Episode 79 - Direct Response Copywriting Dos & Don'ts

what would your business look like if you had the ability to double sales in a matter of 30 to 60 days hey there everybody Welcome to the magnetic marketing podcast and if you've been listening for a while the name Doberman Dan for you will absolutely resonate you've heard this name before he is a master copywriter and we get to listen to him and Dan Kennedy speak about Gary Halbert and the lessons that they've learned from direct response copyrighting and how to interweave it with online marketing appropriately and if you're thinking about getting started with Direct

Mail we're going to talk about the basics how to use the standard rate and data service as a tool plus what most people get wrong when they're just getting started with direct marketing but at the same time we're also going to take a little advance and we're talking about Doberman Dan's analysis models for how he finds a market that works well plus Gary halbert's potato box story of finding fod material let's listen into direct response copywriting dos and don'ts with Doberman Dan and Dan Kennedy I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact

in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy the legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own Peril they're not really lessons they're kind of laws that you live by Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless his ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name the world as we know it was changed because d and Kennedy became obsessed with marketing welcome to the magnetic marketing podcast with your host Dan Kennedy good afternoon everybody Welcome to a uh uh what I

think is going to be a very cool and interesting and provocative uh Diamond call for you um I have with me uh popularly known as Doberman Dan uh Dan galipo a um a really really uh smart uh um direct response entrepreneur and a great freelance copywriter um he is his ads have appeared in uh a long list of in an Eclectic list of magazines from uh muscle and fitness and flex to Popular Mechanics to Penthouse to the tabloids um newspapers all sorts of other magazines uh he like me is a um uh a big fan

of and a big user of uh direct mail so we're going to talk about that he uh has the the um the masochistic distinction of having worked personally uh with the late great Gary Halbert for a number of years and so we have a couple of uh um Halbert items to talk about uh so Dan welcome uh uh you you you told me uh um before we started that we're interrupting your family vacation and so appreciate you being here and um I'm going to let you I'm just going to give you the wide openen kind

of kitchen table entrepreneur question first has an opportunity to tell folks a little bit about where you came from and what your journey has looked like well thank Stan I'm excited about being on the call with you today I appreciate the opportunity is you'll soon find out as we go through the the reader digest version of my backstory that uh you are the reason I'm involved in all this crazy stuff today the direct response marketing and copywriting and I also want to say a heartfelt thank you for interrupting my family vacation this couldn't have come

at a better time and it it's nice being with family for limited periods of time and it was nice to be able to tell them Uncle Dan can't be disturbed this afternoon uh I'm happy to provide The Alibi thank you for that well um just a brief history of the Doberman Dan story I uh grew up in barberon Ohio very close to your old stomping grounds to Dan and and of course also the where Gary halber grew up um and you know a high school push out I wanted to be a musician and uh and

I quickly discovered that I have uh two bad habits I have to support uh mainly sleeping indoors and eating regularly and I was unable to do that playing music so I just bounced around trying to find different ways to report those bad habits a long story short uh wound up as at the ripe young age of 20 in the Dayton Ohio police academy and stuck in that job for 12 years after just a couple years I I quickly realized that that isn't where I wanted to spend my life because I looked down the road 20

years and saw what happened to the folks who stay in that job 20 to 25 years and that wasn't what I wanted so um uh it all started with the Amway business somebody sponsored me into Amway and that's what started me on the path to entrepreneurship uh like most people Amway didn't work out very well for me by the way were you by any chance because of Barberton connection were you in Kenny mavix downline no I wasn't I wound up in the uh the the Bill Britt downline yeah yeah I know bill so you know

theway was was a great experience that I knew nothing about entrepreneurship so it at least got me started on the path and so of the 12 years with the police department the last nine I was a full-time cop part-time entrepreneur um I guess you could call me that a part-time failed entrepreneur for nine years every business money-making idea or project I tried failed um after nine years I was Big Five figures uh in credit card debt uh divorced living in apartment with no furniture and just an air mattress and and miserable and I wound up

uh I believe I ran into you at one of the successive Anan and uh bought the magnetic marketing kit the attempt to try to save one of the failing businesses I was trying to get going but after I got that kit uh it was a lifechanging experience because I realized I don't want to do any of these other businesses that I've been trying I want to do what this guy is doing I want to sell paper and ink you know for for what I thought was the big bucks back then I mean was unheard of

for me to spend $400 on a quote unquote book book and cassettes but that was the turning point I totally ripped you off and just observed what you were doing to sell information products and and appli that in the bodybuilding Niche which was a longtime hobby of mine and after nine years of failure and lots of heartache and lots of debt and lots of humiliation I finally had a business that was successful I had a little mail order business in the bodybuilding Niche that that um really after about a year was was making enough money

that that I left my full-time job so you were the impetus for all of this Dan well there we go we opened up a job on the police force for somebody who needed one and uh and we and we moved you to the dark side and and so that's that's all fine um so fast forward a little maybe through Halbert to now um so I assume found Halbert because of me absolutely um you know you well you talked about him a lot in in your newsletter and I I tracked him down back then it was

you know this was pre- internet it wasn't easy to find the guy so um tracked him down bought the maximum money minimum time book and then subscribed to his newsletter and and uh for some reason I don't know if it was just the barban connection or perhaps his sense of humor uh how it resonated with me and I well I basically took what I learned from his newsletter on how to get a big shot's attention and turned it around on him to get on his radar and it worked um I I just felt like we

had a lot in common and I wanted to work with the guy and it took I don't know it was over a period of a couple years of you know engineering this whole scheme to get on his radar that um you know got on his radar we maintain contact and then uh well he wrote an issue of his newsletter about Costa Rica uh so I sent him a fact asked him some questions about Costa Rica and he called me while his girlfriend was in town and answered my questions and the next correspondence he got from

me about six weeks later was an email that said hey Gary uh you know the way you describe Costa Rica sounded really interesting just wanted to let you know uh I sold everything I have without ever even having visited there and have moved there I'm living there now uh which that got his attention he was pretty shocked at that and and when he was in town we got together for dinner you know and then when he came back a second time he asked if he could stay the weekend at my place and I said yeah

and the weekend turned into about four months of him sharing my home there so that's the long story short of how we wound up working together so you're now a direct response uh uh entrepreneur copywriter what does the business look like and then I want to start picking your brain on everybody's behalf well I didn't do client work for years I felt as if that wasn't the right path for me I felt like I needed to prove myself first in how I would how I would prove myself was by investing my own money in Blood

Sweat and Tears in various direct response businesses you know and have real world results uh paid for with my own money to show people so it was it was quite a while before I ever did any client work um so I had uh I had various businesses in the bodybuilding Niche um martial arts Niche I sold uh you know B2B stuff to martial arts school owners and gym owners teaching them how to you know get more members with direct response um well several other things I sold gadgets and different things uh through direct mail and

I think I had only taken one client on my own who uh wound up not paying me according to our agreement and in a roundabout way that led me into the supplement business he also uh basically did a number on the lab and ordered stuff on credit and didn't pay it and I had the ad written and and I told the lab owner could I just buy the products from you he said yeah and that and that the ad worked and that led me into getting into the supplement business in the bodybuilding Niche and then

anyway that's that's when the Halbert deal came together and I wound up working with Halbert and doing client work for his clients and today you're still a hybrid you're doing your own projects and and and you're doing client work yeah still a hybrid actually from about 2005 I got real fed up with clients and just focused on my own stuff with an occasional client here and there um in February this year I just I had sold the bodybuilding supplement business I started in ' 04 so now whereas it used to be like maybe 85% my

own stuff 15% client work now it's kind of shifted to 5050 uh right now my my existing or my only business I have right now is my newsletter business and then so that's about 50% of my time and the other 50% is client work all right so now now let's get to some stuff stuff that maybe will will be of benefit to folks and you know when we talked about this call um one of the things you mentioned was you'd be happy to tell people how to double the sales of an online business in 59

days um you and I also of course are um our big champions of direct mail and um and you recently sent me some information about shocking a kind of an online only marketer um with taking him offline so let's just talk about the whole online versus offline online integration with offline you know that whole uh debate argument conversation and how you've approached it in your supplement business how you approach it now with clients I I feel like I had an advantage over a lot of the younger marketers um when I started the only thing you

know to do was offline yeah um you know I grew up in direct mail and space ads um and as soon as the internet became a viable option I think I had my first you know website that it was a direct response website it sold directly to the bodybuilding Market I think it was late 1996 or early part of 97 but I never abandoned except for a short period of time I never abandoned my offline marketing and uh it seems like a lot of the younger marketers the only thing they've been exposed to is online

marketing and they they don't have you know exposure to all the classic stuff and you know and all the what I like to say the the dead mail order guys the dead mail order guys can teach you a hell of a lot more about uh online marketing than actually uh some of the online marketing gurus and so I I feel like I get really frustrated trying to convert the online only marketers to doing some offline stuff but I've seen just Time After Time After Time in my own businesses and those of clients that when I

can get it to through their thick heads that they're leaving a a large portion of their money on the table by not integrating offline into the mix it's just it's it's always been proven to substantially bump up sales in many cases doubling sales within a very short period of time I mean when I say short period of time I I mean literally 30 to 60 days and I know that sounds um maybe a little bit hard to believe but I've proven it time and time again um The Challenge has been getting the online online only

marketers to to buy into that and at least try it and once they do they they usually never go back they they're they're you know they see the value of of integrating both want to give me a case history or two um recent test I think the the most recent would be an online only marketer the guy is just sharp as attack but again no frame of reference for offline stuff he he's grown up so to speak as an online only marketer and so we did a JV to promote my newsletter and his email list

he has an email list of 25,000 that consists of about 5,000 of those are customers they've bought something within the past five years with price points anywhere between a one um a $97 price point and up to $2,000 and the remainder of the less the other 20,000 would be you know just the free optins who opt in to receive the uh free info by email uh so he he sent the offer for my newsletter to that list well basically four different times the list of 25,000 I told him so we're talking about a 100,000 emails

100,000 yes to 20,000 leads and 5,000 buyers correct got it now I I did a I played a little trick on them I first of all I explained if I wanted your I I want to mail something in snail mail I want to mail the exact same offer in snail mail and I told him to give me the crappiest snail mail list he could which I just said take a random sample only want a thousand names of the buyers but take a completely random sample so I could have people in there who bought the $97

product immediately refunded you know and wrote him and said you know don't ever send me anything again us so I never want to hear from you um just completely random sampling obviously if I really wanted to stack the deck I would have done a $2,000 multi buyer yeah of course absolutely but I wanted to prove a point to him that even the crappiest snail mail list I just knew was going to completely beat him him promoting this to 100,000 emails online so a thousand snail mails uh to a crappy snail manil list long story short

pulled five times more subscribers than the 100,000 emails yeah and that's that's not people should understand that doesn't always happen but I have seen it more often than not um the other thing and I imagine you'll agree with me I find in situations where there are varying PR PR points within somebody's business that the higher price point sale tends to be more effectively made offline than online absolutely that's that's been my experience also well so let's jump over and talk about copyrighting which is where you know you live and you know most of these businesses

direct response businesses Andor direct response applied to real businesses people need to get you know that it's not really about the nutritional supplement or the exercise device or the piece of information or the service it really is about the sales copy um and so you live there I live there um what do you what do you know about copy that most people don't where do most people go wrong what don't they really get about the whole issue of Dr copy when I first got started um you know I just had very little experience uh well

really the only quote unquote training I had was observing you and swiping you um the only thing I had was the magnetic marketing kit but I saw how you marketed that I saw the examples in the kit and then I of course I the additional offers I got from you after I was you know on your list and a newsletter subscriber so that was a 100% of my training back then so I knew I wasn't uh you know I was just a rookie Rider so but I mean I needed to make money now I desperately

wanted out of my job and uh so I cheated I figured well I'm not that great of a copywriter but I sure know how these guys in this bodybuilding Market think I know exactly what they want I know how they talk um you know I know their deepest desires and I know you know yeah they say they want bigger arms or whatever big shoulders but I know what's behind that I know the reason why they want that because they don't really want big muscles they want the they they want what big muscles can do for

them who knows maybe they were the 90 lb weakling getting sand kicked in their face um so I knew how they thought and I knew exactly what they wanted and I think that's the biggest reason I did well in that market even when I was a completely wet behind the ears rookie you know I like to say I've made a lot of money with half-ass copy because you know initially the copy I was right was not great but I knew their hot buttons and I knew how they thought and I you know so I really

researched the market deeply um I was the market so that was probably the biggest secret I had starting out it wasn't about you know what I said so much as is understanding the market and giving them what they wanted and knowing the you know knowing the deep emotional reasons why they wanted it hitting on those hot buttons even if you know copy was not all that great so if you'll forgive translation um what I would what I would say about that and I see it all the time I I've had a conversation as recently as

today with somebody about this is clients certainly marketers business owners and in many cases they they sort of if they use an outside copywriter they take them by the nose and walk them into the same box they tend to be just stuck on the thing they're selling rather than the person they're selling it to and you know they they just want to keep going into the box of features and benefits and comparative superiority one product to the other uh um uh function rational reason when in reality it doesn't matter what's being sold and what's being

bought the The Leverage is all in understanding the person who's buying it a and what's going on internally with them and attaching to that that that was the big secret that I discovered early on why I was actually forced to discover because I just wasn't that great of a copywriter um but yet you know I didn't have the 10 years to go through the learning curve to to become good to make money I needed to make money now so um you know that that was that was my Discovery now you can you know you can

make a living marketing that way you know yeah reason why feature benefit kind of stuff but the real breakthroughs are doing the hard work and heavy lifting that nobody wants to do really going deep in the research to to figure out the mindset of the person you're writing to and and then tailoring the message specifically for them and uh and you know and getting getting to understand the reasons why they want this stuff I mean like selling business to business you know people always hit on you know well you're going to increase the size of

your business get more sales and make more money because that's what they say they want but there's more important reasons why they want to make more money and it and it ain't the money and it's finding out that kind of stuff in the mindset and yeah it's all about the market is where you get the big breakthroughs not not about the product yeah and you're you're a very big market research guy um and and so and then I'm I'm going to shift to a little Halbert stuff and then we're going to do Q&A but why

don't you just talk a little bit more about how you approach a market and and I know you've put together some resources specifically on that for our folks on the call so watch you tell them about that um you know at this point I in certain markets I've done so much work that you know the research is is is done for me now I just especially if I have to write for the bodybuilding and the Health Market I've you I've been researching that nonstop for whatever coming up on 20 years now but if I have

to write for a new market um then you know the first thing I do is well my go-to resource has always been srds and I I like that because I can get information about actual buyers in that market as opposed to like let's say the Google AdWords uh keywords tool you know that'll show me people who are searching for certain keywords but it it tells me nothing about the buying behavior of people in that market whereas the srds um you know I find out exactly what people are buying what they're paying um you know how

often they're buying number of buyers I find out who else is mailing those particular lists so I can look at their offers and find out what those uh what those mailers are selling so usually srds is is first stop for me um yeah you just made not to derail you but you just made a very important point and again I think our friends who sort of you know have grown up with an iPad in their hands um often don't get it there is a big difference between what people are interested in what they know to

search for um the names they attach to things um what they will go look at for free versus what they buy what is being sold to them that circumvents search um and and not knowled about buying is is at least as important as knowledge about interest and and you and I are in the same camp I think it's a lot more important absolutely um you know I've I've used I've used and still use the other tools but it's it's not giving me it's not giving me the information I need I mean for example a niche

I was honestly looking at going into after I lived on this Farm was the miniature donkey uh n those people are pretty rabid about the people who raise them are pretty rabit about that topic um you know but knowing there are x amount of people searching for miniature donkeys on Google has very limited value to me you know but if I can look on srds and I find out you know there's a thousand people a month uh buying a course on raising miniature donkeys for Fun and Profit and they're paying $150 for this course sold

via direct mail and you know like I said a thousand hotline names a month and I know who else is renting that list so I see what other products they're getting sold that that's just infinitely more valuable than than finding out search engine data so talk about your whole Market selection market analysis um uh process and resource well I had to give it a sexy name so I didn't have a name for it until I wrote about it in my newsletter and then figured out I got to call it something so I I I wound

up on calling it The Ultimate desire analyzer profit making model and uh and mainly like it involves my go-to resource the srds um and lately I've even been using the the next Mark tool next Mark has a list selection tool that uh is pretty good not as good as the srds but um some people may prefer the next mark1 because it's free um and uh so my process is to uh you know do some keyword searching in there uh for my market to find out who's buying what how many are buying what what price points

they're buying and uh and basically what I'm looking for is a hot market and what I call a natural Trend which the numbers will show you once you know how to do this kind of research the numbers will show you you know is this is this a trend that's on the upswing is it on the down swing um is this something that has a a high risk of failure or you know is this a pretty good opportunity with a low risk of failure and uh it's it's really easy it may sound like you know it's

it's complicated but once you know what to look for it's real easy and it and it just makes your your Market selection if you're looking to go into a new market um it just puts all the odds in your favor if you have an existing business I mean it's the same process danan um I like you know I like doing this for products or businesses that I'm starting from scratch but the same applies to an existing business you know if you're selling in a particular Market all the same research rules apply and the whole formula

can be followed for that also all right so tell me about halbert's potato tell everybody about halbert's potato box well uh he had this old wooden potato box with a hinge lid in the corner of his apartment which I never paid any attention to um until we we came back from being stranded on his boat which was a regular occurrence yes I know I was stranded on it once too I you're floating towards Cuba I don't get it I never understood the attraction with that that thing always you know always for those that don't know

Halbert had the boat or at least one of the boats that was actually used in the Sea Hunt television show with Lloyd Bridges um which predates a lot of people but in fact I think it was black and white if I'm not mistaken uh probably of the Andy Griffith era and um it was undersized because of course TV you know you know you don't necessarily have real size so it was a pretty damn small boat and it was not in particularly good condition and he insisted on taking people out in it I think I did

the numbers in my head at one time uh I think his me his boat mechanic made six figures a year just off of Gary's repairs alone and so you know we that thing was always stranding him so we got stranded on the boat it was a particularly long day out in the sun he just he was never prepared for anything His Radio on the boat didn't work we had no water so we were feeling pretty bad when we came uh when we came back and this is when I moved back to Miami and was staying

in his client apartment in the same building as him so I guess he felt like he you know I am endured all that crap he'd throw me a bone and uh share one of his secrets with me so he he tells me to go grab this potato box and dump its contents out in the middle of the room and there we sat in the in surrounding this big pile of papers and what he would do anytime just anything struck him as interesting whatever it was an article uh a a copy off of a product box

uh direct mail piece anything that he thought at some point in the future might have some what he called fder material uh for for a piece of copy or for an offer for possible business he' just throw it in this big potato box and every so often he'd dump it out and we'd sit there on the floor Indian style look through those and and in many cases I'd look at something and think why in the world that even throw this in the Box this makes no sense and uh you know nothing would happen we just

look through and think hm interesting I guess nothing would happen we'd all you know we throw it all back in but every now and then something with spark an idea uh either for some client piece we were working on or or possibly uh an entering a new market or a new business and it would be you know the Breakthrough we needed it exactly the right time and uh so that was pretty eye openening I've continued the tradition to this day I don't use a potato box I'm a bit more organized than howbert was but uh

I have my fodder file and uh some of the stuff can be pretty uh pretty weird you look at it and you think I I see no relevance whatsoever with this piece of fodder and and direct marketing but um even the weird stuff that you wouldn't think is relevant is often times the tiny little missing piece of the puzzle that leads you to the Breakthrough you need um and you understand that you understand that with Gary's idea of a filing system um U well you know see I think I think that really really good copywriters

and really good direct response people and really good marketers of their own business you you develop sort of antenna a subconscious recognition of things that may be useful and then you have synapses other people don't have you you see a product label or somebody's ad or a page out of a book and and and it suggests something that suggests something else that then Works its way into the copy or the ad or the piece you're working on you know now I mean people often comment about the surprising somewhat obscure references in some of my sales

copy and where did you get how did you think to use that story how did you think to use that example and the answer is while I was working on the project I was also doing the equivalent of going through my potato box and and and I think most you know most great writers do that and a and most business owners um don't really play enough um when they are when they're putting together a campaign or a a a promotion so what's like the most important copy lesson you learned from Halbert well well that's an

easy one he required and I found this out after I started working with him I talked with a couple other guys who' worked with Howard Scott Haynes and John Carlton it didn't matter how you preferred to write copy you know maybe you were an excellent typist and preferred to you know type your copy on the computer he pretty much insists that you write copy like he liked to write copy on a yellow pad you know in with a pen by hand and uh when it was time to write it was time to write this was

his motion beats meditation uh put into practice there was no thinking there was no looking through the potato box there was no you know reading or researching it was he'd throw the pad and Pen down in front of you and say right and you you literally had to write you that pen couldn't come off the paper and if I'd stop to think about a thought you know he'd start yelling at me so right right right don't stop and he would literally have me write when I when I couldn't think of anything he'd literally had me

write blah blah blah the words blah blah blah and you know at first that was a little unnerving for me I never worked that way before but after getting used to it um I saw the value of that because by not stopping um you know that stimulated thoughts and things that I probably never would have come up with you know sitting there meditating and trying to think things out um the interesting thing was a lot of times I started with blah blah blah because I had nothing to say and ironically blah blah blah led to

some of the the best stuff that we had produced um so that was the big secret when you sit down to write you know I set my clock now to a a countdown timer of 33 minutes and 33 seconds and I write and it's nonstop there's you know the time for thinking and research was you know weeks before you should have been doing that for weeks before you sat down the right the time to write is to write and do nothing but write even if that even if you're only thing you're writing is blah blah

blah because I've never sat down I've never set a period of time where I'm going to write where even though I had nothing I thought I had nothing to write at the time I've never spent the entire time writing blah blah blah um blah blah blah just gets the pen moving and gets your your mind in motion and even just something as stupid as blah blah blah leads to all the good stuff you need to right so that that was the most important copyrighting lesson he always said motion beats meditation and that was applied to

many things uh but when applied to writing copy that was a huge breakthrough for me and with that um we've got to wrap this show up uh Doberman Dan thank you thank you thank you um I thought it was a great call and I'm sure everyone agrees and um thank you all for being here and again Dan thank you very much thank you Dan I I really enjoyed it thank you for listening to the magnetic marketing podcast with Dan Kennedy if you love hearing it on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls then

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