maybe pretty familiar to people my mom was a schoolteacher and my dad was a salesperson and later on and life became left the sales – left the company became a business owner and so I’m basically the combination of the two. My mom had a saying when we grew up that we had an obligation that if we learned something we got a teacher to somebody else so I’ve always been a teacher and a leader in that way and since my dad was extremely successful in sales and business he always taught me a lot of business lessons and sales lessons and how to deal with people and took me along on sales calls and and to meet all of his associates and stuff so I was deeply embroiled in the world of business from young age and helping my dad out do whatever I could do and also always had an eye towards whatever I learned I got a teach and lead others and so I guess I went the usual route of going to school and thinking you know go to college and get a job and do all that nonsense and I was lucky enough or fortunate enough to turn my hobby into a business during my last year of law school and that business very quickly became a multi-million dollar business and became the numberone largest in its industry. and I was off and running into the world of business ownership and pretty much never looked back and after a that very quick and meteoric success I had lots of people asking me what to do had to do that can you help me and I was de facto kind of consulting with people until somebody said you know you ought to start charging for that because people will pay for that consulting so I became a paid consultant to help other small business people have massive success and I’ve been doing that for coming on about four decades now and enjoying it now more than ever yeah I think you have like a really fascinating I was reading some of the testimonials on your website and I’ve listened to many many of your sort of daily video Facebook live things you have some sort of things for various days of the week that you talked about what was that first sort of like you were just doing it for free it seems like at first like just helping other people out like you said following what your parents had told you to sort of share what you’ve learned and then what was it like you know did you get out of that other business and into consulting sort of right away or how did that work well that first multi-million dollar business I got out of it because they screwed it up and so that you know wasn’t I didn’t make a choice I missed the chance had an offer from an investor to invest and then possibly take it public but back in those days I didn’t know what the hell I was doing I didn’t know anything about business and so I said no to that offer thinking you know hey they wanted to give me 1.75 million for 45% of the company and I was like well you know that makes it worth a little more than three and a half million in just about three years so in ten years it’ll be worth 10 million and why would I want to give away 45% of that so that was my dumb thinking and I had a sort of assorted other dumb mistakes that now the beneficiary that is my clients or anyone that like you said listens to my various podcast or sees me on TV or radio or reads my books or watches my daily Facebook live videos they just passed my one and a half year anniversary of doing a Facebook live video every single day and everyone else can benefit from I can see the warning signs of a business about to go on the wrong track fail get overwhelmed go under and I can spot those and they can help people to avoid them before they happen like they did with me okay so let’s let’s delve into a few of those because now before we even get to that I mean you’ve had a long history of doing sort of a you know you were podcasting daily for a long time now you’re doing the daily Facebook videos maybe talk a little bit about that where people out there who have a business or business people and maybe they’re not you know they’re sort of scared to get on video or they think it’s very problematic to put together something like a podcast maybe talk to some of that and sort of your history with that stuff oh yeah that happens a lot now it’s extremely common and people do ask me that all the time the good news is asking that question about 10 20 years ago very simple answer you want to you know disseminate videos or audios very simple you have to convince a TV or a radio station to have you on or pay lots of money to someone that has all the equipment to come out and interview you and edit out the video and and then you can you know put the video wherever you want put it onto cassettes or whatever you had to do back then and mail them out and all that kind of stuff nowadays thanks to technology you know like I I I’m fond of saying we own the technology now we don’t need to convince a TV station I got something to say please have me on the air so I can get a recording of the video and then send it out the prospects I got YouTube it’s free I got Facebook it’s free now LinkedIn you can do live videos you can do you know tape videos and upload them to to all the different social media sites and web video hosting site and everyone’s got a pretty high-quality video camera walking around in their pocket all day long so pretty much since we already own a cell phone it is free to record a video and you can get free editing software usually comes with most computers you can find it somewhere on the computer on the internet and then you can upload it for free and it’s hosted for free and then you can promote it for free by sending it out on social media and stuff so oh my goodness if that doesn’t overcome all the excuses I don’t know what does I mean cuz the alternate is hey just come up with about few people I know that own film producing companies and they’ll come out with all the big equipment and they’ll help you what to say and they’ll you know get the right lighting and the right angle and the right everything to make it look all slick and professional and and but who the heck why invest I mean I know there’s reasons why to invest in that stuff to really do first-class filmmaking but for I’d have to say 99.99999% of business owners just take out your phone and put it onto video pointed out yourself start talking and if you can’t I always say if you can’t talk about your own business for about four hours you’re in the wrong business like just stop and do something else because you’ve got to be able to answer questions all the time maybe just to get started how about this you write down the ten most frequently asked questions that people ask you and for thirty seconds or one minute each you’re gonna give the answer well there’s your first ten videos now you take those and you put them on YouTube you put them on your website put them on Twitter Facebook Linkedin wherever you want to put them you got ten videos ask to the people that say oh gee I’m not comfortable doing video well no kidding like yeah whoo-hoo you know I I’ve been doing like you said I’ve been doing a daily podcast for about five six years a daily or the daily podcast about three years the daily blog is about five or six years old I’ve got a publish a monthly magazine that’s about six years old I’ve been doing a Facebook live video almost 600 of those every single day and that’s one way to do it if you go back and you could find it on any of those sites I just talked about my blog my podcast LinkedIn Twitter Facebook whatever but maybe YouTube’s the easiest you just scroll back and go to the first ones of my daily Facebook live videos they absolutely suck sure they’re the most embarrassing ridiculous terrible things but here’s the news it takes and you know this David it takes 10 20 30 how many it takes to start becoming good I don’t know any one that became good on the first one so people that are sitting there with you know letting themselves fall prey to their own nonsense excusive I don’t feel country of course you don’t but you’ve got to get through the first feeling comfortable and start getting good so how soon you want to do that if you want to be good 30 days from the hell start doing it now and just suck for 30 days here’s the really good news if you can do a facebook live video on video record the whole thing and then go on and delete it so you can do first 30 days of sucking and no one will ever even see him other than the people who were on live you can even just record him with your own video camera for 30 days or record 30 in one day or whatever you want to do till you get good and then start publishing him to other people but here’s the thing I get a lot of connection from people that say man I was nervous just like you I saw some you’re nervous things or I heard about how you messed up that multi-million dollar business I did too or heard about you made these mistakes I did too or you know I did had a paper route when I was a kid or I messed up my first gum you know be people connect through shared experiences so I’m not afraid to share all my experience is good bad ugly and different share them all because that’s how people feel comfortable connecting so yeah and here’s an example let’s say you’re watching a you know one of these late-night TV shows where the actors come on and it’s a it’s a it’s an actor who makes 5 10 million dollars a movie is a big movie star he’s promoting the biggest new movie and the host will sometimes mess them up by going you know what we went in the archives we found this really obscure commercial you did when you were 16 and invariably if you seen that what what does the guests do they’re like oh no don’t show that that sucks that’s embarrassing I was terrible or they find their first ever appearance on TV or or their if they’re a comedian here’s your first thing on HBO’s young comedian sir here’s the first film role you were in and they’re like oh my goodness I look terrible I sound terrible I was terrible that’s embarrassing but here’s the news they did what the listener asked that question doesn’t feel like doing is they did it and then you get over it so action cures fear just take the action and get overnight and I don’t go with the saying of like act as if you’re not afraid no you’re afraid you have fear do it anyway feel the fear but do it anyway don’t feel like oh I’m gonna act like I’m confident like you don’t act anyway just do it and you’ll be like that that movie star you’ll be like the band I mean whatever your favorite musical band is go back and listen to the first album it’s act or go if you can get some kind of bootleg recording or when they were just playing at their high school prom and they were doing all cover songs cuz they couldn’t write a song they couldn’t play a song they couldn’t sing a song they were terrible like no kidding but they got out there and they did it and now they’re millionaires and having fun and doing it so that’s how I did it I don’t have any advice on how to do it perfectly the first time I guess my advice is just get out there stumble bumble fumble and do it and eventually you’ll need a quick or you’ll get good there you go yeah I think that’s a very important point you made there to where you said earlier about connecting with people how you share all your foils and your successes and everything that’s something I think we both have shared perhaps because we were both sort of fans as is probably everybody in marketing of Dan Kennedy and that’s the first place I heard him somebody talk about that was his magnetic marketing speech where he talked about there was all these instances he had interwoven into that speech so that people had a place to connect and relate to him as a human being and therefore he no longer seems special and that they too can do it well you mentioned Dan Kennedy and and you know I know if you were people know but then it’s my number one mentor and direct response marketing once I figured out it had a name directs months mark and I had been using it for decades before I guess that was even a heads up a lot kind of a leg up I we didn’t the first thing ever read from him I was like yep that works yep that works yep he’s right yeah that works but I also at the same time was going oh crap I never did that oh crap that’s a good idea oh crap look how much money I left on the table because I knew that if since most of what he was talking about it I already experienced and and used it to build my companies and knew it worked I was like holy crap look how much money I left on the table by my not doing the rest of this stuff where was this guy of course it’s not about where was he it’s where was I the same as you have a listener today going wow where was this Steve Cyprus Kevin well I’ve been around I’ve been around for decades but you finally opened up to saying I’m looking for help and I’m looking for the right guy and maybe that’s me so maybe you found me so I found Dan Kennedy and I actually became one of Dan Kennedy’s independents Dan Kennedy certified whatever he call the business of Brian the largest I built the largest Dan Kennedy independent advisor chapter whatever they called it back in those days and that was my claim to fame for a while I any time I went and spoke at events or even attended or wherever I went it was like oh you’re that Dan Kennedy guy so you know other than you know 99% of his personality I was a Dan Kennedy guy even though I haven’t been the you know stuttering alcoholic gone bankrupt a couple of times and all that kind of stuff I got my own foibles and screw-ups and messes to share and you’re right then is forthright about that and happens all the people all the time after I speak or even on a video or a podcast or whatever and then I get the private messages or people coming up to me going yeah you know I had that too or me too so just another thing to get you started like we’re all human I don’t know a single human his life has gone up business has gone up on a straight line from left to right all the way up from broke to riches like we all know it’s a rollercoaster we go up and down life throws us curveballs there’s all kinds of twists and turns and social media especially is somewhere where there’s a lot of fakeness going on there’s a lot of people hiding behind they only post great things that happen and Here I am an exciting place and I’ve even read about or seen heard about something like this there’s cases of depression of people spending too much time on social media because they keep scrolling through all their friends stuff which everyone’s happy and they’re not and I’m like well you know what comes scroll through mine because I’m gonna tell you that I make an and and since I do these live videos every day and I’m I’ll drop the camera I’ll like you know I’m not in the focus in the thing and then I’m forget you’re gonna I do have that happen to you must be talking about one over two weeks ago your are the two things I’m known for one and then I get all off track and I say hello to everybody in this and that and whatever and I’m sure I have more excuses and I’m sticking to all of them and then I stopped the recording I hit end and then I’m like holy crap you know what I didn’t even say the second one so I was like hey Bravo light bulb I got the subject of tomorrow’s video perfect and so I stepped on tomorrow’s video I turn on the camera hey say hey hello it’s Steve and my screw-up of the day yesterday was I said two things that I got to secret so I’m gonna share only shared one so I’m a total screwup and the good news is today I’m gonna share the other one it’s perfect I mean pretty simple this is the idea sort of – and you’re I think you’re very good at this everyone the better people I’ve ever seen do this because you do you just plow forward you’re taking that imperfect action you’re not afraid to you know it’s like you said to drop the camera or maybe what people would call look bad yeah because then people would say oh you should you should hit that you should stop it and and delete it and start over and whatever and I’m like don’t be ridiculous yeah it’s unnecessary because you’re gonna do another one tomorrow no you know I know for a long time I’ve been known as straight talk Steve and I’ve been known as a no BS guy and speaking of Dan Kennedy that’s his brand the no BS friend so I remember telling some people I was thinking of becoming one of these Dan Kennedy no BS advisers and people like that’s perfect for you you’re no BS that’s right Steve that’s right up your alley it’s so straight talk no BS means when I make a screw up you see it I make a screw up there’s no hit the edit button and start over and oh I’ll tell you when I have to start over I don’t start over but when I start again cuz once in a while I’m out and I’m recording it while I’m driving or walking or somewhere or whatever and it’s got a bad connection and it just cuts off in the middle that just I just lose the internet and I’m like holy crap I’m in the middle of this thing and so I don’t want to start over so I just go on again and I go part two here’s part two I’m back again is anyone still with me I guess not I screw the whole thing up and Here I am and then when I I take that video and then I put it on to YouTube Twitter or LinkedIn my podcast my blog my facebook page my dis that and remember all the places I put it and I’m like all pain in the butt I need to first go online to the free editing to videos together paid software thing download and I get to put these two together and what a waste the time when much rather and put the whole thing up warts and all right because I news flash I’m a human being so there’s warts and all and a second of all if anybody has any fear about recording in the video you know go to Steve Cypress on Facebook and take a look at me guys not afraid the short bald guy with the glasses and you know I hate shaving and I wear a stupid ugly red Hawaiian shirt every day like you get what you get you don’t get me looking good and and whatever and this and that none of that crap so now I I will one caveat because when sometimes when women are gonna say you know gee I don’t like the way I look on video I am a more sympathetic to women because they will say I got to do my makeup my hair every I don’t feel like about that I unders damn guys were more like you know whatever goes Oh like me I can roll out of bed and you know Here I am I look the same as if I just came out of the beauty parlor if is if I ever went in a beautiful nine years of door-to-door sales I went into beauty parlors but otherwise or or hanging out waiting for my wife and my mom when I was a kid in the beauty parlor but otherwise this is what you get but I do make that exception sometimes women feel well I got to do a little bit to do my hair my makeup or whatever okay very good but I will tell you and if you see and even this goes for movie stars movie stars or the car – and you know it’s one reason I know people don’t like to hear it but the Kardashians are brilliant marketers and perhaps everything we just talked about is the biggest reason why you see warts-and-all and people got to have no talent they have no skill that’s true but they do have something other people don’t have they have the willingness to invite the entire world into their entire life works warts and all and let me ask every single person who says oh I have no respect the Kardashians will you do that would you invite an international camera crew to come in and film you 24 hours a day good bed and different everything that’s going on and put that out for the whole world to see the answer is no you won’t and therefore you don’t get 50 million dollars a year or whatever the heck they all make so they’re willing to bare their soul and so all of us on a much smaller scale least to begin with if we bear our soul well no pun intended because that’s how Kim Kardashian get started right she bared a little more than her soul but you’re inviting people into the most intimate embarrassing parts your life she willingly did it and she doesn’t have to have any skilled talent or anything else she laughs all the way to the bank does whatever she wants marries a super-duper recording superstar and has a great life and or as whatever life she wants makes a lot of money everyone at home it says you know we also you know another one again like them hate them ever there’s not much in between but like we have a president now here in the US and the White House who is pretty much the same way that’s why nothing can stop I’m in every real politician or in a normal human being would of course drop out of the race on any number of a dozen ridiculous embarrassing stupid things he said or done or been uncovered and he just keeps plowing along as he goes I don’t care I mean just look at the way he combs his hair I mean he clearly does not give a crap what anyone thinks about him and you can reveal this and that and I just love what me criticizes other people for doing this stuff he does like Harvey Weinstein slept with some women you know that’s outrageous I’m like really now you just said that or you know me by American made in America I’m like really none your stuff this mean it’s just amazing like in nothing to all drama Kings not a war hero I’m like yeah but you were you’re a draft dodger I mean it’s just it’s amazing so the guy bares his soul becomes a billionaire gets to be President Kardashian’s Trump a whole bunch of others me I’m not putting myself in the same scent but in that vein you know well I’m gonna hate him or whatever all we do is go out there and say Here I am that’s the important part which is putting yourself out there and like you said warts and all and if you’re looking at the various people you just talked about including yourself guess what works well in my line my line I used for years never works but it doesn’t work anymore because thanks to Trump thanks a lot Trump because people used to say man you should run for office and I always had an easy answer that the truth is of course I have no interest in running for office like I like give me a break but but but I used to say man I got so many scaled into the closet I could never run for office that Trump has to come along me wrong I’m like holy crap I don’t think I’ve had many skeletons of closet but even if I do clearly it doesn’t matter anymore so I’m off of that one and now I just got to say I don’t want to do it so let’s shift gears a bit now than Steve let’s you mentioned earlier in the show that you have a you know you had this long history of helping small business owners you could sort of foresee I’m sure it’s much like you know as a copywriter I see the same problem same mistakes being made over and over again I’m sure just like with you you see the same mistakes being made over by business owners and running their business into the ground or whatever what are some of these big obstacles business owners don’t see coming and and sort of what do you do about these things well here’s the biggest one people well there’s a few big one here’s one big one is business owners get way too carried away with the what of all about themselves and what they do and their product or their service and always tweaking and improving it and making it better and in my experience you know you get to a point and there’s diminishing returns I mean your product the service let’s take a well you mentioned copy rose take a copywriter copywriters are pretty darn good copywriter he can write stuff that sells and so he can go out and you know apprentice under the Great’s and study ten more courses and and hand write 30 more long-form sales letters by hand ten times each over and over every weekend for a year and he’s gonna get a little bit better but come on now you’re pretty much and the same goes for a dentist or a doctor or a lawyer whatever you know you reach the boy you have an excellent product service and now really that’s what I call the ante to get in the game but now start playing the game and the game is sales and marketing that’s where all the money comes from so you know we just mentioned some people we do you know Donald Trump is he the the greatest real estate person of all time or the smartest businessperson of course not is he the smartest a greatest politician of all of course not like is Kim Kardashian the smartest the greatest I don’t know they owned a clothing store or a– or or having sex yeah put on a sex tape was she the greatest sexual performer of all time or was she the biggest celebrity that ever have a sex tape probably neither I never seen it but I’m guessing neither so it’s not about being you know going overboard to being the best in it and outrageously working on what you do start working on the marketing I’ll bet that she marketed that sex tape more than anybody ever marketed a sex tape in fact she marketed herself didn’t she get her start by just being like Paris Hilton’s friend or so yeah she marketed the heck out of that I have a feeling that Paris Hilton had other friends and not to not to make this all about the Kardashians but I read something about a couple of months ago that one of the Kardashian sisters who give me a like you couldn’t pay me enough to know their names but one and I know they all start with the same letter for crying out loud so one of these sisters with the letter starting K I’m sure is now set to be or already as the youngest self-made billionaire in the history of the world and they have all these naysayers who already nay say everything like I just said it about the Kardashians who are they’re not you know they can’t do anything they were like she’s not self-made she’s a Kardashian I’m like get a hold of yourself aren’t there other Kardashians are every one of them a billionaire before they’re 20 the answer is no so there is something she did she had a good jumping-off point I guess is that what you’re saying she which makes sense she was probably on that TV show from when she was 10 or 12 or 15 or 8 or I don’t know what but I think she has other sisters who were the same age or two years old or younger or whatever so not all of them are billionaires so yes there’s something she did herself self-made and became a billionaire so instead of all the naysaying and going I feel I’m high and mighty because I have such an excellent product to service and these other people and Steve snipers are all talking about these people that are not great at what they do or they’re not great people or Trump is you know not ethical whatever you know whatever but the guy gets out there he takes massive that’s you know nobody can deny the guy takes massive action I mean he’s tweeting 24 other guys you know yeah right will you like anyone he takes a break and they criticize all ways playing golf all the time like well you know I counsel my clients to play golf I don’t know if you don’t want to quiet a certain point there’s a point where the doing of the business of putting out the marketing is not going to attract the top connections and relationships you want to make and those are done by attending high-end mastermind events or playing golf with movers and shakers of the world getting out on the yacht where the top movers and shakers are and so Trump alright last I heard I’m not sure if you could ever say Trump played a round the golf alone he certainly not since he’s been present so he strategically way over the head or I don’t even know things I think there’s a lot of people understand that but they’re disingenuous and they just still put forth their anti-trump or whatever always playing golf yeah but he’s playing golf with the president here and the president of there and I’m sure they even got a got to have a translator along right cuz he’s playing with the Korean guy in the Japanese the Chinese and the distant that or whatever so things are getting done he’s connecting with Phoebe’s getting what are you doing are you working on your gizmo or you practice you know getting your you know that you can pull a teeth bet to pull a tooth better or if you teach more martial arts you can break a board better or if that’s not it the money’s in the marketing the money’s in the connections get it out there and make more and better connections and do more and better marketing get more and better people doing your marketing doing your sales putting the systems together getting you in the right rooms to connect with the right people I mean how about this one here I am speaking to David Allen’s audience connecting with David Allen how did this connection happen was it because you I think you told me you you watch yeah or you heard a podcast you watch one of my videos or something you say like I couldn’t be speaking to this audience right now and hopefully helping somebody out if I wasn’t out there and put myself in the higher circles and I’ll be in attending an event next week and whenever I speak in attend events I tell people when I first was attending and speaking of conferences and seminars and events I was taking notes and sitting there up in the front row and paying attention and then over time I realized you know pretty much number one they’re all kind of the basics of the basics number two the top speakers are the celebrities they got all their talks in their speak there’s the tux they’re all on YouTube where they’re on a TED talk somewhere else and so when I go to events now I almost never even go into the room we hang out with the top sponsors the speakers and certainly the host of the meeting and I’m gonna be making those connections indeed damn right I’m gonna be playing golf and out on yachts and doing all these things that maybe you know naysayers are gonna go oh he’s not working well Kardashian’s never look like they’re working Donald Trump never looks like he’s working I probably never look like I’m working but I know what I’m doing I’m making strategic connections so that I connect those people with my clients so they can make those strategic connections and things are getting done systems are getting into place things are happening and I’m bringing people along two levels of success they never dreamed of well you have delivered and you know every every instance of that word you have delivered Steve now if people want to get in touch with you they want to hear more of your ramblings and your daily Facebook live and stuff where can people get a hold of you where should they well Facebook lies you go to Facebook but I am serious with people’s time when it’s serious so you can go to help from Steve calm and you can get help for me now warning though especially when I do these and I speak and whatever there’s I do have a waiting list there’s a there’s a pileup of people so I don’t you know I have I have a life I have a wife I have clients I have things to do and so I don’t get to as many in a day as I should so there is a waiting list if you put on there something like you know her John David Allen or uh I liked your dumb joke about that give me some reason or you know some exciting goal you have or some reason to kind of move you up on the list when I look through them because I I gotta say you know I’m just again I’m no BS I’m just gonna tell you I look through room all and I’m like boring boring boring boring give me something new fun interesting a big goal give me some reason to really talk to this guy and I’ll move you up on the list because just like the the way I disjointedly haphazardly did this interview it’s the same way I go through my waiting list I don’t it’s not first in last out I mean can I’m in charge here I look at the list and I go that one looks interesting let’s get on the phone with him or her so help from Steve calm you I think I ask you a couple of questions and then you can get a link right to my personal calendar pick a time we get on the phone and my guarantee is I guarantee to find you at least $25,000 in your business in one 25 minute phone call so there won’t be a lot of rambling and messing around there I’ll be asking key questions getting right to the point and giving you way or ways to make a lot of money in a short amount of time because when it comes right down to it I’ve had a lot of fun here but actually when it’s serious that’s what I do right awesome awesome way to deliver you heard it you need help from Steve you go to help from Steve comp and you’ll find him and you can definitely I recommend checking out his Facebook live videos there they’re funny they’re super informative and you get to see what cool Hawaiian shirt he’s gonna do Steve Cypress everybody he has just knocked it out of the park he came in swinging he never let up he’s tireless and Steve I really want to thank you for coming on the show I can’t thank you no for having me this is a lot of fun I can’t think of anything I’d rather do for the last hour since I don’t know what channel the Kardashian shows for everybody else we’ll be back hopefully with somebody next week who’s even 1/2 or 1/4 of the energy and knowledge of Steve Cypress until then The post Episode #204 – Steve Sipress On Stepping Out On A Limb. How to Attract Business To You With Authenticity appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Scott has had a diverse career. From a minister… to shipping cars purchased online… to a bounce house/waterslide business… he’s experienced in many fields. He became the top user and most knowledgeable about one of his favorite online products. When gas prices hit the roof, the owner of the company brought him onboard full time. He helped drive their blog to among the very top social media blogs. He co-authored the Facebook All-In-One book for the famous “Dummies” series. In January of 2017, he came on board at Agora Pulse to start the Social Media Lab. They get to the bottom of social media tactics and strategies… taking on gurus and “best practice”advice all over the interwebs. Today, Scott is bringing what they have found here… to the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. Are you committing these social media SINS? In this episode, you’ll discover: Will using a LinkedIn hastag get you more impressions? Scott put it to the test. How to figure out exactly where your audience hangs out. Scott destroys what Instagram goo-roos have been teaching for year? Have you been a victim of this advice? Compelling data from Scott’;s (former) bounce house/inflatables business. The social media success story of Gerald and the Colossus pizza. Mentioned: Agora Pulse Social Media Lab Social Media Lab Podcast Scott Ayres on Facebook David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey everybody, we’re back for another edition of the podcast I’m David Allan – it’s probably been a while like you’re listening to this I won’t get into that right away but today we got an exciting guest who’s gonna talk a lot about social media his name is Scott Ayers from the social media lab and the parent company Agora pulse Scott welcome to the show. Scott Ayres: Hey thanks for having me on. David Allan: Yeah I think this is gonna be exciting because as people will find out it’s been a little hiatus here for the – you know marketing podcast and we’re getting back at her and you’re the first guest to sort of restart things post summer and so maybe let’s give a little your backstory. How did you get into social media and sort of you know take us – take us up to where you’re at now. Scott Ayres: Man, it depends on where we start I think when social media first came out back and held myspace days I was addicted to MySpace and then from a business perspective you know I I guess this was probably on a 2007 2008 I started working in the auto transport business I moved cars for a living mainly like people who bought in sold cars on eBay or auctions and stuff and a guy named Gary Remy who I still remember I lived in Houston at the time he came in our office was hoping it was the SEO and stuff he’s like hey you guys got to sign up for this site called LinkedIn and we’re like what is that and he’s like sign up for and you get tons of customers from it you just got to connect with people and so I sign it for LinkedIn and sure enough I got addicted to it I mean this is so cool because iPhone I can talk to people and I can get a lot of business from I saw the business value of it and then fast forward about a year and a half and I started my own transport business from home you know shipping cars you know instead of having the split Commission’s kept it all myself but got all the headaches so and so I dove in completely with Facebook and Twitter because nobody in that niche was really doing much in that and discovered that I could get more than 50% of my clients via Twitter and Facebook and not to spend any money on that was just connecting with people and through that process the fun thing was and how I kind of moved over from the transport business into this I started creating there was a product called fanpage engine back in those days that was if you familiar with Facebook pages a usability those custom tabs they called them they had his product that was real simple didn’t require any coding you could create these customized pages for people to have on their business page so I started using their tool to make my own pages on my own my Facebook page and then started selling I’m like doing the service for people and started doing blogs and videos and tutorials about how to use their product and they got David Foster on the company he reached out to me is like man you know more about our app than we do and he said can you write some blocks for Zoar and then can you do some training videos for so for a couple months I started doing training videos for him and blogs for him and then he’s like hey you want to help out with customer support and like yeah sure you know I’m doing some side during that run of my shipping business I think it caught the economy collapsed and that’s when that’s when fuel prices went to like I’m in Texas and so for us normal fuel price was like two dollars a gallon went to like four-and-a-half five dollars a gallon and no one was buying cars for one and nobody we could get them shipped either and so it right about that time you know they was like hey once you come work for me full time and somebody sure I didn’t know what that minute I’ve been the typical you know have a nine-to-five kind of a job and for all my life and so I started doing social media for them it started being their guy to blog and in within a couple of about a year so our blog went to the top 10 list for social media examiner’s top social media blogs which was a big deal and so through that process I worked for them for a couple years and then I’m working for another app company called post planner I’m doing the same sort of work you know the the blogging that I must have written face book all-in-one for dummies through that process and got our blog at the top of social media examiner’s lists again and then about a year and a half ago or so January 2017 I came on board at Agora pulse just to do this project we call the social media lab it’s pretty interesting yeah I could go even further about what I’ve done before that which would blow your mind but and for this we’ll leave it at that yeah former minister turns social media so this is where you’re at now you came on board with Agora pulse at the Social Media Lab and this is the constant mag I get questions being in marketing I get questions about social media all the time and I don’t really consider myself even that well qualified to answer some of them beyond my rare few exploits on my own maybe start talking about what should people be doing I mean it’s constantly it seems like a constantly shifting sand you know of like what’s hot what’s what’s not and the different algorithms are changing constantly of course and you know what should people be doing if you’re there this is a small business owner listening to this right now or should they start on what sort of shot stuff should they be looking to do well that’s that’s a convoluted question right you know for one for what we do at the lab just to kind of throw it out there we knew our goal is to go out there and and test all the different social media tactics that we hear from a lot of the Guru’s a lot of brands are trying or just people questioning wondering if this works or not we can’t test everything there’s some things that you can’t quantify and get good data on so we don’t bother testing a lot of stuff on based on sentiment or real hard to test right but I can go out there and run a test like I just published a test today on LinkedIn hashtags dude does those using a hash tag at least one on a LinkedIn post gets you more impressions and our results came back yes they do compared to the same exact link post they got about twenty nine percent higher impressions when we added last hashtag to it which tells me people are using hashtags on LinkedIn right and so there’s stuff like that we can test that are pretty I would say use is they’re very time-consuming like right now I’m working on a test on Twitter on about five different Twitter accounts it’s gonna end up being about fifteen hundred tweets I’m gonna have got a schedule and go through into the process sometimes too daunting but our whole goal is just to try to figure out ways to you know bus those missed and talked about those things that people are saying is true and sometimes they’re not and then given data to back it up and try to pull out opinion as much as I can which is really hard for an opinionated person like myself but I try to pull it out on all the blog posts where we want to say this is the data and sometimes we’re shocked by it and sometimes I’m absolutely wrong on my hypothesis right and I have to kind of you know eat crow and say well that didn’t work but and that’s it and here’s the data and the science says and I think that’s a better way for a small business to go back to your question you know I think for one you you’ve got to figure out and this isn’t something you know I’ve tested because it’d be hard to test could your business gonna be different but you need to figure out where your audience is if your audience is not an Instagram audience don’t be on Instagram if they’re not a Twitter audience don’t be there they’re not a Facebook audience so don’t be there heck your audience might be on Google+ still who knows and so you’ve got to find out what that is for you I think most businesses feel the the obligation to hop on every social platform there is and they run themselves ragged trying to keep up and they end up doing a poor job with all of them instead of just being really good at one of them so that’s the first thing I was saying you would test that probably by doing zip if you’re a local business do the zip code search on the different sites see how many users are in that area or try to run an ad on one of those sites and see what kind of target market you get when you do your whatever your perfect target market looks like that’s how you’re gonna know if it’s the right platform to you so you want to look at that and then you know from there it’s just it’s trying different things to see what works what kind of what sort of content resonates with your brain it’s not gonna be the same for every brand like for example I for the last five years I had a side business running do it written bounce houses and water slides and stuff cool in Texas because that was written him anyway right but it was kind of funny to do that process I did it for five years acts they just passed the business over three weeks ago to my brother he’s been working with me the entire five years and it made sense to finally just move on from it let him run it and so I noticed through that though that you know there were certain things on social media that worked for me that didn’t work on other sites like for example on that bounce house business posting links to my product was horrible no one cared no one clicked on them you know I didn’t get any traffic attending engagement but boy I post a picture of some kids smiling on a water slide the thing would go viral in my world but I do the opposite software the links are do great for us photos are just kind of me sometimes you know on Facebook you know people go like well okay great yeah you posted a photo of your team good for you you know it’s not it’s not as there’s not that close of a connection for agar for a company like that so you got to figure out what that is for you and then kind of run with it from there like Instagram for example and we get a some data set from the second but on Instagram for that local bounce house business I even though I had 5,000 or so followers on this account I worked really hard on it for five years I didn’t get any business from it at all I mean it’s just I got I got some you know vanity metric likes you know and some ancillary type engagement but no one was you know messaging me or calling me from Instagram saying I want to rent a bounce house but about 80% of my business and we did six figures a year eighty percent of our business was coming from Facebook and so the rest of it was google it so meant when I passed the business on my brother the other day I’m like for one you’re not yeah I’ll give you the Facebook page which has you know six seven thousand likes and I spent a lot of money to get to that a small town it’s only eight thousand people get that many likes I said yeah I’m not giving you the Instagram account though for one it’s a waste of your time and two I want to use it for something else so I stole it and change the name to something else so I could continue to use it for testing so yeah that was a fun little experiment so that that whole thing for me it’s been an experiment the entire five years kind of see what works what doesn’t work what I’ve found for a local business I don’t know if you’re mainly your listeners or local businesses or our small businesses or what I’m finding that that Facebook live is is gold for a local business and a real prime real-life example and I talk about this guy all the time a friend of mine named Gerald owns a pizza joint in my town and he created this 28 inch around Pizza called the Colossus giant pizzas literally literally the blur the Box barely fit in the back of my suburban that shows you how big it is and so he said I know exactly and it’s about seven pounds just with pepperoni and cheese on seven pounds and he said he wanted to do an eating contest and see if somebody could eat that pizza in an hour and if they did they got the pizza for free they got a t-shirt they got their picture on the wall blah blah blah and the pizzas about 60 bucks and and still Mike Jarrell dude you got to go you gotta go live on Facebook he’s like I don’t know how to do that I mean he’s a guy that was annoyed with Facebook you know he didn’t want to pay for ads and I was sure I might you’ve got to run a Facebook live so I’m literally like 30 minutes before this starts I’m texting him how to go live on Facebook and so he hops on his phone goes live on Facebook and if for his pages got about 22 hundred likes kind of put it in perspective and he’ll get decent and gave me you know 30 40 likes on post that sort of thing and in 13 minutes maybe 50 or 60 of us were watching it I was watching from home it was like 7 8 o’clock at night and all of a sudden after about that 15 20 minute mark you know there’s a hundred people there’s 200 people 300 people 400 all set it jumps like a thousand I think the max live was about 2,500 people watching it Wow and they were watching it from around the globe it wasn’t just locally there was people from France from from Ireland from the UK all around the United States watching this guy and this little podunk town in Texas try to eat this giant pizza so the right people saw it and somehow Facebook’s algorithm saw that and notice hey this is trendy and it’s just hot and so they started showing it to more people the cool part of the guy didn’t eat the pizza he ran off camera with like a minute left and no vomit look who that wasn’t on camera and Gerald’s phone died you know right after that he was texting me later like this was awesome the video get about I think total about 12,000 views was massive for a little brand like that but where’s the ROI in that yeah it’s great didn’t people watched it the next day the local news station contacted him and said hey can we send out one of our reporters and do a live remote during our morning show for two hours and let him try to eat that pizza massive free advertising I mean massive free advertising form the guy and of course he got he ain’t less of the pizza in the our former former football player he couldn’t he couldn’t but the thing I told gentlemen you got him now he keeps doing him he does those lives every time he doesn’t get 10,000 12,000 views every time but he’s got a couple hundred a couple thousand and it’s kind of created this you know momentum for him now that he sells that pizza like crazy and it all started because he did that Facebook live he pushed the button went like I didn’t know what he was doing didn’t cost him a single penny you know to do it and now he’s seen you know huge dividends on doing that one little Act so that’s I mean I haven’t that’s not even a test on the lab but that’s just a little personal thing that I’ve seen you know real life happened that went golly I wish would I’m pulling his dad actually to look at and see what it’s done to his page because I am actually an admin on his page I said you guys make me an admin your page so what should maybe you do well let’s talk about Instagram if you don’t mind like I’d like to talk about Instagram because I have another business myself and I use Instagram I’ve tried to start my page and just I had a page but I did like you know put some work into it here the line over the summer and I’d love to hear more about Instagram it seems it is you know it’s one of those things where you know the the avid user the typical user and Instagram has been younger or people who just want to post you know their coffee and their lunch and you know activities and all that stuff but there’s tons of stuff on the business perspective that you know are huge value Instagram stories are awesome especially if you gather your audience as Millennials you want to leverage stories like crazy but some things that we tested that you know all the quote-unquote gurus have been teaching we’re pretty interesting first one that was probably the biggest one that I had to and that really was scared to publish this it all got done cuz a lot of my friends in marketing have been teaching this for years and I even reached out to him today so you know I’ve tested this and I you know this isn’t working and so what a lot of marketers have been teaching a lot of people over the years is when you use hashtags put them in the first comment instead of leaving them in the post because it makes the original post look kind of ugly you know because you’ve got too much text and people don’t want to see the hashtags I know you’re being you know mr. spammy marketer by using the hashtags so they people have been struck people for years to kind of hide those in the comments hide those in the comments and there’s even apps out there that you know circumvent instagrams official API and we’ll put the first comment in for you even though they’re breaking instagrams API by doing it right and so a lot of people been doing it for you I used to do it I’d always go back and put it in the comments because you know you want to look pretty in a sense you know on for two users and so we tested 30 hashtags you know in the original post and in the same 30 hashtags in the comments would you know on different posts to kind of see which one you know might do better in the end and here’s the interesting here’s here’s the data likes were 9.8 4% higher when we put the hashtags in the original post so right there alone the engagement was tired when I just left them in the post and then the here’s a more important part I thought reach or impressions or however you want to call it on Instagram was twenty nine point four one percent higher when we just simply put the hashtags in the original post instead of going back and putting in the comments yeah it’s 129 percent mass if it had just been like H percent I’ve been like well that’s almost a wash but 29 percents a big deal and so I mean I went back and tested it twice just to make sure because I mean I literally I won’t name their names but there was couple people on like God is influential is gonna be ticked off at it because they’re friends of ours but they have courses on this stuff and I’m like okay but it’s yeah it’s true and you got to go with the data on anything in life you got to go by what the data says not your opinion on it and so what happens here and the reason this became a thing is a couple of reasons you used to be you saw a lot more of the text when you’re thumbing through Instagram on your phone right now you’d only see about three lines and then it goes to the dot dot dot more and you have to tap on the more to open up the rest of the post so you don’t see the ugly block of someone’s texts because Instagram isn’t want that user experience they want you to focus on the photo not necessary the text so that’s changed for one so if you put it far enough down below the fold if you will you know what no one will see it anyway the second thing was you know you rewind a couple years ago instagrams algorithm you know on the explore option with the hashtags if you if you did whenever you put your hashtag in is it would show back up at the top of that explore option so if I posted something you know right now and then let’s say 30 40 minutes out our two hours I don’t know what the time would have been you later I come back in and post bunch of hashtags in the comments boom that post gets surfaced back at the top of the Explorer option for that hashtag I mean that is a Instagram realize it’s like every other social platform they realize that marketers like me have you know trying to or getting around their algorithm and they said oh wait a minute let’s don’t do it anymore so now it that explore option on your on Instagram is based on the time the post was made and so it doesn’t matter when you put that hashtag in it’s not going to push it back up to the top like it used to so it’s when you put that post in so you want to get it out there as soon as you can and then and make sure it shows up in that explore option that someone’s searching for you know pizza is in Dallas or something I don’t know it’ll show up now I got pizza on the brain right I say that with my chick-fil-a so I mean that’s how that Explorer feed is working now and I think that’s why we saw the results we did because there in a sense you’re penalized if you try to go back and do it later because you’re getting around the algorithm you’re working around it are trying to so now you’re not rewarded for that the other thing to think about too with hashtags this and we’ve done a lot of tests on hashtags because it’s such a people know they’re good but they don’t know what to do is I’m a lot of times hashtags are not for your existing followers so it doesn’t matter if you use it for your existing followers are going to see your content based on it they’ve engaged with you before or not so if they’re engaging with you it doesn’t matter what the content part of it says the hash tag is not going to resurface it for them hash tags or on any of the site where it’s LinkedIn Facebook Twitter or whatever hashtags are for people searching with that hash tag to hopefully find your content and get exposed to it may become like you follow you whatever so you got to kind of keep that in mind with the hashtags and your strategy on them so you know the whimsical ones are funny maybe but they don’t do any good hash tag that was fun there’s no one searching that was there searching you know social media SAS tech marketing tips you know they’re searching for that sort of stuff you know motivational whatever it might be they’re searching those hashtags so that’s what those hashtags are for and so you got to use those right so that was a big one on Instagram that I mean I tell you what I got so many I got a couple of the emails going are you sure yeah wish it was different but it’s not but it makes it interesting well that’s so that’s important part though I mean that like as people listening to this podcast a lot of people are freelance copywriters and people who employ freelance copywriters and you know in the direct response world this is exactly the important part yeah media is like we want to know not what we think works we want to know what actually works yeah and you can only get that through testing exactly I mean if you’re not testing you know you’re just you’re taking the advice and it’s just advice from someone else who maybe it worked for them but it is it’s not gonna work for everybody so that’s why it’s what’s been really cool with this project is and I call it project it’s my full-time job so it’s not going away but but the lab that the cool the cool part of it that’s for my boss the way he didn’t say why was he on that podcast but the thing with the lab we try to do is not just test on you know a software company’s page we’re testing on a bounce house business we’re testing on a personal profile we’re we’re testing on you know a pizza business or you know someone who’s selling digital products we’re testing on multiple kinds of accounts and then averaging those numbers together that kind of give us a trend otherwise what happens in a lot of those tests that I’ve seen other people do you know let’s and I’m not picking on anybody I’m just saying like so say HubSpot while your users pretty listeners probably know HubSpot yeah let’s say they run a test on just their account and it gets some really cool data maybe it’s you know hundreds of pieces of data but it was only on their type of business so unless you you are that sort of you know inbound marketing type company it may not apply to you all right that’s real important kind of for me to always have that cross section of different types that way I can give an average and then kind of go from use it average for my conclusion so that’s that’s a really big deal for me so tell people you know as we wind down here tell people how to get a hold of you and like maybe you know where to go to listen to the social media lab and here’s some more this fantastic data that you are accumulating yeah anywhere you listen to podcast is search for social media lab you should find us we’re on all the different you know podcast platforms as far as our website you can go to gora pulse comm forward slash social media lab we kind of decided beginning not to do a separate brand we think of this for us the social media lab is all about you know getting out some great content and but see somebody’s missed but it’s also a branding move for us so we kind of by word I kind of equated till we get a room in the house a small room on the house and Agora polls so Agora pulse com4 slash social media lab you can see all the different experiments based on the topic so you can go directly to the podcast from there and anywhere on social we’re basically at Agora polls and if you tweet us it’s always me pretty much that does offer social media because I’m also a social media manager awesome that’s usually me that’s engaging and if anybody has you know some sort of dying question or something they’d love is he tested we’re always open to taking you know ideas from people and if we run with one of them we’ll always mention you in that test or have you do it along with us that’s excellent excellent think you’ve given out just pounds of valuable content and you busted some you know some myths that have been perpetuating this industry for a long time which I really enjoyed and it’s been a real pleasure having you on Scott thanks for coming on the show yeah thanks for having me on and a good talking to you we’ll have to circle back you know maybe you’ve got something you want me to test and we’ll circle back on it yeah absolutely and for everybody else listen to this and you know welcome to the email marketing podcast which is started again after the lazy summer so to speak and we’ll be back again with another exciting guest hopefully someone is insightful and as scientifically driven as Scott The post Episode #203 – Scott Ayres On Killer Social Media. Opinion-Free Practices Based On Testing & Data appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

I conducted this interview with Erik back in November of 2016. Intended to release it under the Takeover Tuesday banner, I held it back when I came over to the McMethod. It is a very important episode and one every entrepreneur should listen to. A great many of you will have experienced exactly what Erik speaks of. The “secret sadness”. He has had this particular “sadness” inflict itself on his life three times. Each of these events spiked with a “harajuku” moment. A realization which said he could not move further down the path. Erik admits much of this is painful to state. Vulnerability is not seen as an admirable business trait. By talking about this though it will shift into the open. Freeing others to talk about it too. What impact does this have on your life? Your family? Your clients? Erik goes into painstaking detail about this most intimate subject. This is a superb episode. In this episode, you’ll discover: The stunning “kids and I will be homeless” email he woke up to one morning. The truth behind the 5 options you have of dealing with your “harajuku” moment. A little-known secret can steer you through these type of events with confidence. How to avoid falling into the “prostitutes, drugs and alcohol” scenarios. The “seat-belt” moment which instigated Erik losing 60 pounds. Mentioned: Stafford Marketing Erik Stafford on Facebook Erik Stafford’s blog David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody today on the show we have Eric Stafford. I think I first heard about Eric from buddy of mine Colin Theriot, and you guys are good buddies Eric? Erik Stafford: We are. I’ve known Colin for a number of years he’s a very good dude. David Allan: Now you come from an advertising and design background you’ve won a bunch of awards and you’ve been a serial entrepreneur, product creator and soforth lending your expertise to multiple businesses over time how did you get into the, you know, the advertising world and maybe take us through your sort of superhero origin story about how you got into all this. Erik Stafford: No sure absolutely so on you know I guess you could probably say gave that my life has been a series of realizations and moments where I just you know sort of was like well this just isn’t gonna cut it anymore and I’m not sure if you could say that’s true about everyone but I think that’s probably true about most people I thinkmost people you know when they look back on their life with a critical eye they can kind of see where they had these very specific moments where they just decided look something’s got to change right and I know that I’m a marketing wonk so I read a lot of books I know that Malcolm Gladwell called this a Harajuku moment. A moment… a defining moment right? And I think Tim Ferriss may have had stolen that from him and used it and what his folks as well but the first one that I can think of specifically as it relates to busines was you know I had two young kids and we had built a very successful advertising agency here in Southwest Florida but I was working 80-hour weeks and I just you know I just one morning realize look you know I can’t do this I can’t do this forever you know I I will work my way into a grave and my kids will be you know grown and gone and I won’t I will never know them and you know it’s a painful realization because my entire life I had wanted growing up to be a creative director in an ad agency right and so I you know I out there and I got to that point and realized well you know I’m not happy and you know we were winning all these incredible awards addy awards and Art Awards and um we’re even featured in all sorts of press we’re doing incredible work for clients that really inspired me but it just it just wasn’t sustainable as far as I was concerned and so I realized I had to make a change and so you know I majored in fine art grew up got to the position that I wanted to be in in sort of the creative world I was running an ad agency the creative to the creative department of an ad agency and so I realized something had to change and so I started researching different businesses that I may start and that led me into internet marketing and led me to creating my first products and things of that nature and I developed a bunch of digital products I hadn’t built an incredibly successful business and then one morning woke up and realized that I was unhappy with that business and I understand right now that I’m probably coming across as the most ungrateful turd on the planet but but that’s literally what happens to me yeah well that’s exactly why I wanted you on the show I’d seen a video yours I think you went on so Facebook live or something and you were talking about you know how you woke up one day and just realized and it sounds like for the second time or more that this wasn’t what you wanted to be doing and you know I have definitely felt that way for sure I definitely instantly related to that I’d started other businesses in the past and and gone on for some cases years and then realized this is just not what I thought it would be and definitely don’t want to do this anymore and you know I I would just outright just quit like that day basic right as if as if I was never interested in it at all and so that’s that’s so maybe talk about that I mean I think it takes a while to get to that point to that maybe people don’t even realize because I know I didn’t yeah I mean it depends you know I tend to think that entrepreneurs are wired a little bit differently than the normal people and you know most entrepreneurs myself included aren’t willing really so much to settle and so even if I were willing to settle I don’t think the universe is willing to let me settle and so that’s the whole reason that I quote-unquote quit my job to begin with was because I just didn’t didn’t feel that working that many hours and missing that much of my kid’s life was something that I could put up with right and so that’s why I quit my job to begin with and so when this happened the second time in my business when I fast forward from you know from the early two-thousands to like 2008 and this happened in my own business it was a very sort of similar thing it was like you know I’ve woke up and realized I hated my business but it was quite a bit it was quite a bit harder for me to get my head around and it was quite a bit harder for me to stomach but it’s it’s a very similar feeling it’s like right well you know I’m not willing to do this anymore this just doesn’t work for me anymore but when you’re an entrepreneur and it’s your own business and it’s something you’ve built with your own two hands from scratch especially you know when you’re in an industry you know sort of similar to the industry that I was working and at the time you know is working in sort of like personal development online marketing digital digital product development things like that it’s very difficult it’s very difficult to admit and and I think this may be true for a lot of business owners difficult to admit that you’re unhappy when you’ve worked so hard to build something that on the surface appears to be going so well right right and so you know at the time I was spending all the time in the world that I wanted with my kids my wife and I were extremely happy I built an engineer to life that I really wanted but I really had always envisioned but the physical act of doing the work that it took to live that life I hated it and it’s it’s tough to admit that you know there’s people that subscribe to entrepreneurial style followings there’s a lot of talk about being grateful and about gratitude and about abundance and so it’s very difficult you know to say that you’re unhappy you can be grateful and yet I’m happy but I didn’t quite understand the distinction at the time and so I just remember a very long period of time of me sort of thinking myself like Eric what’s wrong with you man why are you so on the motivated are you say depressed like look at you know look at the money you make and look at how you get to live your life like if you told any of your friends that you felt this way they would they would laugh at you they would think you’re in it but I couldn’t hide I couldn’t hide from those feelings I you know I I clearly was not happy and so it’s a very difficult thing when you’re an entrepreneur to sort of own that and separate it from thoughts of like not being grateful or not feeling fun the secret sadness it is yeah it’s sort of this painful solo you know journey that entrepreneurs have to take and you know I’ve not heard anyone else talking about this and yet I know it to be true for a lot of my peers and my colleagues and my friends and you know I’m I’m grateful that when I went through this process and as you said I’ve gone through this process three times now but I’m grateful that uh you know I kept the rails on somewhat for each of those three transitions right but you know I know a lot of people where this process is led to you know heavy heavy alcohol abuse and heavy drug abuse and lots of you know trips to Vegas and full of spending of money interactions with prostitutes cheating on spouses even in some cases suicide and it’s just it’s a it’s a secret sadness that not many entrepreneurs are really able to talk about or discuss and an own you know it’s really difficult to aim the lens at yourself and I certainly know I didn’t feel like I could talk with my wife about this you know my wife just wanted to know that everything was gonna be fine and that we would still be able to get Evan the private soccer lessons and that we’d still be able to take the summer road trip and um you know so I very much felt alone in this journey I didn’t feel like I could speak with any of my colleagues or peers I didn’t want anyone to perceive me as being weak and so it just was that sort of thing I just sort of sat with yeah I think that’s uh that’s I’ve seen that I think I saw it until we started talking here just recently about this I you know I sort of reflected knowing that you were coming on the show just kind of like you know where have I seen this elsewhere you know and I was just like yeah you know I can pinpoint a few other people where I just like they said things to me at the time which didn’t really register and I thought to myself probably what you like you were saying about your friends how they would have judged you I think I probably I never said it to their face but if I judge a thing like man you know talking about but I was just kind of like oh man I’m sure it’ll pass kind of thing you know and then and then I had it happen to me in at least one occasion where I was just like man I just don’t want to do this I just and I think it was a sort of multifactorial problem that sort of I came into and that I really just wasn’t what I thought it was I didn’t really want to do it anymore because I aspect of it but not the other six you know yeah I could I remember thinking myself like really I worked so hard for this and it’s finally I was finally going successful yeah but you could see that it was going to be so for you and you’ve done this now three times where did you start with at first did you realize like I got a I mean obviously quit but but I mean did you have a specific plan of action that you were gonna take or did you later come into that well I mean I think it all starts with that sort of harajuku moment that moment where you’re like shit what have I done like a moment that moment where you go how did I how did I get here you know and it’s funny because you know I can track moments like that throughout my life now that I know what to look for in terms of you know relationships or in terms of my health you know if if you’re overweight you know you you will never lose the weight that you want until you have that moment no amount of your spouse beating on you you know I speak from experience I lost 60 pounds over the last several years and it wasn’t easy yeah yeah thank you man I appreciate it it wasn’t easy but it became so much easier once I had that moment and that moment in terms of my weight loss was I actually was flying somewhere and couldn’t get a seatbelt around right and the stewardess said to me do you want a seatbelt extender which apparently in America is a thing which is even creepier but but anyway that was the moment dude where I was like this has to change this this this is embarrassing this is shocking this is shin I hate this this has to change and so it starts with that moment and the moment with the ad agency with with my sort of first career was I lived about about a 20 mile drive from the office but during season you know Florida’s very seasonal during seasons sometimes that drive could take upwards of two hours and so during season I would I would try and go to the office really early to avoid traffic and then come home either early in the day if possible which never happened or late at night and one night I was driving home late at night and I started to fall asleep at the wheel and I opened my eyes and snapped out of it and realized I was in the middle of a red light and so I slammed on the brakes and my Jeep sort of fishtailed and did this earth thing and I stopped at 2:30 in the morning in the middle of a red light with no other cars around anywhere if there had been a car there I would have been killed and that was the moment where I was like yeah I got to do something about this and so it starts with that moment and it’s funny dude you had said you know that you know there’s been a couple times in your life where you found yourself in situations where you’re like yeah right this doesn’t work for me I’m blowing this up I’ve done and that certainly is you know one of the op in my experience when this happens there’s there’s four options the first option is to ignore it and do nothing which we’ve talked about a little bit I don’t know for most people especially entrepreneurs I don’t know that that’s really an option right I don’t think entrepreneurs are really wired that way and I think you know we might be able to ignore for a little while because we like you know we like giant incomes and we like being able to have that car or we like being able to live the life we live or whatever but right I don’t I don’t think for most of us we can ignore it forever so I don’t really see the first option as an option the second option is to quite simply get fed up and blow it up and just walk away again I don’t know that that’s the best option but again we’re finicky beasts us entrepreneurs and sometimes we’ve just had enough and that’s it right so um that certainly is what happened in 2010 or so with the first internet business that I had built I woke up one morning I received an email from a customer a guy that had purchased one of my courses in the middle of the night and he emailed me and said hey bro I bought your course in the middle of the night it really needs to work for me because if it doesn’t I need to make five grand by this might even three grand I need to make several grand by this weekend otherwise my kids and I will be homeless Wow and I was like yep I’m done you know because my sales letters never promised any sort of money from the sky or any other yeah but at the time you know it was 2010 and the the housing crisis was becoming a very real situation that the banking collapse was looming and it was just a very difficult time for a lot of people and my systems and my lead generation systems my affiliate stuff was geared to bring me those people and I didn’t realize it until that moment and and at that point I blew that business up I literally uh I logged in oh my god I can’t believe him tell people I logged into autoresponder I deleted 75,000 people from my email us Wow and then I logged into my CMS or whatever and I deleted all of my monthly members I had over a thousand people paying us $50 a month for a monthly membership for training and stuff and I logged into my FTP client deleted all my websites and I basically blew it up I blew it up and I walked away and I like to tell people that you know I had sunglasses on I was walking slowly it was exploding behind me it was very cool there were kittens involved like it you know that’s but no in truth told brother it was extremely painful I spent I spent a long time right it’s just not understanding what had happened how I built a business I hated and not understanding what to do next worried about my family and not sleeping it was a terrible time when I felt like a failure dude because you know who he does that right and so I think the first step is that Harajuku moment of realizing that you are no longer comfortable where you’re at and you’re no longer willing to settle with where you’re at and then the second step is understanding that it’s okay and understanding that all businesses go through silence and that all entrepreneurs shift and change goals shift and change a good example of that being Netflix you know your your your longer in the tooth like I am you remember when Netflix used to just be a DVD company they would send you DVDs in the mail and they transitioned from that to being an online service and now they’re transitioning from that into being a movie studio yeah right and so on you know this stuff it when you understand that this stuff is inevitable and that it’s natural and it doesn’t mean that you’re a failure then you can start to look at other options besides the first two which are to ignore it or to blow it up right okay you see a lot of people serve and that maybe that’s exactly why is you know you see people pivoting their businesses and so forth and you think to yourself oh this guy’s just being very clever trying to get into something new but I’m thinking about it now I’m probably sure there’s a lot of those scenarios with a person well that’s how they got out of where they were yeah if they’re smart I mean it it definitely takes a lot of self-awareness and it takes a lot of a willingness to really aim the lens at your own self which can which can be painful it’s it’s not always been an easy process but but I you know I will say that when you understand that this sort of thing happens you know I was chatting I was chatting with one of my favorite authors a guy named Marty Neumayer who wrote a book called the brand gap and he wrote also called zag which are incredible marketing books but I was chatting with him once and and I was explaining this to him and he goes oh yeah dude like that’s happened to me like six times in my life that happens to me like every two years and I was like shut up really I don’t hear about this on you know on podcaster in the interview I don’t hear anyone talking about this and he’s like now dude it’s totally natural like you know everyone pivots my first business was designing software boxes there’s not even software boxes anymore let alone a computer stores to buy software and I had changed my business and I was like oh wow shit and so um yeah I mean understanding it and owning it allows you to look at like you had just mentioned the other two options which are you know to remove yourself from your business you know methodically remove yourself whether it’s something as simple as just starting to outsource some of the things that make you the most unhappy document what you’re doing and outsource it or hire someone to come in and and do those tasks so that you don’t have to and you can focus on other more more liberating and more more soul filling tasks in your business or you know to go as deep as to remove yourself completely you know to hire an Operations Manager and pay him a large salary and just take a smaller percentage of the business and let someone else run it or even sell your business right that’s certainly an option and then you know the fourth option is to realign your business which you had mentioned it’s to sort of pivot and and move your business back into alignment with your ethics and with with you know where you’re at and what your goals are right you’ve seen that over time with a few I’m trying to think it doesn’t matter even to mention you know names but you certainly have seen that in the internet marketing thing over time you’ve seen a few people go through that where they chose to rely in they’re there for ethical issues or whatever their reasons were you can sort of see you know coming up born-again marketer almost of thing right that yeah it’s tough man it’s tough to separate it’s tough to separate the reality from the chaff because you know I know certain markers who have a retirement sale every year right so I mean it’s um it’s a very strange place it’s a you know it’s not an entrepreneurial it’s not commonly seen to be an entrepreneurial trait to be vulnerable right and to be open and to be shamelessly honest with yourself everyone needs to appear bullet right and so it requires a certain level of vulnerability to really look at where you’re at and say you know look I’m grateful I’m grateful but I’m unhappy there’s a big big difference the most recent time that this realignment occurred for me was at the beginning of the summer and at the time you know I loved everything about my life except what I had to do to live it that was super happy we were making great money I was never wearing shoes I was working on my lanai in the beautiful Florida weather I was working out at the gym a lot I was going to yoga a lot I was eating lunch with my friends almost every day I was watching a ton of European soccer yeah life was a really good man but you know I would open my laptop in the morning and just go oh like really I got to do this today yeah well that’s interesting too because from seeing like you know we’re friends on Facebook and so forth you know just watching you from a distance and that’s what was probably you know real surprising to me when you put up the video and I thought okay well that’s interesting because I’d see your stuff popping up you know you would take your family to Vegas in the Pacific Northwest and so forth and you look like you’re just living the life you know and again that’s part of that you know no one I would have never suspected for a second that you weren’t happy with what you were doing because you know you get the suppression of people based on a series of photos videos or snapshots on the internet or whatever yeah yeah for sure I mean I don’t feel that I was intentionally deceiving people I think I was deceiving myself yeah because I didn’t want to admit it I didn’t want to look at it I didn’t want to cast the lens at myself and and like I had said you know I loved almost every aspect of my life during that time except one and so for me too for me to go really am I gonna I gonna blow something up again or am I gonna I gonna do this again really but like I had said you know as I’ve done this now several times it’s it I will say to those of you listening that it gets less painful every time and it takes less time every time and at least for me it’s been a less radical shift every time so this last time that this happened it was a a slight realignment that really has brought me immense pleasure and happiness and working again that’s great to hear man yeah that sounds like you’ve learned lessons of course from the previous realignments if that’s the term we’re going to use and so yeah the fact that happens quicker and stuff it’s not such a colossal ordeal where you have all these doubts cuz you’ve had these things before and you realize what it is yeah yep yeah the first time it happened I switched entire careers right right and the second time it happened I blew everything up and started over the third time it happened it was merely a realignment a slight adjustment in my path based on my shifting goals okay so let’s take you back to begin let’s take it back to the beginning of the summer what was your business then and what did you realign so I had built I had built a business where I was doing conversion consulting based on my experience in in in the agency world and also in participating in a lot of high-end launches launching my own product split testing a lot of my own pages and a lot of my own assets and then working with clients for so many years but I built a business where I was just consulting and helping other entrepreneurs with their conversions and it was it was a great business it was a really really lucrative business we charged a $2,500 a month flat retainer and we would meet with our clients once a week or twice a month depending on what suited them and you don’t need a whole lot of clients at $2,500 a month to live a very good life but what had happened is a couple of things the first thing that it happened was I let I let some of my clients readjust our arrangement to better suit them and I loved I loved all of the people that I was working with at the time and I don’t think it was malicious but I do think it’s human nature to try and get as much as you possibly can out of any situation that’s why people eat at buffets right and so could you know a couple of my clients one of them in particular they were like oh well you know we fired our in-house team and so is there any way that you could just update all the split tests this week and and because I love watching European soccer and going to yoga and hanging out with my kids I said yeah sure no problem and suddenly I was doing all of the implementation instead of consulting which is how I’d originally envisioned isness right and so there was a lot of school creep there and there was a lot of extra hours that were happening suddenly there and I just didn’t have the balls to tell them no because I loved everything else about my life and so that happened with a couple of my clients one of them I went from consulting to actually writing their emails okay and part of this also is you know I feel a strong sense of responsibility and I wanted my clients to get results and a lot of times I would just say to myself look you know this this guy that’s working for my client is an idiot I’m just gonna do it like just tell your guys to leave this alone I got this yeah because I wanted my clients to get results right and so the business sort of crept up on the intern into something where I was back to doing a lot of pixel pushing and a lot of copy writing and a lot of implementation which is not how I had envisioned the business right another one of my clients landed their dream contract and literally got so busy that they were no longer able to get on the phone with me right and so you know I would I would send them all my recommendations I would send them my conversion on it and I would say hey man look let’s get on the phone next week and they go yeah yeah definitely and then we just never would and so you know man just send the invoice it’s all good we’re just slam and I just I was feeling these people $2,500 a month and literally doing nothing for right it just didn’t sit well with me you know it was minor things and again I understand that I sound like the world’s biggest herb for for being unhappy right to kill someone for doing nothing I you know but but again I mean you only live this life once I think that when you can build a business that’s in such alignment with who you are and with your passions and your goals that it literally is seamless and you show up you know for your wife the same way you show up for your kids and the same exact way that you show up for your clients it is so integrated with how you want to live your life and how you want to show up that there is no distinction that that was my goal and and so I had I had to I had to change it so you made these so this sort of as you were going along and then and what way did you decide okay this is the buck stops here we’re doing this from now on yeah so what happened what happened at the beginning of the summer was that as soon as I sort of realized that I was no longer able to deal with this I think it became very apparent and the work that we were doing for our clients they were still getting results but our heart wasn’t in it within a very short period of time I gently let go of or was let go of by almost all of our clients within the space of six weeks we sort of separated and went our separate ways from nearly all of our clients within six weeks within eight weeks all of them were gone Wow and I tell you what though dude like no joke it was the most liberating feeling in the world because it created space for me to really spend some time over the summer sitting and reflecting on what that ideal business might look like and where I might transition to to fill me up and to make me happy does sound liberating and I could tell just by the way talked about it that it was like this yeah it’s so true and you know it’s an emotional thing for me to discuss because you know I’d said earlier that each time that I’ve gone through this process it’s taken less time and it’s become easier and it’s also it’s also become more liberated and more free and you know I I quite honestly I never I never really thought that it was possible to build a business that I enjoyed so much I never thought that it was possible to do something to where I felt in alignment with with really what I feel I do best for people and how I want to show up and and the results that I get for people the Japanese have a a term for this actually it’s called I key guy i ki GA I I believe but it basically means your reason for being and it’s a combination between that which you love to do and that which the world needs and that which you are very good at and when all of those are in alignment with that which makes you money then you have found your IQ guys according to the Japanese you found your reason for being I found mine I found that yeah it’s no it’s like I don’t know I feel like that scene in the matrix right where every morning I wake up and I grab my bulletproof coffee and it’s like I see the code Wow check this out very cool that’s the slight real in a long roundabout way I’m sorry I didn’t answer your question but the sly tree line that I made was I realized that the best way for me to serve my clients and the thing that I am best at and that which inspires me is to help businesses through this process it’s to help entrepreneurs build businesses or recreate or reinvent their businesses into something that not only makes them more money but also makes them happy right that’s great ma’am it sounds like you really have found that that intersection people need and obviously what you want to do so that’s that’s a great realization thanks man yeah it feels very good so what is the immediate future hold for Eric Stafford are you going to it’s it’s not a sort of situation where it’s like great let’s build a sales team and I’m gonna build a webinar we’re gonna we’re gonna blow this up and you know like like I had mentioned I’m really quite happy with every other aspect of my life and so for me it’s just a matter of putting that intention out there and understanding that this message will resonate with the right people and if if that looks like a great fit for us to work together then I’m certainly open to that and if it isn’t then it isn’t and that’s just out of this and again it’s just super liberating to not feel tied to those outcomes it’s just liberating to know that I’m doing what I’m what I’m here to do and so the clients the clients understand and the right people have showed up and I’m working several clients and and it’s incredibly rewarding now if people do want to get a hold of you and they listen to this and they they feel like they may be in this or quagmire were there you know secretly sad but the what what they want and they’re thinking about pivoting or blowing it up or we’re just suffering and needlessly in desolation that how do people get a hold of you so the best way to reach me you can certainly find me on Facebook I’m guessing if you’re listening to this we probably share some similar friends you can find me on Facebook Eric Stafford on Facebook or you can check out Stafford marketing.com or Eric Stafford calm those are my websites awesome this is something that virtually nobody talks about I’ve never heard another not listen to every podcast on earth but I’ve certainly listened to a lot of the major ones and I’ve never heard anyone I’m really delving into this this is something I think that exists probably in a much greater number than anyone wants to talk about or even understands kind of the tip of the iceberg idea there but you have some real good strategies and I haven’t gone through it yourself Eric it sounds like you got a grip on this thing well thank you very much man I appreciate you having me and uh and I respect what you do so I’m proud to be a part of it thanks a lot Matt and we’ll be back again to the next episode and hopefully we’ll have someone as real and authentic and as kick-ass is Eric The post Episode #201 – Erik Stafford On Overcoming The “Secret Sadness” of Business. appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

It has been five years since James was last on the show. After recently catching up with John on his own podcast, he’s here to share what’s working now. You can find James revealing other juicy business ideas on Episodes #4 and #47 (worth a listen for sure). Since then, he has sold his SEO business. Sold his website design business. He’s ramped up his coaching business, wrote a book, and now works less and makes more cash-eesh. He’s employing some new tools. After coaching Ryan Levesque of ASK Method fame through his huge growth phase… James understood the value of segmentation. He’s employing segments right at the top of his funnel and it has made everything so much more efficient and valuable… for both his clients and himself. Super relevant. The right support at the right time wherever business owners are on their journey. Email wise, he’s been focusing on list health. Deliverability and reputation. And killer email copywriting. Listen to how he’s grown. What he’s changed to make everything more effective and efficient. In doing so he has found the sweet spot in his business. The people he can get the best results for and are easy to work with. James also talks about the effect his first, best-selling book has had on his business. And what he’ll spill in his upcoming second book. You should be able to take this quick, action-packed episode… and make money with it immediately. It’s that good. In this episode, you’ll discover: Should you be doing live events for your business? James gives two powerful reasons you can’t do without. The game-changing effect James’ first book has had on his business. Email secrets of the P.S. and Dean Jackson’s “super signature”. Are your offers converting? The ways James is segmenting people entering his business. How he makes sure people see only what will help them now. One big email metric James looks at which always leads to more sales month after month. Mentioned: James Schramko’s Super Fast Business James’ “Work Less, Make More” book John McIntyre on James’ SuperFast Business Podcast David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody we’re back for another edition of the podcast and today we have a very special guest, he’s actually been on two previous times – episodes number 4 and 47, he’s a fan favorite of our audience and I’m sure you’re going to like what he had to say today because we’re bringing it back full circle as he was last on the show quite a few years ago as it turns out and James Schramko is back! James, welcome to the show… James Schramko: Hey, it’s really good to be back I was just catching up with John on my own podcast and we thought it would be fun to bridge our little five-year gap since the last time I was here or the time before that. Certainly a lot… David Allan: Yeah…I think this is really going to be exciting today because we’re going to talk about…dun…dun…dunnnn…email marketing, which is what this podcast is really about and you’re going to share something you’re doing with your own business and we’re going to bring it down to the technical side, we’re going to bring it down to what the emails actually contain – if you will divulge – and we’re just going to get into this right away. If people want to learn more about James we’re going to provide that near the end of the show but if you go back to the two earlier episodes you will hear more of his life story and what he offers through his SuperFast Business…business. James… let’s talk some email. Where do you want to start? This about you and what you want to share with our audience so where do you want to start? The post Episode #200 – James Schramko On Super Fast Five-Year Update. Evolved Email Strategy You Can Use Now appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

I first heard about Gabriella Rapone on a Facebook comment. It was a thread involving two friends, marketers and former guests… Justin Goff (Episode #158) and Dave Miz (Episode #145). She is an inboxing and email copywriter expert… having worked in some shadier areas of email in her past. She talks about how she got into the email game. How she helps business owners get their email game on point. It’s a free-flowing conversation we jumped into so pardon the lack of the usual intro. She drops a ton of knowledge. Such as how to correct any problems you’re having getting your email delivered to the right place. A lot of ideas and “behind the curtain” knowledge about Email Service Providers. Authentication. Triggers. Writing emails. We move fast through many issues and ideas in this short but action-packed interview. I know it will help our listeners. Whether getting your emails into your people’s inboxes… or correcting the simple errors a lot of small business owners are making to boost your response… Gabi delivers the goods. In this episode, you’ll discover: The one mistake even experienced brands and businesses make in every single email. Email Service Providers. The good, bad and ugly. Who shoudl you be using? Why THIS email myth pushed by so many “experts” is dumb, dumb, dumb and what your emails should doing instead. GDPR mania. “Behind the curtain” truth on how it should have gone down. How to “gauge” when your business needs to “go it alone”. Have you reached this income level with your email? Mentioned: Gabriella’s website Gabriella’s Email Maverick Facebook group Secrets To Inboxing course David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: If people are having some of these issue or they’re thinking about this and they’re brand new even and they’re looking to set themslevs up for success. What re some of the ESP’s you love and also if they’re starting from scratch what steps should they take to be proactive about avoidng problems? Gabriella Rapone: That’s a great question. So that’s one of the two questions I always get. Which ESP should I be picking, which, you know, is a valid question because people want to know what is quick and easy. Do I have a favorite one? It really comes down to what tools you need to make your business successful and I actually ahve this cheat sheet that I give to people that actually lists the priorities so that you know…OK lets say that you need 24 hour support. Right? email is a 24/7 game, its not a 9-5 game right? And we all know the problems never happen 9-5. They happen at 5:05 – so that’s it, depending on your business you know this is why I ahve this checklist because it really depends on what you need. I often say I need 24/7 assistance. I need to know if there is a problem I can pick up the phone or I can speak to someone via chat and I can get it resolved. Because If I am not emailing I’m not making money. And if I’m not making money I don’t need a service provider. So this is why it really comes down to why “this is what you need”. Of course, you want to keep things a s simple as possible when you start because that’s what kind of intimidates people. A lot of people are intimidated by email because they think there’s a lot of setup that needs to be done. There isn’t much setup to be done but you do need to be aware of what will set you up for success. The post Episode #199 – Gabriella Rapone On Get Into The Inbox. Secrets Email Service Providers Will Never Reveal appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

He was 16 when he started getting the marketing bug. He attained a bachelor’s degree in marketing and found his way into Reitmans… Canada’s largest women’s clothing specialty chain. Then a company approached him and wanted him to interview. It seemed secretive and unusual. Curious, he took the interview and found something surprising. The company recruiting him was PornHub. With their 70,000,000 website visits and offering him a great budget and creative freedom… they wanted to integrate into the mainstream. He never thought he’d be working for a porn company, given his marriage and coming from a”nice Jewish family”. Almost immediately he attended the adult industry’s version of the Academy Awards. To quote Matt, it was a _____ ____. Jump in and listen to what is one of the most intriguing interviews I’ve (David) ever been privy to. His answers may surprise you. The way you look at the industry may change. Either way, you’ll leave this interview with some fresh ideas… and an insight or three into what your neighbors are up to In this episode, you’ll discover: What was it like to go from a “normal” company and into the world of adult entertainment? Matt explains a little culture shock. The surprising epicenter of the porn world. (Hint: It’s not in California). The honest, “no bull crap” statistics and insights about what people are up to every day. (Including hilarious Super Bowl data). The realities of making money in the adult industry. What “stars”make and do to make ends meet. How did Matt take his experience at Pornhub and transition to something new? Mentioned: Matt Yanofsky on Twitter Alix Lynx Amanda Cerny David Allan’s Make Words Pay Brian Swichkow on Takeover Tuesday Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey everybody, I’m David Allan coming at you from Boulder, Colorado. We have an interesting entrepreneur on the show today who was recommended to me by another guest, Matt Yanofsky, how are you? Matt Yanofsky: Yes sir, I am doing well how are you? David Allan: I am fantastic. I’m up in the mountains, the air is nice, the weather is fantastic and the day ahead of me today will be tubing the rapids apparently. Matt Yanofsky: Alright. Similar type scenario to where I am located in Montreal, Canada and we have our mountains close by as well. Weather is pretty good but if you call me in six months I will definitely be complaining about the cold. David Allan: Well, I’m from Winnipeg, Manitoba so I know all about freezing cold weather – which is part of the reason I’m here now. Matt Yanofsky: My dad actually used to own a business in Winnipeg on Jarvis street. David Allan: Get out of here! That’s awesome. Matt Yanofsky: There ya go. There’s a Winnipeg connection and I went to a Blue Bombers game once. David Allan: Sorry to hear that (laughing). Hopefully, it was in the 80’s. Matt Yanofsky: No, I’m not that old, unfortunately. David Allan: Alright, let’s just dive right in and what we normally like to do I start with your superhero origin story. Now you were referred by Brian Swichkow… Matt Yanofsky: Sorry to cut you off but it’s always interesting to me when someone gets in touch with me depending on who they’ve been referred by…I can only imagine what experience they told you about or who my connections are and what I’m into and the way you’re laughing I have a feeling I know where this is going but go ahead… David Allan: Brian…he didn’t really give me too many of the details because I think he wanted us to explore what you’re into. But, basically, he said you were into some very interesting work in some interesting markets so maybe give us the backstory on how you became an entrepreneur and where you started and lead us up to where you are today. The post Episode 198 – Matt Yanofsky On The Truth Behind The World’s Most Taboo Industry appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

For the last few years, McMethod founder John McIntyre has been on a journey. He hesitates to call it a spiritual journey, but rather a journey of self-discovery. He’s been learning to work with his own emotions. Years ago, fresh off a Richard Branson event on Necker Island, he appeared to be living his best life… Penthouse apartment with a great view. making great money. Tropical location. Yet, while he wasn’t depressed he wasn’t happy. He spent five or six years going in circles by trying to “throw his brain” at the problem. Finally, he uncovered the secret. He learned to FEEL is feelings. Sounds weird, right? It was an epiphany. So why should YOU care? Simple… …it has taken John’s performance in all aspects of his life to a new, unimaginable level. The best part is, he doesn’t TRY anymore. It’s automatic! Sound like something you might want in your life? Listen to John break it all down now. In this episode, you’ll discover: Do certain situations stress or “trigger” you? Find the root cause why you react this way now. How John’s “ideal life” made his situation worse and could be doing the same to you. Plagued by negative thoughts surrounding your dreams and goals? Remove THIS, and like magic, you move forward. Are you one step removed from your feelings? Take the “pizza test” and find out today. Discover the “surgery” that will save you the next 20 years of your life. Mentioned: That Which Is Aware The Presence Process by Michael Brown “The Work” documentary David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody, we’re back with another edition of the podcast and today we have someone who hasn’t been on the show in a while – John McIntyre, he started this podcast and he’s back on the show and he has some very interesting things to say. John, welcome to the show. John McIntyre: Thanks for having me Dave, it’s good to be back. David Allan: Yeah it’s good to have you brother, it’s always fun when you’re on the show, we always have a good time, and something we’re going to talk about today I think is very important because this affects a lot of people not just of course in the marketing game but in all aspects of life all walks of life. And, this is a journey you have been on for a couple of years and I’m just going to let you take it away and tell us what you’ve been up to and what you have discovered. John McIntyre: Ah, yeah man, where to start, where to start. So I emailed you and said let’s do a podcast on something that no one is really talking about. Not funnels and copywriting and of course o this podcast it’s all about emails and copywriting and freelancing, how to get clients and things like that. But what journey I have been on the last few years – I don’t want to call it a spiritual journey because that word is so loaded The post Episode #197 – John McIntyre On The Silent “Cancer” Ruining Your Dream Life appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

In 8th grade she made her intentions known. She told her father she wanted to leave India and go to America. Her father became more confused later why she didn’t focus on one discipline. Reekita though knew the link between psychology and advertising, so she studied both. When she couldn’t stay in the U.S.A. any longer, she longed for a way to get back. She wished she could “teleport” back there. It was then she learned of Microsoft HoloLens. This began her climb down the extended reality rabbit hole. She has been waiting for a long time for 2018 to come and these technologies are now in full emergence. Now she’s helping business owners use these amazing tools for their business. In this episode, you’ll discover: Why augmented reality is the first step for your business into extended reality. An intriguing presentation of virtual reality from a magician’s conference. Why extended reality is the perfect medium if you know why people REALLY buy. The fastest known way to use this techniology in your business now. The “hidden” benefit augmented reality provides to your customers. This will make your business addictive. Mentioned: Reekita Gala on Facebook Reekita Gala’s NEW podcast Jay Abraham David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody we’re back with another edition of the podcast I’m David Allan from makewrodspay.com and we’re here with a very special guest today I’ve been talking with her a lot recently before we did this podcast and she’s got some very interesting things that she’s into which are rapidly exploding onto the scene – Reekita Gala welcome to the show! Reekita Gala: Thank you so much hello everybody. David Allan: Now this is gonna be a very interesting podcast I think because these are some new technologies but they’re sort of they’ve been around for a while but now they’re finally, sort of getting into the hands of “regular people” right it’s getting past the stage of creation and development and stuff and it’s getting to actually start making an impact in the real world for real people’s businesses but let’s go back when you were slightly younger tell us how you got into all this virtual reality extended reality type technology stuff. Reekita Gala: I think when I was in eighth grade I had told my father that I I belong from India by the way so when I was in eighth grade I do not father I do not want to stay in India I want to go when settled in America what do you know what America is like I want to go and settle in America I didn’t know anything to be honest okay we’ll see when you grew up what you want to do went on so and I was very sure that I want to settle in America that’s it and what I wanted to do and all those things were not such but I always wanted to do a business and do something different than what everybody is been doing eventually I took my masters I mean I took my bachelor’s in psychology and I also took another bachelor’s in commercial arts and advertising okay so my father’s like why are you doing two things like just focus on one thing I was like I know what I am doing because I always believed psychology and tink goes hand-in-hand so I was like I am going to do this so he’s like fine go ahead and do it and I was also working with all the different businesses doing my internships and also that was like you know at a stretch eight years of full to colleges and work and I didn’t have any time so then one fine day my father he asked me okay so we are starting to look for guys for you do you have anybody in mind like I don’t have anybody you go ahead and find whomever you want to find but I’m not settling in India like how you serious like why like I were to go and settle in u.s. you still have that dream well I guess I so he itv found me somebody in u.s. and I am settled in Boston now that was a major change in my life because I came on dependent visa and at that time in fact now also we all know on dependent visa an immigration visa you cannot work and that was a big change because when I came here after three months my grandmother she had cancer my father she called me like a hawk grandmother has cancer and I could not go back at all like there was something which really frustrated me like I wanted to go back so badly I say looking for me is how I can go back and started reading about you know the laws and oil and one fine day I just randomly type how can i telephone and I still remember that day and microsoft hololens pigeon came up reading like okay what is it all about like how could you teleport [Laughter] teleport into Google and oh my god is it possible like there are patents so reading reading reading out of curiosity and I got so much deeper into it so there I took my masters in project management but I still kept reading all about mixed reality because microsoft hololens is about mixed reality where you can virtually teleport and you know you can have your life holograms in some other place wherever you are P at three different places at one time Wow so that was really amazing and that curiosity helped me get the point to this field and I started reading all about mixed reality virtual reality here again today and that time there were no articles or you know some courses around I kept reading patents patents patents and when I came to patents then slowly I started understanding the concept of all these technologies and at that time it was bored at early stage it’s like six years back so it was more on the earliest stage and eventually the market started developing like you know people started you know launching their products and hardware’s and so that was 2016 when oculus they had launched their own device we are device right and that was around the same time when I was doing my master and I had a kid and again that same process so I kept reading reading reading for two three years till the time like that product was launched so when the hardware was launched I decided that I don’t want to take up a job and I want to develop a software or a platform where users will be able to use you know or that not cat form to integrate it for their business or marketing so that’s how I got into this entire technology and I am still working on my platform and as of now I am working also as a consulting and trainer and helping businesses to integrate marketing and I mean integrate augmented reality into their marketing and businesses because this is something which you can start implementing now and you you just need a mobile phone to use a our experience you don’t need any and if we are device anything so I mean that’s very yeah that’s a great I mean that’s a great story that’s a pretty pretty unique thing to have happen to tell type in you know to be frustrated with the immigration process to type in how can i teleport to the USA give a hug to my grandmother yeah literally type like how can I just teleport and that patron oh my god totally it changed your whole life right just that and that’s a power of ideas you know you’re looking for something maybe a little fantastical but then you know it leads you down a path you never and that urge of you know going to us I don’t know like it was destiny of what because like the way things suck I started following you like flowing from eighth grade I wanted to go to us and I came to you I said I could not go back and then it was like I want to teleport and I had something new so I started focusing on creating all together something you wish nobody has done no yeah and that’s what the rest of this podcast is going to be about so you’re currently consulting and helping people build out some AR and VR stuff for their for their businesses and this is you know this is what’s coming I mean if people are listening to this I know John and I have talked about this off the air too you know about how this is gonna impact the world he’s into this as well and what’s strange about this is like this has been brewing for a while a guy I mentioned to you last week or something that you know I attended a conference people who listen to the show know of course that I’m in addition to being a freelance marketing consultant also a professional magician and I attended a magic conference here a couple of years ago where they had this company demonstrate the development of one of their virtual reality it was like almost like a box that you got into they were creating like a whole world inside like a telephone booth essentially and they were just changing the walls around and stuff inside so that it would you know as the person went and it was something that they hoped as and I mean they were developing developing it for entertainment they were hoping to put it like on street corners or something you know like out in the public as you could access it and it was so cool because I remember that the power of the demonstration that the guy telling us that they had an elevator a virtual elevator in this simulator and they were wondering if this was gonna work and the guy that they had wearing the goggles and everything going through the the virtual reality he got into the elevator and pressed down and he you know supposedly went down but he was just standing you know a couple feet from the creators and then when they said to him you know over the intercom or whatever you know what do you think he like look they still and it was such a funny moment I remember because it was like I mean and he put his hands like he was gonna yell you know like he’s yelling up a shot you know so yeah you had tricked your brain into believing it was real yeah I mean in reality you actually feel you actually somewhere else and that’s the power of virtual reality and in augmented reality you you can actually overlay digital information into your real environment and mixed reality is all about totally immersive and have Holograms so you cannot see around like you know things around you but you can see the hologram of I mean you can obviously see things around you it depends how he wanted but you can see like Holograms overlaid so that’s totally different experience and I had read once people buy three things they don’t buy your goods or services but they buy your magic your stories and your relationships and these technologies are all about that it’s magic it’s about building the relationship and creating story no that’s something that’s really amazing yeah one of my favorite quotes personally is I believe it’s attributed to Maya Angelou where she said you know people never remember what you said or what you did only how you made them feel and this and this applies to doing magic and it applies to you know virtual reality extended reality because it is a form of magic I mean you watch some of the videos and we’ll conclude these in the show notes you watch some of the videos and like I you can go now and shop like you were showing me on Amazon where you’re just like taking a lamp and you’re actually putting it in your house to see what it looks like you need to leave the house and the companies like Amazon I care Wayfarer lorry and Mabley yeah I mean there are so many brands who started like you know they’ve already integrated augmented reality into their websites and apps and if you don’t even need to leave the house anymore you just do whatever you have to shop online and there it is in front of you you can try the product before buying so yeah I imagine I imagine eventually we’ll get to a point very quickly since this is already being done where not only you take that let’s say it’s a lamp you take a lamp you put it on your table virtually – let’s see what it looks like with the rest of your furniture or whatever people do and then you know you if you create something in 3d and you like that thing you go ahead and do 3d printing in fact now there are 40 prints it’s very fast I saw a 3d printer the other day where they were printing houses for land for your way on top of this stuff then you’re you’re you’re all you’re all in so let’s let’s let’s cover some of the ways in which you think you know small businesses medium-sized businesses businesses that perhaps our audience either owns or the freelancers that listen to this show interact with some of the you know the direct applications the uses of this that people can plug into their business immediately and start seeing results right so for small businesses like let’s start with augmented reality because I think everybody has a phone right now in their hands like oh they may be having two phones – I mean you don’t need any other additional device like you know we are plus when I said before so AR is something which you can easily integrate like immediately and that as sewers will also be willing to use that so the benefit of augmented reality is let’s say they have their e-commerce Tilghman or you know they are into some kind of retail or real estate business yes let’s say they have an online store their retail business but they also have online right so what happens is when you are online you see some product which is like you know that you see like different 50 different products when you are online but in augmented reality what happens is people have used I mean it’s something that once you scan or you know you see a picture you scan that picture or you want to show something in augmented reality you will be able to just see those products what you want to show like let’s say you have four different products and you want to show them just three three products like let’s say you have a shirt you have jeans you have some kind of caps or XYZ product and the customer is looking for only t-shirts so when you are online you will see all the four categories let’s say but you want to just find t-shirt and show only t-shirt so in augmented reality you can actually show them a shirt and let them try that t-shirt with all the different colors or you know different types of t-shirt so they are not going to be seeing all those other tee I mean pants and all those kind of things so it helps them to make up their mind when they try the product also when they have visually seen something it’s very it helps them to make up their decision whether they want to buy or they don’t want to buy the product like obviously then you go to a retail store you will try like 50 different t-shirts and you will land up not buying the product right yeah so when you have tried something and you like you know in augmented reality or when you try something and experience something you will have a larger impact on your brain and you will remember that for longer time let’s say let’s say you’ve tried that product in augmented reality and you’ve just gone on another website and you’ve tried you just see in random product so the one that you’ve tried you will actually go ahead and buy that because you you’ve tried you see how it looks and you like the feel of it so you will just go ahead and okay fine let it went by so the it helps for retaining the and recalling what you have seen before and try other than that it also helps the users to visualize and you know it helps them to understand how look like you know what is the final output so if you are into e-commerce there are many times that you know we buy something but then we don’t like it so we want to return it back right so then again it’s an additional cost on the e-commerce store oh it’s a long supply on to again get back the product and send a new product but if the users have already tried the product before they buy so it helps them to reduce the cost of refunds and returns because they know exactly what they’re going to buy and what is the final outcome yeah so this is like it just being like way more immersive so yeah you know one of the things you said to me before we did this podcast was that one of the advantages of having this is like people going directly into your store directly into your stuff and it’s it’s more immersive and it’s like also to the exclusion of other options yeah it just cuts all the noise around your audience or your customer like you know there is nobody in that augmented reality world except except for you your brand and your products and your customer so you build a personal relationship kind of personal relationship too because then there is nobody it’s something that is very personal yes and that and that’s all about building a brand I mean that’s creating that relationship you could do so much now with of course with videos and stuff I mean all that stuff can now be integrated altogether I’m there with you like you know in your house that’s the personal thing like you know wherever I am right in front of you in the same environment it’s something really personal I mean imagine how like if you go to a website you will see different things on the website but it’s on your phone but when you have that product right in front of you in your house it’s personal yeah yeah because you’re literally trying it all and it’s yeah and there and that’s enough that’s an interesting thing you’re saying there because it’s also if you take that let’s say we go back to the lamp example and you’re putting that lamp on your table not only can you see what it looks like with the rest of your stuff but also in some way you’ve already purchased it in a way it’s already part of your environment yeah that may sound a little Machiavellian to a few people out there until you don’t try what is augmented reality you will never know what it is my first dinner yeah my first encounter with it I think was probably I guess Pokemon yeah it was the first time I was even aware that people I never played Pokemon I don’t I don’t know anything about it but I happen to be traveling at the time that that thing went live and people were walking around you know bumping into things looking at their phone and you know looking at this augmented reality of collecting these poking these creatures so you know but but just the just that experience of watching people do that I mean it was so big like I was in a very small town at the time and I and people like all the people downtown were doing it and I was like million downloads in just about three days yeah that’s what I had heard about they ending in fact were number one app in the entire US and they created a record like you know record yeah I believe it because like everyone and I was in Wichita Kansas the day that it landed which is like and part of me for people that live in Wichita but I mean it’s a middle of nowhere people everyone downtown was like I’m not I’m not talking about children I’m talking about husbands wives children like everybody was on people were like you know in the age group of 50s to 60s we’re also using it so yeah it had a big impact yeah that’s sort of one of the first sort of really big you know public that made its way into the public you know it’s like this is something now people want to get hold of you kita what are some of the places that can best contact you they can actually connect with me on Facebook or and they can find Ricki Tarr Galah or they can actually or try to find my group that is augmented reality marketing so that’s that’s the best way to connect with me and I also train people in fact there is nobody in the industry whose training on this program like how you can integrate AR for your business and marketing so if that’s something they would be interested they can always find me and yeah you can help them learn how to use it and integrate it into their in fact you’re gonna come out you have a course you’ve been putting together that is going to teach people I use it for their business many people have been telling me oh my god there is nobody whose truth teaching us how can we do that I would like okay fine let me just create a course and from it can help you get started with like you know how to get started on your yeah absolutely well it’s really been a pleasure having you on the show I mean you hear very knowledgeable about this you’ve been waiting for this you know this time in history to arrive you know like I said it’s a tsunami of different realities are upon us and I really want to thank you for for coming on the show and explaining this to our audience thank you so much for having me and I really hope that it helps your audience to understand the difference and why they need to adapt now because it’s really important for them to me adapt now and be heard of competition yes absolutely and by the time this goes live we’ll probably have some sort of way you can get some immediate assistance through Rokita and myself and take on the future immediately I would love to help your audience so if you have anything for me you can always ask awesome awesome and for everybody else hopefully we’ll be back again next week with another guest as exciting as Reekita Gala. The post Episode #196 – Reekita Gala On The New Marketing Tsunami Crashing Down On Your Business appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Joel began to wonder early in his life… …what separates people who make a living doing magic and those who do not? They work more. Period. His father was not as enthusiastic and ordered Joel to get an education. “If you’re going to be a bum, at least be an educated bum.” What was the answer to fulfilling his goal of turning pro? Marketing. From an excellent professor in his college marketing classes to the works of Dan Kennedy… …Joel accumulated marketing knowledge and savvy and took the most important step… He put it into action. Soon he was performing often for birthday parties. Then preschools. Summer camps. He even sold Santa Claus. Sit back and listen. Joel’s been making a living using classic direct marketing techniques for a long time. A return to fundamentals is always like re-reading a good book. Sometimes you lose your way with all the newfangled media. He drops some excellent knowledge in this episode. In this episode, you’ll discover: The number one method Joel uses to go into the many markets he works. (Is your small business using this?) The allied arts to magic are many (ventriloquism, mentalism, pick-pocketing etc.). Do you know THESE allied marketing arts? The way Joel stands out from other magicians when he enters a market and how you should do the same. Joel’s honest, “no bull crap” advice about testimonials and social proof. Clear and straightforward practical psychology of attracting work to you. Mentioned: The World of Dr. Magic Joel Ray – The Gentleman Magician Dr. Magic on Facebook David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody – we’re back again for another edition of the podcast I am David Allan and today we have a very interesting guest is personal friend of mine who I have become closer here in the last couple months because I’m in New Orleans visiting and I have another magician friend of mine works in an entirely different venue – in fact several venues and he does a lot of marketing. His marketing skills go back decades and so I would like to welcome Joel Ray to the show, how are you? Joel Ray: I’m fine and I like how you worked in that I’m an old guy and my marketing skills go back many decades or as the director of my TV show used to tell his parents – not his parents his daughters, just to say that Joel is as old as dinosaur dung. David Allan: Well your social insurance number was like three right? Joel Ray: Yeah but that’s our little secret Dave thank you for telling everybody and ruining it. David Allan: Now take us back because you’re a full time magician that’s what you do this for a living here… Joel Ray: Right, yeah I don’t have a real job… David Allan: Yeah you don’t have like another day job Joel Ray: Right people ask me that what’s your day job? I go this is my day job, my night job, my all the time job… yeah so take us back to the beginning of all this how did you get into magic and then how did you you know transition into the venues that you’re in now okay I’ll make it short and how I got into magic because this is a marketing podcast sir I’ll get heavily into the marketing really quick briefly how I got into magic is a cliche thing like most people I got interested as a kid I was six years old I got interested in magic at six so I guess I was maybe six and a half at that time you know I was in my sixth year and for my eighth birthday I got a magic set and I’ve been doing it ever since so 10 years now 10 years so that’s a joke you folks can’t see me but I’m well over I’m well over 18 I that’s a joke yeah I got into magic I got a magic sense when I was 8 and I’m doing it use them your ways that the first in seven years your life yeah thank you thank you thank you know I’m 60 years old so that’s why when people see me they get the joke absurd said the sort of a visual component of that joke but the important thing from a marketing standpoint is that I wanted to be a magician for a living when I was say about 14 is when it really hit me and I was uh well really even earlier than that in junior high but I would say somewhere in high school I really wanted to be a magician for a living and I’m thinking to myself how can you do that and I realized the difference between somebody who makes a living as a magician and somebody who doesn’t is they work more right and usually the overhead isn’t much because you can be a professional magician out of your house or your apartment in other words you don’t need a separate office or a warehouse so the overhead isn’t what kills you it’s you don’t get enough work you don’t have enough revenue coming in so then I just sat down and thought about it almost commonsensical II I said to myself well how do you get work and I just at that level I knew I wasn’t gonna get an agent or anything and also I grew up in Louisiana so they weren’t big-time theatrical agents I realized it would be up to me so how do you get work and then I realized well through marketing at first I did just advertising but then I learned about marketing as an entire concept not just advertising a publicity PR all aspects of promoting yourself and so I studied marketing on my own mostly now my dad made me go to college I wanted to become a professional magician right out of high school and that would have probably not been my best move you know he had the greater maturity of get a good education my dad used to tell people you can be a bum if you want to be but you’re gonna be educated right so I tell people that’s what I became an educated bum but bless you for laughing at the jokes Dave thank you so then what I got interested in magic um excuse me in marketing say both M words magic in marketing I was already instituted magic and I got interested in marketing and I got really serious about it a little in high school but in college and got really serious about it I took some marketing classes and I had a wonderful marketing professor in particular that opened up some doors for me and mentally doors and then whatever I really learned marketing and probably like most of the people listening to us right now is self-study right you know reading everything I get my hands on I go back to when also when you got courses in marketing they were on cassettes I said right and I always had a manual and audio cassettes they can’t wear those foam like foaming past I like things that clip together absolutely going way back yes and and I’ve read all of the the major marketing minds that I’m sure you know everybody listening has I guess Dan Kennedy everybody is a disciple of Dan Kennedy’s and we always show we’ve said in the past and many people say elsewhere that all roads lead to Dan Kennedy yes that’s that that says it very well because for instance Dave D has taught a lot of people but he learned through Dan and has been other marketers who’ve learned through Dan but I read everybody uh you and I had dinner tonight we’re talking about a recent trout dinner right also that’s another thing too Dave is visiting me at my home this is his first time here and I showed him my you know book collection on marketing books but I’ve also read a lot and I I want to put this here on the podcast because I think it would benefit your listeners Dave what I call the Allied Arts to marketing see and magic we have allied arts like ventriloquism juggling you know the other variety arts balloon twisting I mean you know the other variety artists are allied to magicians well in marketing I would say the Allied Arts are like you’re gonna study Blissett II persuasion negotiation these are charisma yes I’m reading some excellent books on charisma and I read I had a a course in charisma again audiocassette course I think might be it might be CDs and remember but all these things would be allied to marketing you know because you persuasion goes hand in hand with marketing negotiating um you know charisma I mean if if everybody’s repulsed by you how effective is your marketing gonna be right you know if you can’t write effective marketing like you work a number of different will call venues mm-hmm for the uninitiated so this would be different places you do you magic right so this is like restaurants preschool shows for toddlers summer camps as big you do summer camps yeah so you know how did you initially get the first few gigs that you were paid for like what how did you find those and then take us through the evolution of like your system that you can acquire work well going way back I just did birthday parties been going back to when I was in high school I did almost exclusively birthday parties I didn’t even know of other venues then occasionally things would fall in my lap I did a breakfast with Santa Anna McDonald’s and I opened for Santa Claus and ironically something like thirty years later I put together a package where I worked with another magician of a retired magician dick Aslan who I’ve mentioned he played Santa Claus and I opened for Santa Claus and I sold it as a package to daycares and preschools during the holiday season and so you know Santa’s the bigger star so I did an abbreviated 15 to 20 minute magic show then I bring Santa Claus on yes and and he would do the usual thing you know he listen to what they want for Christmas that kind of thing how I get the the engagements I get now the methods very one of the most effective methods for me or postcards right I use postcards in in most of the markets I pursue um and the reason I use postcards is as you know the challenge of a regular mail is getting the envelope opened right and a lot of people see the return address and they put it in a circular file the garbage can attract so postcards why use postcards that are already open they’re less expensive to mail at the time we’re we’re doing this postcards a thirty-five cents and first-class mail is 49 cents so and that matters when you start mailing out hundreds and hundreds well that little does you know that fourteen cent difference adds up correct so for every hundred years saving fourteen dollars by sending postcards as a pass to first quest ma’am also I’ve structured my postcards to where almost all of them are three paragraphs with a picture and a caption and those of you that know marketing know you should always include a picture and if you include a picture you always include a caption also I the reason my postcards tend to be three paragraphs is I’ve timed that you can read the postcard in 20 seconds and what that does for me is since they’re already open and you can read them in 20 seconds I get in your head even if you’re not interested when you look at it you have got my message through to you also I use the dual track method for people that just read headlines and captions and look at pictures and then the other track would be people to read every word so postcards are big for me I’m trying to think of other marketing methods I use postcards are really really strong for me oh I have a Booker who telephone solicits for me she calls this yes yes and somebody’s gone back to past engages people have engaged you in the past correct now it’s it’s cold calling from the recipient standpoint but she’s working from a list in other words she’s not working from the phone book or something she’s working from a list of camps or list of restaurants or whatever now with restaurants she tries to just get me an appointment and I go close in person that’s another thing I would say that’s an allied art to marketing is selling in my life I’ve done some well more than some a lot of what they call belly-to-belly selling and Dan Kennedy touches on importance of that so does exude was correct so I can also belly-to-belly sell I can close I can sell and my friend Dave here was asking me how you get restaurants and there’s a slow way in a fast way the slow way is to send postcards over a long period of time for instance every three weeks for a year and they know who you are and then when you go in and talk to them they’ve heard of you and a fast way is to just go into the restaurant and break out a deck of cards and show your waitress some card tricks and then she wants to show whether we’re spectacles exactly and then the manager comes over what’s this about and you impress everybody in sight and that you never the key there those never ask for a job where they suggest that maybe you do some magic there at their restaurant right but that’s the quicker way right it’s like it’s like bolder yet more subtle in some ways yes because you’re not asking all right for a job you’re kind of saying oh this is a nice place you know I used to do this you fudge a little on me well in my case now other used to do it is a bill Malone wine in my case I would say that I do it now but I do it somewhere else right but I take still the bill Malone approach psychologically in that I come off as I don’t need any more work right look you said lassic you know if you don’t need it people chase you mm-hmm chase what moves away from them all those kind of ideas the key is to I would say if you’re gonna use that technique to never ask for a job I think it’s really hard to go into a restaurant cold or even with an appointment say you met you phoned and make it and made an appointment and to to pitch yourself because you and that’s can be one of the weaknesses of selling in general outside sales where you go and solicit you know not where they come in to you is you there’s a sort of a psychological standpoint of you you’ve got your hat in your hands so to speak yes and you’re asking them for a job with them to buy your products they just walk in off the street and I’m selling bottled water just some to grab my Hatton in my hand you know please buy what I’m selling right now are there other ways in your marketing that you try to set up that you know we’re talking about positioning over dinner you know there are other psychological things you’re doing amongst your marketing to sort of give that impression maybe that you are the hand and a hand guy even though you’re out reaching with the postcards and so forth because yeah and I think I could answer this partially for you because I mean you have a TV show yes you have other things that go on let me tell you real quick yeah this keeps me from appearing to have my hat in my hand and again it’s sort of I don’t know people want to work with you when you don’t appear to need the work but one of the things that a lot of marketing books will tell you to do is to offer social proof that you’re good and this doesn’t have to just do with magic anything you know the product I sell and it could be say I’m selling like Ginsu knives or something else and mrs. such-and-such says it’s the best knife she ever used or mrs. such-and-such says he’s the best magician I’ve ever seen you see what I’m saying you get they say get testimonials as social proof I think just for me now because I know everybody out there can’t have their own TV show but for me the TV show is stronger social proof that I’m good at what I do are unqualified than a testimonial I personally don’t like testify testimonials because and you could call me a cynic here but there there are things where a cynic could could dismiss the testimony I’ll give you for instance Dave you’re a friend of mine so let’s say you say in a testimonial David Allen says the Joel raised great he’s the best catalyst thing best ever saying well you’re a friend doing me a favor okay so that could be a cynical view let’s say it’s a legitimate testimonial your David Allen your vice-president of so-and-so you know and you’re saying you had me at a corporate function and I was great yeah and it’s legitimate again how does the cynic know it’s legitimate right you say okay so first I can think you’re a friend number two it could be legitimate but I’m dismissing it because I have doubts um number three oh and it’s another thing too it is legitimate but I don’t know you right so I don’t care what mr. vice president says you say so many testimony and then the third one is and this is the worst when they think this it’s made up right just totally made up there is no davidow and I made you up yeah they make the mistake of putting like you know D Allen oh that’s another thing too yeah with a testimonial ad I couldn’t track you down if I wanted to verify it you know if I say David Allen vice president of Exxon Northeast region based on the USA Bible I could yes if somebody really wanted to we could find you in the New York City office but yeah if I just say D Allen of of New York State says yeah yeah no not good but I just think even legitimate testimonials are largely worthless but my TV show well you can find my TV show you’re watching yes yeah it’s it’s it’s it’s real and it’s proof and also it’s more rare than having housewives and in corporate vice president’s say you’re good yeah that’s that’s common in it for instance if you can’t get corporate vice presidents or housewives to say you good you can make it up right yeah it’s almost like so commonplace that people dismiss it yes it’s a popular way to do it of course but like you said you know another way to do the testimonials too of course which is to have which I believe I first heard from John Carlton which is to have the testimonial specifically tailored you’re gonna have testimonials haven’t specifically tailored to these specific objections you know this person let’s say it’s a magic let’s say you’re you know it’s a family friendly show so the objection might be the last magician we hired for a little Timmy’s birthday party he worked kind of on the fringe of good taste mmm let’s say please because your testimony says no we had Joel ray to our party and he is the most family-friendly kid-friendly show in Louisiana yeah that helps a bit spits right to the point it’s overcoming that specific objection what what I what I wanted to say about though still what I would advise your your listeners to do if they can is to do their own version of what I’ve done where my TV show is my social proof and it’s better than testimonials for instance what I would advise you to do is if you could get a picture with a celebrity and get them to give you a testimonial so say Brad Pitt the movie star says you know he saw you work and you were great and he’s got you’ve got a picture of you with Brad Pitt so that they know who that’s another thing see they don’t know who misses such and such a housewife that says you’re great is and they don’t know that the corporate vice president is but they know who Brad Pitt is so there’s your real strong social proof and and he just packs weight because he’s a major celebrity I don’t care what your politics are maybe you like the president or maybe you don’t but you’ve got a picture with the president and the president says you’re good yeah you know or I mean it’s also a matter of the president knows it’s like it’s the idea that these are the president of the United States it’s not you know your politics this one you know well also movie stars as people that would like for instance Brad Pitt and people who don’t but he’s got the cachet of Brad Pitt and a major movie star said I’m good if you can and also maybe you can think up a way of of social proof that’s not the normal testimonial as I’ve done with the TV show think up your own way but something that surpasses the average testimonial is social proof one other thing I wanted to touch on you were talking about giving an exam Belov you know the testimonial being customized to the event like it was a great children show I was wholesome and or it was the best corporate write presentation we’ve seen okay in my marketing and this is advice I could give to your listeners I custom tailor all my marketing to the different I used the term venue I tend to use the term market for instance summer camps are a market for me restaurants or a market for me but this is the point I wanted to make here and it and I hope you guys are listening and girls listening to this would do this with your marketing if you’re going to market to a certain market make it look like that’s what you do for instance and that’s all you do for instance the the restaurant that get my postcards it appears that I’m a restaurant magician and that’s how I make my living solely I only work restaurants daycares and preschools that get a postcard for me it looks like I’m a day care preschool magician and that’s all I work the summer camps they don’t even know what other things I do but I’ve got a summer camp show I call it the summer fun magic show the point is people hire specialists what really makes you look bad and it’s not just in magic it’s in any area like say you’re a marketing consultant really to claim you’re a marketing expert in every area in radio TV print internet come on well it’s the same thing with magic I do kids parties and everything else know you know you know see now by the way since I mentioned working different markets it may seem like I’m contradicting myself I’m not I work the family market I worked the the g-rated you know mom-and-pop in the kids market so I do very little corporate in a when I do the mom-and-pop in the kids market I do it as a character called doctor magic when I work strictly for adults in a coat in time I’m Joel Ray but see that’s again what I’m talking about I separate the markets right you’re telling everything for that means correct correct you can’t people don’t like a jack-of-all-trades they really don’t yes maybe their master of nothing them correct and even in a g-rated mom-and-pop market they only know me for the specific sub market I guess you would say that I mean right because I mean your postcard say stuff like you know verbiage is like the world’s greatest preschool magician or something or the world’s greatest restaurant you know the Civic League tailor it’s like you seem like you’d that’s like you said they it’s all exactly all you do and you’re the best at this one thing even though you do all these market they’ll know that right you know so because they’re hiring a specialist so how people gotta hope you if they want to well it depends if you want family type entertainment you you can learn about me at dr. magic world come I always abbreviate the doctor so that’s dr Magic normal Spelling ma GIC world normal spelling all run together cuz it’s a website dr. magic worldcom that’ll tell you all about me I have a number of websites for dr. magic that’s my main booking site if you’d like to look at my TV show it’s dr. magic show dot-com right now that’s mainly you’re gonna see my TV show and it’s a kid show I gotta warn you you adults out there it’s a kiddie show that I have a fansite dr. magic minions calm again abbreviate dr. normal spelling on magic normal spelling on minions dot-com and that’s my fansite because a dr. magic fan is a magic minion right a Grateful Dead tube and the Grateful Dead have the deadheads I have the magic minions and that’s a fansite now for you adults listening on dr. magic minions there’s a internet only show besides my over-the-air TV show see on dr. magic show calm it’s my over-the-air half-hour show just on the Internet those episodes are a half-hour on dr. magic minions calm there’s a show called moments with dr. magic that’s internet only each episodes only 10 minutes long about and there’s three questions and three magic tricks there’s no commercials it’s made for the Internet there’s no TV commercials on and what I do is I answer questions about magic that people have asked me over the years I’m sure you’ve gotten these questions Dave do magicians use their sleeves right modern magicians was Houdini the greatest magician of all true and I when I asked what I’m working I might give a flip or a joking answer on the show I give an honest answer a straight answer and in between I do a magic trick so I answer a question do a magic trick answer a question do a magic trick I do three questions three tricks and a show’s over that’s why it’s ten minutes so for you adults doctor magic minions is the website and in moments with dr. magic is the TV show or the Internet only show and you might enjoy that more than the doctor magic show which is a kiddie show those are three ways to in it and all the websites have how to get in touch with me now if you would like to have Joel Rey that’s my real name entertain at an adult function say a cocktail party with classical music in the background and we’re sipping wine and it’s also sophisticated it’s also sophisticated where I’m wearing a coat and tie and I’m not dr. magic you would go to magic Joel comm again normal spelling on magic normal spelling on Joel Jo al magic Joel comm and that’s my website for adult functions and doesn’t I type stuff so that’s how you can get in touch with me very nice very nice this hour has literally flown by Joel’s dropped all sorts of great marketing knowledge and I wanted to stuff that’s like fundamentals that are good to review too because people you know you’re gonna start to keep the fundamentals sharp and keep those things rollin and Joel has made his whole career you know of taking these now very simple but often overlooked and under to utilize things like postcards and stuff to keep his magic revenue streams cranking in his it shows you know coming in by the truckload and Joel it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show thank you thank you it’s been a pleasure being here and for everybody else we’ll be back again next week hopefully with somebody as semi good-looking and knowledgeable as Joel The post Episode #195 – Joel Ray On The Magic Of Direct Marketing Fundamentals appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Are you doing everything you can to convert visitors into customers? Unless you’re a fan of Neil Patel, the answer is probably not. Neil Patel is the co-founder of Crazy Egg and Hello Bar. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. He’s a well-known entrepreneur and he’s passionate about helping SMEs get more customers with less effort (and money). Today, Neil spills the beans on several surprising strategies online retailers are using to jack up their average order value, increase conversions and seduce their visitors into buying. In this interview/episode, you’ll discover: if free shipping is as good as everyone says it is how to increase average order value by 20-30% with a simple-but-underused sales strategy what offers work best when using pop-ups Neil’s strange “geo” tip for improving the response on pop-ups and sign up forms why copying what Amazon and the other big ecommerce players do is eroding your revenue People on this episode: John McIntyre Neil Patel Mentioned in this interview/episode: ReEngager Services Quick Sprout (Neil’s blog) NeilPatel.com (Neil’s other blog) Neil Patel Consulting Rejoiner CrazyEgg Listening options: Subscribe via iTunes. Listen on Stitcher Radio. Android users can subscribe here. Grab our RSS feed here. Right-click and “save file as” for direct download. Or click here and get sent to the top of the page where the on-site player is. Transcription: John: It’s John McIntyre here. I’m here with Neil Patel, who’s the co-founder of Crazy Egg and Hello Bar. And he blogs at quicksprout.com. When it comes to content marketing, I don’t think there’s anyone who – in my mind, who really defines it or– Really one of the top experts on it. Other than – Neil Patel is one of the first people that comes to mind. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom use content marketing and online marketing in general to grow their revenue. So he’s got some great clients, does some really cool stuff. His blog is just a wealth of information with tons of guides as well. And I thought it would be cool to grab Neil, get him on the show, and have a chat about content marketing specifically for online retailers. And maybe not so much for beginners, but for stores starting to build some momentum and kicking up into the 1, 2 million dollars. And even when we start getting higher into stores that are 20, 30, 100 and what some of the big – really big retailers are doing. So that’s what we’re going to have a chat about today, and dive into that – Neil, how you doing, man?  Neil: Good, how are you?  John: Pretty good, it’s good to connect again, man. I was just saying – before we hit record here – that we’ve done this before on a different podcast and talked about some interesting stuff like helicopters and jets. Which maybe will be a future episode. But Neil, before we get into content marketing specifically, I’ve kind of given the listener a little bit of a background on what you do. Can you give them a bit more of a – sort of fill them in a little bit on who you are and what you’re all about?  Neil: Yeah, so my background’s – I’m a serial entrepreneur. I love creating products that help small and medium business owners, as well as marketers generate more sales from the website. Whether that’s from driving traffic or converting more of the traffic into customers – I just enjoy helping people grow their online businesses. John: Cool, cool .And would you describe yourself as a content marketing person? Or do you just think about marketing as just marketing?  Neil: I see myself as a content marketing person. But it’s not – everyone knows me for it. Generally it’s not like really what I specialize in, right? I just do all forms of marketing. For example, the one thing that I do a lot of that no one really knows about is – I do a ton of webinars and sales funnels, right? Some people know what they are, some people don’t. But it’s the process of driving a visitor from a website into this whole process that gets them to convert. And think of it as like dating and marriage. If you ask a random person on the street, “Will you marry me?” The chances are, they’ll say, “No.” I don’t care if you’re Brad Pitt. In most cases, they’ll say, “No,” because they don’t know you. But once someone gets to know you, they do a few dates with you. You start doing a few dinners, then you start moving in together. Then you date for another year. And then you ask them to maybe marry you. The chances of them saying yes, drastically increase. The same goes with the web. Everyone expects someone to go on a landing page and be like, “Buy now.” Well if they don’t know you, you’re really going to make as many sales compared to if you built a relationship first.  John: That’s really interesting. So the webinars and sales funnels. So what – are you doing this for your businesses? Or you mean you’re setting these up for other businesses? Neil: We mainly do it for our own businesses. It works well, and think of it this way, right? So I mainly sell software. Out of all the people who buy software, just like any e-commerce site, maybe 1 out of 100, maybe 2 or 3 out of 100 if you’re lucky may buy. But the majority of your visitors won’t buy. So it’s how do you get their email and then how do you build a relationship and then get them to come back and then buy from you? ? John: We can probably touch on some content marketing stuff. I’m kinda interested to hear, if you were talking to an e-commerce, an online retailer that’s doing– They’re established enough. They’re doing say a few hundred thousand dollars a year in sales. So they’ve got the basics down, and they want to grow. If you were consulting with them, what would you tell them to focus on?  Neil: Emails. So with most online retailers, if they collect emails, there’s a huge ROI – from coupons and discount codes to free shipping. Ideally you should be offering free shipping to everyone. That’s a number one conversion driver that we’ve seen. But you can do so much through emails and keep re-marketing. Other thing most e-commerce companies don’t do is up sells and down sells. For example, if everyone bought a coffee table from you, right? On the checkout page, you could offer accessories for the coffee table – rugs, coffee table books etc. Those are all quick up sells that can help increase the average order value size.  John: Interesting. So you wouldn’t– Hey it’s funny, maybe we’ll end up going in a totally different direction here. But this sounds interesting. So when it comes to email marketing, if you were coming in saying, “Well let’s look at the up sells, let’s look at that.” It sounds like looking at that conversion process, assuming they’re getting people to the website. You’d go in and look at what can we implement to just increase that conversion? All the different leverage points where we can set things up, set processes up. Then they’re going to jack that conversion rate up.  Neil: Yeah, you can do the same thing for emails, right? On a checkout process, ideally you want at least a 2 step. If not, you can use software’s like Rejoiner. Where it just tells you, “Hey this is the name, and you know that the person didn’t complete the checkout.” Because then you can follow up with the person and get them to buy again. That usually helps boost sales by around 10%, alright, so that’s one thing. In addition to up sells, down sells for e-commerce. You can increase your average order value size, usually by 27 to 30% – just by adding up sells and down sells. Which is huge, because your margins keep going up as you’re selling more and more products. The other thing that e-commerce companies don’t do is – upon exit, right? Someone’s leaving the site, they haven’t bought anything. Why not offer them coupons, discounts, or something in exchange for their emails. Because you can get a few of those people percentage wise to come back and buy. If you get 1% of them, hey that’s 1% that you didn’t have. If you’re only selling 2 out of 100 people, now you’re selling 3 out of every hundred people. So doing all these little things adds up, and you’ll quickly find that you can double your revenue.  John: Interesting, interesting. So you wouldn’t actually go and focus – ’cause you can’t – like content marketing is, it’s really a traffic– Would you think about that as a traffic strategy or where does that fit into the picture?  Neil: It’s a traffic strategy. It’s a long term one that doesn’t provide a ton of ROI in the short run, but in the long run it will. So what you want to first do is maximize what you have, and then focus on content marketing. Because at least you’re making more money, where you can invest in content marketing and do it right. Due to the fact that you won’t get it all right from at least 6 months, if not a year.  John: Interesting. It’s funny ’cause this is the stage that we’re in with ReEngager right now. Where it’s just getting going as we’re recording this. And so this is interesting – like, “Well do we go and do paid traffic first? Do we go and build some sales funnels and do some webinars like you’re doing? Do we go into – do I start writing a blog post every week?” And the way I’ve been approaching it, is thinking – there’s no point doing content yet, let’s go find a sales– Basically like a sales channel. Whether it’s say Facebook advertising or Google AdWords or on LinkedIn. Once we have that and a proven way to bring in customers, then we take that money and then go hire a content person that churns out that content. That then – that’s then going to take 3, 6 or 12 months to really start generating any kind of traction.  Neil: Yeah, you’ve got it.  John: Okay, and so when you work – let’s go back to email for a second, ’cause that’s really what this podcast in general’s about and what ReEngager’s about. So tell me about some of the email campaigns? You’ve got your cart abandonment– Here’s something that’s interesting. I have my own opinion on this, but most stores – let’s say they’re using Shopify, they’re going to get a cart abandonment sequence, and it’s going to be one email. It’s going to be the default – whatever Shopify sends out. There’s going to be no – very little strategy in there. It’s just going to say, “Look, you forgot your order, here’s a link to your checkout.” What would you do in that situation? ?Neil: If it’s a Shopify store, what would you do? John: It could be any store really, ’cause with the various plug ins and things like that.  Neil: With Shopify, I don’t know what they let you do. But I would always make it where you need to click email first. You need to at least do 2 sub checkout. ‘Cause I have seen that in almost all cases, unless you’re a really popular brand – increase sales. And you need to focus on a drip campaign. So if they don’t by, maybe coupon codes. Like look at the margins of your product, right? Does free shipping work out for you? Maybe try countdown clocks, where you give them an offer that allows you to break even, and you can get them to come back and purchase again. You’ve just got to test a lot of different stuff, but it’s all about being creative. ? John: Yeah, yeah. How many emails would you send?  Neil: I would usually send 2 or 3, before I stop bugging them.  John: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny, in one of the other interviews we’ve done was with – he’s known in the retail space by his attitude. Thought this was interesting. He’d just keep sending emails until people stopped responding. So I think he’s – the equivalent of his cart abandonment in his business is 6 or 7 emails long, just ’cause that’s when he – it wasn’t until email 6 or 7 that he saw the conversion rate start to drop. ? Neil: Yeah, and that makes sense. The other thing you can do, is you just keep sending them until people stop opening them up. All the people that don’t open it up, don’t send them anymore emails. Or the people that do, keep sending them promotion based emails. Rotate it up. It’s like people do re-marketing a lot on e-commerce. This is another big mistake that I see. If I was on a page, I sold a coffee page – and someone added it to their cart but didn’t finish adding it – you can’t keep sending that person back to the same page. Maybe the first time you can, but if they don’t buy again, you don’t want to keep showing them the same ad to the same page. If they didn’t buy it the first time, there’s probably a reason why they didn’t buy. So you’ve got to be a bit more creative on what you show them, to try to get them to convert. ? John: Right, so what would you do in that situation? When you say, “Be creative,” what does that mean?  Neil: Like offer free shipping or a discount or a free bonus if they purchase within the next 30 minutes. You can do a lot of cool stuff, it’s just all about being creative.  John: When I chat to clients, it’s often that – like looking at why isn’t someone buying in the first place? Is it a price thing? Are they just – is this a commodity and they can get it anywhere for–? They’re just looking for the best price out of the 5 different stores that they’re looking at. Or is it a luxury purchase like a $30 000 watch, that’s going to get them more clients? Where they’re going to need to educate them or something like that? And in which case, you might want to give them the buyers guide, or something that’s going to help them – how to select the perfect watch.  Neil: Yeah, those all end up working out. The key is, whatever you give them, it has to be of substance or value. Because if you don’t, that’s going to tarnish your brand. But if you go above and beyond by doing what’s best for the customer, eventually you’ll get those people coming back and buying from you. John: Yeah. I like that. And then how do you approach – I’d be curious about how you – ’cause I know you do some email marketing. How would you approach a nurture sequence for an online retailer?  Neil: A nurture sequence for online retailer – what do you mean by nurture sequence? For people who didn’t convert, right?  John: Someone visits a store, they click around and then they go to exit. At some point there’s a pop up, either when they exit or just after a minute or something like that. They sign up to say – something – for a 10% coupon or a guide or some kind of offer. And then you send them some emails. What would you send them?  Neil: Sure, it’s like cheap money, ’cause – and I don’t do as much e-commerce stuff. But for me, when we considering nurturing, we’re like (11:56?) or something (11:56?) serviced based business, right? And I’m like – whereas an e-commerce business, you guys call it nurture, but we see it as all the people who just didn’t buy anything. Like where do you send them? But yeah, for those users, once you get the 10% coupon or whatever it may be, you email them. The other thing that you can end up doing is, I would end up shooting them let’s say like a 3, 4 part email sequence. So, if I was selling your coffee table, I could talk about the benefits of the coffee table. You’re (12:24?) sounding like how it’s ergonomic when you put your feet up on it. Like it’s better for your posture or whatever it may be. So start selling benefits. And you want to do the emails based on the products that they looked at. So for example, if they’re looking at cat based products, and they have a cat as a pet, you wouldn’t want to send them a ton of emails regarding dog based products, right? ‘Cause they’re a cat person – usually – unless they’re looking at cat stuff when they actually have a dog, which is rare. Nevertheless, you want to do the email sequences related to the products or services that they are looking at. It gets a bit more tricky, but it converts better. Same with the exit intent. Most people on the exit intent, they just do 10% off. But if they’re looking at the cat based products, your exit intent should be, “Hey, put in your email and get 10% all our cat products.” So then it’s also more targeted to what they’re looking for.  John: Yeah. Set up those different pop ups for – maybe a different one for each category of the site? Neil: Exactly.  John: That’s a cool idea, that’s really cool.  Neil: Yeah, works well.  John: Okay. I mean, what’s something that – this is very tactical. What’s – kind of like, how do we get a bit deeper here? What do you find most interesting, whether it’s a mistake that most people make, or something that most people aren’t doing when it comes to online marketing in their business?  Neil: Especially for – and in general, or e-commerce? John: Let’s start with e-commerce and then maybe we’ll sort of expand that. Let’s start with, yeah, e-commerce.  Neil: The big thing that we’re seeing with e-commerce is people start copying the major players in the space. So they’ll be like, “Oh, I’m taking my call to action or out to (14:05?) into orange.” I’m like, “Why?” “Well Amazon has it to orange, and look how big they are.” Well just because it works for Amazon, doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. Amazon has such high brand loyalty that they can do whatever they want. They can change it to green, and they would still make sales. You can’t just copy major players in the space, and expect it to have the same results as it would for them. What you need to do is get qualitative and quantitative information, feedback from your users. So you may end up asking questions like, “Why didn’t you check out? What didn’t you like?” Or, “What else would you like to see on this page?” Just getting feedback. Let’s say it’s a product page. And they may say, “Oh you don’t have enough reviews.” Or, “You don’t have this or that.” Then you want to go and do A to B (14:50?) tests, making those changes and see what impact it has on your sales. Or make changes based off of data, both qualitative and quantitative. One being feedback like words, and the other one being data, like your Google Analytics.  John: Right, that’s a really good point. I’ve even been guilty of that before. Yeah, looking at Amazon or other companies. You look at how they’ve laid out their website, or what they do with their buttons. And then using that to then inspire some page that I’m building or something like that. And – right, it should be all about that data.  Neil: I’ve been foolish too. When I started out my career, I would buy these books that talks about like how to triple sales. And it was just like split tests from across where they’re like, “Oh if you make your checkout like this, and look like Amazon, you’ll get a 20% increase.” And they had a whole list of things. I’m like, “Oh this is all bullshit.”  John: So what do you do now, when you’re– Like let’s say the sites that I’ve seen at your website, right? Let’s say like Neil Patel, you’ve got the consulting page, right? Which I think it’s a great, as far as a sales page goes – I think it’s a great page. So did that come from you reading books about what works for other people? What works for other companies? How did you – what inspired that page?  Neil: Just myself, I enjoy writing and coming up with variations and testing. We had to keep in mind, with that page, it doesn’t work as well as you may think. My conversion rate on it, I think is around 3%. Which is low. I can probably get it to around 8 or 9%, but the quality of the lead would be a lot lower. And due to the fact that I don’t want to go through all of them, I really do focus on making sure that I’m getting only quality, and I don’t get a ton of people who apply.  John: Yeah, but so then, what’s on that page then – it’s a result of testing, it’s not from that – you read a book about split testing and then went, “Oh, I’m going to design it like this and put this orange button here, and this layout here.” Neil: No, it’s – a lot of it comes from storytelling and creating a pitch that made sense to me. In which I’m like, “Alright, I used to be a company – used to hire consultants. What am I looking for? What are they looking for?” And then once I did that and wrote all the copy, then I looked at analytics data to get feedback. Right, are they balancing? Are they sticking? How far are they scrolling down using my Crazy Egg tests? And then I also started doing survey’s on there, like Qualaroo, and that would give me feedback on, “What else would you like to see on this page?” And everyone would say, “X, y and z.” Getting enough of that data helped me fine tune the page, so I was getting more relevant leads.  John: Interesting, interesting. And so we can use the same kind of tools on a – in an online retail, on an e-commerce website. For example, once they get to the checkout, pop up one of those surveys that ask them these types of questions.  Neil: Yeah, you can do a lot of fun stuff, and it all works on e-commerce, and I hope you get feedback to make the right changes. Most people don’t realize that when you’re running tests and making changes, you don’t always make more money – you can lose money too. So if you made changes that aren’t the best for your user – what you’ll find is, your sales will go down, and you’ve lost money in that period of time until you revert back.  John: Yeah, interesting, okay. And then, we’re coming up right on time here. So let’s finish up with – do you have any interesting case studies from say an e-commerce store on something that you changed or did that was an unexpected?  Neil: So I haven’t worked in the e-commerce business in a long time, other than Amazon. That’s the only e-commerce – I only have 2 customers right now. Google AdWords and Amazon. And sadly I can’t talk about Amazon, ’cause they don’t let me talk about what I do for them. I do CRO, I can tell you about. But they won’t let me go into more details. John: Fair enough, fair enough. What’s the most interesting tests you’ve run in general? Neil: In general – pop up based stuff on exits with geo targeting in the pop ups. And I found that to convert really well.  John: So that’s like saying– Neil: So for example, if I’m selling cat food on my e-commerce site, or I have a section, Upon exit, didn’t buy anything or add anything to their cart – and they viewed let’s say 3 pages in the cat food category or the cat category. That tells me that they’re interested in cat based products, but they didn’t find what they want, or there may be a reason why they’re not interested in buying. So I may do a pop up that says, “Hey John, put in your email in the next 10 seconds or next minute,” And I have a countdown clock. “And we’ll send you a coupon for discounts for cat products. Hurry up ’cause we only have 5 coupons left.” And, where are you based out of, John? John: Metajing (19:41?) Columbia right now.  Neil: Yeah, so I would be like, “We only have 5 coupons left for people in Metajing (19:48?) in Columbia,” right? So when people know it’s going to expire, and the offer’s only relevant to people within that region.  John: Interesting. I’ve seen that before on sites where they have that geo targeting. I look at it, ’cause I know it’s just a simple java script, that just pulls the location. So I look at it, and just seems kind of like a – sort of like a gimmick to me. But it actually works? Neil: Yeah, works really well.  John: Interesting. So the exit, so the whole point – the whole way of setting it up – you’ve got an exit pop up, you’ve got an offer, you’ve got a timer, and then you’ve got the geo targeting in there as well? Neil: That’s correct. John: Awesome, cool. Okay, well let’s wrap it up here, we’re right on time. Before we go, if people want to learn more about you or check out some of the stuff we’ve talked about, where can they do that? Neil: They can check out neilpatel.com or quicksprout.com.  John: Yeah, happy days, easy. So neilpatel.com’s where that consulting page is, and I’ll link that up in the show notes. I’ll have everything here we’ve talked about in the show notes at reengager.com. Neil, thanks for coming on the show man.  Neil: No problem, thanks for having me.  Intro music by DJ Rkod and George_Ellinas. The post [INTERVIEW] Neil Patel On The 5 Surprising Marketing Mistakes Online Retailers Make appeared first on ReEngager.