dan kennedy class two - running a successful copywriting business

Dan Kennedy’s “Insider’s Guide to the Nuts and Bolts of Running a SUCCESSFUL Copywriting Business” with Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero

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Dan Kennedy’s “Insider’s Guide to the Nuts and Bolts of

Running a SUCCESSFUL Copywriting Business”

Part II

With Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero

LORRIE: It’s time to get started with the second part of Dan Kennedy’s Business of Copywriting. I am going to just start talking with you Dan. I am beginning to see why you started us backwards last week. You a re focusing on client management strategies. You’re really talking about a mind set shift. You talk about losing the word ‘job’ out of our vocabulary and thinking of ourselves as more marketing consultants and strategists—not just copywriters. You really have to have that foundation laid before we can be at the level of success which is your level! Is that right? DAN: You are absolutely right. The wrapper you put around yourself, the way that you position yourself to the client, has everything to do with the value that client will have to you—both short and long term. You have to be clear on that before you start running around exposing your self to them. LORRIE: Your homework really reiterated that—the strategies you had us read. DAN: Tonight’s call, I want to try to accomplish 3 things in the time allotted. One is to deal with where to get clients, another is the how-tos—how you get clients, and very briefly touch on the homework assignment. You have some reference notes from me that you can send out after the fact that include notes on client criteria that we are going to talk about today. Meaning how you choose them—who you want, who you don’t, and why and the clues you use to find them. LORRIE: I want to clarify that on the sales letter; I think I used the wrong verb-age. I called it a questionnaire, what it really is… DAN: Somebody asked that question the other night—the kind of questionnaire that they were talking about the other night—the 50 questions you ask a client in a standardized thing or a form you make them fill out, I know a number of copywriters use that, I do not, I never have, so I can’t provide you with one. I know, for example, Jay Abraham, has this monstrous questionnaire that he has new clients fill out and that’s fine if you want to




build one of those. It’s not the way I work. I have my concerns about it narrowing the focus of how you’re perceived to the client. I have a different client intake procedure that we will hit on tonight. It’s looser but I think it is more valuable. LORRIE: Why don’t we get started with where you find these people? Where do we find our clients? DAN: Usually when people ask me that question, what they are hoping for is a list of addresses. Where in town might this person be? There is some place to this, what we are really talking about is ‘who,’ and it’s unique to determine. Who you want as a client and who you are suited for so that you go looking for the right thing. On the first point, who you want as a client—it’s extremely important because very few business people have any business, think in these terms. Most everyone sort of thinks in terms of their product and their service and holding that out to the marketplace and taking whoever comes, or whoever can be found and attracted. As opposed to engineering from the other direction—who do I want to work with, who don’t I want to work with? You want to get as clear a picture of that person as possible and then building what you present to the marketplace says the right thing to attract them. This allows you to see who you are suited for—not everyone on this call or hardly anyone on this call, I don’t know, may not be get enough to go deal with the same type and level of clientele that I would or John Carlton would--Where you are really butting heads with the top talent in trying to beat an already finally honed and tested controls. So when you think about who you want as a client, you do have to have some honest self appraisal about who you are suited for in order to be effective with and be able to control and manage so that you can get results that are satisfactory to them. It is about who you want and who you are suited for. With that said, I am going to run through the criteria that I always consider. Different people with different levels of expertise may rate and use these differently. There are 8 basic criteria points when you think about who you are going to get as a client and how you are going to find them. We’ll go through the ‘who’ first. The first on is sufficient opportunity. By that I mean getting the client is real work—it is the most difficult part of the business for most people. Since it is, remember that it doesn’t take a great deal more work, if any more work, to get and develop one with a lot of potential vs. getting one with very little potential. All the things we talked about in the last call about the ability to expand the scope of the work that you are going to do with a client, the ability to work with them continuously, or at least sequentially—one project after another—you have to keep that in mind as you begin to search for and attract clients. If you aren’t careful, you end up with a stable of clients with little potential to use you. You’re still managing 30 -50 relationships that don’t have a lot of room to grow.




LORRIE: That is so subtle and yet it is so brilliant that it takes as much time to find a client without as much potential vs. someone who is going to pay your bills for a long time. We also have a question from some of the early birds that signed up. One asked where to find top paying clients? DAN: That really gets us to the second point on my own criteria list. Actually, the second and the third. The second is the ability to spend. There are a handful of things that have real impact on that—first is transaction size. What is their average transaction size worth? For example, a cosmetic or implant dentist has a transaction size 3-4 times bigger than a general dentist. If you position yourself as a marketer and copywriter to the dental profession, it is better to zone into implant and cosmetic dentistry than general dentists. The size of each of them allows them to spend more to get a patient and therefore allows them to spend more on the copy—ads, sales letters, and other materials. The same thing fundamentally exists in every industry. If you held a gun to my head and said that I have to work with restaurant owners, I would rather write copy for Morton’s vs. Sizzler. Their average ticket for a party of 4 is going to be over $100, the average ticket at Sizzler is probably going to be around $30—so Morton’s can spend more to get the customer. The second issue—I have a client that owns a large commercial lending institution in California that writes loans for apartment complexes and shopping centers and those sorts of things—in the small size range, meaning a million to tem million dollar deals—he is about to license his systems to brokers all across the country so we are getting into 2 businesses, not one. In one, the commercial mortgage side, his average net commission is $15,000, if you compare that to a residential broker who might write the loan for your next house, their commission will be about $4000, so I got more than a 300% difference in the value of the commercial guy’s transaction vs. the residential guy’s transaction. That means he can spend a lot more to get a customer--that means he can spend more with me and I have more liberty on the things that I get him to do. Profit margins are another factor that affects their ability to spend. For example, people in my industry—information products, seminars, conferences, boot camps, coaching programs—we have very high profit margins and very low cost. If you take someone who manufactures industrial tarps for trucks, they have a very low gross margin, they are working on 20%, and we are working on 500%. Total customer value is a third factor. Overall, what is it worth to them to get or keep a customer? That has an impact on what they will spend. And last is their resources. How successful are they? It is far better to deal with a successful to work with a successful client than one that is in dire circumstances and looking at you as some sort of a life raft. That is in the




category or charity and evangelical missionary work. If you want to engage in that at least apply for non-profit status as a church. The second thing I am thinking about is I think about who I want as a client, where am I going to find them, and it has to do with their ability to spend money. The third thing that is more interesting in some respects is the evidence of their willingness to spend money. You are in the business of seducing virgins and that can be a real uphill battle. I am looking at if these are clients that are already investing in advertising and marketing. Are they already using multiple media or are they lazily only using one media? Are they running big ads, or small ads? Are they local or national? Another good indication and evidence of their willingness to spend money is what they are spending on their own education. The worst client is a really dumb entrepreneur who never reads a book, never listens to a tape, and never goes to a seminar. That is telegraphing to you an attitude on his part about paying for expertise advice and information. I look for evidence that the client is willing to spend money. A fourth criteria are pressures to spend or to improve the business. Year in and year out, at least half of the clients that I end up working with are driven to action and therefore driven to spend money with me by pressures occurring in their industry or in their marketplace, in their competitive environment that forces them to do so. I am not sure that too many people will voluntarily do stuff in the morning of their own initiative, eager to go get consultants and copywriters and eager to spend their money. I think most, if they have an adequate business, have their bills paid—most of them would assume go to sleep on all of this. Thee pressures, for example, commoditization, I have a client that is spending a great deal of money with me out of extreme pressure in his industry, his margins are being erased, his prices are being suppressed, he is being put in competitive positions that he was not put in 4-5 years ago because of this commoditization in his business. He is now pressed to spend money to cure and reinvent what he is doing. I have new client in the trade show industry, they are under enormous pressure there—(inaudible) is declining, their ability to get exhibitors will be a close group that is declining with attendance, and everything from rising gas prices, less air flights, all sorts of factors are new pressures in their industry—they are reaching a boiling point and I am motivating them to change and improve their business, spend more money marketing to their existing base as well as to new clients. A fifth criteria is--because I like to shoot fish in a barrel-- I look for clients where there are obvious and evident opportunities that have an impact and improve their business. This loops around to what particular idea or project in their mind is bringing them to me, what is important is what I am




going to put into their mind, what I see in the business. So, the idea is to do well enough to pay me but is leaving an enormous amount on the table to buy all of the things that they aren’t doing that either they have been negligent about or don’t know about but are very obvious to me. Or, what are they doing so badly, that you can easily improve it. I had a client 22 years ago, I call them my ideal mail order client because their customers are so rabid that they get pretty good results with bad marketing. LORRIE: Is that a niche they are in? DAN: Yes, actually they are a company that many people on the call probably wouldn’t know so I won’t use it—they have about a million customers. They are a mail order company and the copy is horrid, their marketing is terrible and yet they get pretty good results. What that says to me is imagine what happens when you use good marketing on those same customers. I am excited about getting them because it is clear to me that without breaking a sweat, I am going to generate some phenomenal results. The sixth criteria is direct response appropriateness. Not all businesses lend themselves with equal adaptability to direct marketing into direct response advertising. For example, manufacturers of products that are sold through retail distribution sit on shelves and generally don’t lend themselves too well to direct response marketing. That type of manufacturer is not an ideal client. Mail order and all of the new proangulations of mail order, online marketers, people who are doing direct mail to market, these companies are attractive as clients. What most people don’t know is that they are scattered all over the country. There are well over 20,000 catalog companies alone and they aren’t all in LA or Chicago—in every place I have ever lived, there have been a number of them scrolled away there. I live in a suburb of Cleveland –Vitamax, a very old marketer for food processors who sell all of their product through direct mail in Cleveland—there is a novelty company here too(like a Spencer’s). Just about every place some body is—right under their nose, there are catalog companies and mail order companies. They have lots of opportunities—beat the control opportunities, company relying on catalogs and not doing several mailings, a solo mailer who is not doing any catalogs, companies that are only off line and haven’t gone online and vice versa, one’s that don’t have any continuity, these are all companies that I know I can bring something to the table to. A direct appropriate direct response company is one that needs to generate leads for its sales people. Insurance, financial services, real estate, mortgage, boats, planes, those kinds of businesses are in the lead business—that lends itself to direct response copy. Companies that are over dependent on manual labor. Over the years quite a number of my clients have been companies that are overly dependent on




telemarketing. For example, recently with the do not call list, several industries including the mortgage industry, were thrown into trauma. The vast majority of people in those industries were 70-90% were reliant on cold call prospecting to generate leads and it has been fundamentally taken away from them. So there you have pressure on an industry and you have the type of client that we can help. I mentioned this tarp company, this goes quite far back in my copywriting career, but I did a bunch of stuff for an industrial tarp company that sold tarps for highway trucks and took them from 8 inside telephone sales people making endless outbound calls to 2 inside sales people only taking inbound calls. So we switched the manual labor out for direct mail. That is something I have done over and over again. A final thing about direct response appropriateness is that ideally you want a client where there are comparables—not necessarily competitors, using our kind of marketing. Using copy intensive advertising in marketing so that you aren’t experimenting or blazing new ground, you have models to show the client and you have some models to follow. If you’re a high priced item—for example, some years ago I wrote copy for a company that sells this whiz bang coffee brewing thing that is gold plated and it’s based on a design the coffee brewing company used modeled after one that the King of Bavaria used, it sells for $6995 for this thing you have in your dining room to show off to people when you make coffee when people came over for dinner. There is no competitor, there is no other company—they’re it. So convincing them to do direct mail and figuring out how to do direct mail for them, I wanted to look for comparables so now you are talking about who is selling a incredibly high priced item to people with more money than brains—based on ego—by direct mail. If there are some, now this is a good client and it’s a client for which you can do good work. The seventh criteria is the type of client. Here you get into your own preferences as well as practicalities. For example, there is a big difference in dealing with a corporate client where their decisions are made by committee vs. dealing with the individual entrepreneur where you are interacting with one decision maker. Over the years I have had some big corporate clients but I generally try to avoid them. I try to discourage them from hiring me and I tend to add to the estimate the amount of time it is going to take to do the work because when you have a committee involved in making decisions, they are a bigger pain in the butt. On the other hand, they can sometimes write huge checks—to the entrepreneur, it is a large sum of money, to some big dumb company, that will spend a half million dollars to produce a 60 second TV commercial the amount of money we ask them for can appear trivial. So there are pros and cons to both and you have to decide which you are better suited for—in my case, by temperament, I am not too well suited for the corporate environment.




Another type of client factor is actually how marketing savvy and how direct marketing savvy they are. this surprises a lot of people that I talk to because not only are people who at least understand what we are doing—so you aren’t having the long copy vs. short copy debates, and you aren’t teaching marketing 101 in order to do your work. My best clients are ones who can actually write their own copy--They may not be as good as I am but they are good enough to get the job done. Some may actually be better than most copywriters, they choose to hire me just because I can do something they can’t—in this case it is not true—but because I can do it incrementally better, because I will get it done and they may not get it done if left to their own devices, and because other elements of their business where they invest their time are very valuable and so my demands for compensation are comparable to their own time. So I really like having clients who are actually good copywriters—they are useful, they help with the process and provide better raw material, their input is more trustworthy. LORRIE: When I was at your sales letter writing workshop earlier this year, there are only 2 of us who are copywriters, everyone else ran their own business and they were still there to learn copywriting from you. DAN: Yes and some of them, a lot of businesses in the industry in which I work, these companies are going to grind out so much stuff. There is no way they can actually afford to pay you or me to do all of it. So they are going to pay us to do major stuff and they will still have to do a lot of the day to day stuff themselves or with rank and file employees who at best are journeymen copywriters. They need to learn and want to learn. Any one of the clients in the room, including the one you came with, who pay to be in a seminar about writing sales letters, we know John writes quite a bit of copy of his own but also hires you to write copy. Any one of those clients in that room would be great clients for a good copywriter because you are not dealing with long copy short copy, why is it in an envelope, etc. all of that is out of the way. You are now dealing with at smart dog and I would rather work with a smart dog than a dumb dog. I like clients who could if pressed do the job themselves but instead choose me to do it for them. Another thing about type of client is that you need a client whose time is very valuable, who has a lot going on, and is busy. A busy client is less likely to need babysitting by you. He is no more eager to talk to you 4 times a day than you are to talk to him 4 times a day. Whereas the client without a lot going on, the sales letter that you are working on may be the biggest thing in his life—the TV show that you putting together for him may be the biggest thing in his life an it is no the biggest thing in your life—it damn sure isn’t the biggest thing in mine! But he wants it to be but the client who is extremely valuable and has a lot going on all he wants is the job done. He wants the marketing ready to go, he wants the deadlines met, he doesn’t need his hand




held and talked to, calling you at all hours with goofy ideas—he has better things to do. Another issue about type of client is, are they manageable? A real tip out of the gate, I used to go to lunch with clients—which I don’t anymore for the most part—I used to always make sure they picked up the check which is kind of contrary to what you think you would do, because I wanted to see how they tipped. If they are cheap with the waitress, they are cheap with everybody. It’s a warning bell—it’s someone you really don’t want around. If they come out of the gate trying to negotiate everything with you—there is one guy I’ve worked with for 20 years and he is the exception to the rule—he is a compulsive big negotiator because of the business he is in. he cannot stand to do anything without a negotiation, it’s a psychological addiction on his part so I overlook it. But for the most part, anyone who needs to get into negotiations with me right out of the gate—if we change this would this reduce this, would you take a bigger back end and less fee, can we bust this up into 5 parts instead of 3? As soon as I hear that kind of stuff, I extricate myself as soon as possible and run. It indicates that they are not going to be a very manageable client. The last thing I would mention is their reputation. Here is sort of a litmus test that I have taught in the renegade millionaire system for entrepreneurs but this one is universally applicable. If someone can’t provide 3 or 4 people that they have done a deal with, who would say that they would cheerfully do another deal with if given the chance, you aren’t going to be the first to get lucky. If somebody has nothing good to say about anybody who has previously done work for them, you are not going to be the first person that they love. Six months from now they will be telling everybody they know what an idiot you are too. Their reputation which they express by what they say about themselves and others, and what you may know about them in the industry that they are in or what you are able to find out is important. I got rid of a client about 2 years ago in the first month, it became apparent that every conversation we had he wanted to tell me about some previous well known consultant or copywriter who he had given a lot of money to that had bitterly disappointed him and failed. It didn’t take but a few of these conversations for me to realize that soon I would be on that list—better sooner than later. So he got discharged. The eighth factor gets us into niches. This is a criteria factor for people to decide on their own but generally I prefer working in a market niche, a client that is niched to a market because it is really fertile ground for a client to do message to market match--Or a client who can be market niched. Some copywriters like to media niche, there are copywriters who only do magalogs or only do full page ads, or only do TV scripts and they may media niche which is ok if you are extremely adept at something than that is warranted. It is also wise to realize that there are niches within niches within niches again it




is used by a dentistry example; there are over a dozen different kinds of dentists. There is a very successful copywriter who only writes copy for ads—mail pieces, DVDs and so forth for implant dentists—he makes about a half a million doing it. He deliberating gets a different dentist in every market in the country and writes fundamentally the same copy for all of them and is very successful. Generally speaking, I would rather have a client who is niched or could be niched. So those are the 8 criteria that I would encourage people to consider as they go out in search of clients. LORRIE: We will be sending out those 8 criteria tomorrow. Keeping an eye on the clock, have your criteria changed over the years? DAN: Not a lot, higher fees and compensation demands have sort of changed the ability of a client to spend, it’s changed the type of client you get with this criteria but the general criteria is the same—I still consider all of these things. The 3 things that have been added that I consider now that I hadn’t before: one is learning curve, I try to avoid situations where I have to learn a business form scratch—if you showed up on my doorstep with a big bag of money and wanted to hire me to write copy to sell bird seed to people who want to get a lot of birds to come to their backyard, I would probably pass. I look for ease and speed. Another thing that has become more important to me late than early is regulatory environments where you have a lot of compliance issues that add time and difficulty. Financial services for example, I still have a couple of clients in that industry but I don’t seek them where at one time I sought them—you are always going to be dealing with a compliance department and a couple of attorneys who want to rewrite your copy. Weight loss is regulatory sensitive. The third thing that is linked to that is risk. Copywriters have liability and you can only protect yourself so much in contracts and then you have to understand that you are at risk so there are clients that I would do work for 10 years ago and today, I wouldn’t—mostly because the press the envelope so far into the gray area in which they operate. LORRIE: Can you give us and example? DAN: Like a weight loss company or a business opportunity company—I work in both industries but they are clients that I did work for in those industries that today I politely decline. Every so often they are going to be dealing with the FTC or the FDA or both, the FCC or 20 attorney generals and I would rather not explain to someone why I would be exempt.




LORRIE: I see, I could literally ask you a hundred follow up questions but I want to keep us moving along. Let’s get on to the where. DAN: Ok, there is a little bit of geography and then I will give you a little more specifics. There is a little geography; you could divide your clients into 3 categories: local businesses that are based in your own area and are pretty much marketed locally. Local businesses that are acquired on a national basis, and national companies. A lot of beginners make the mistake of thinking that they can only deal with local clients. So they are going to get the local hardware store and the local insurance agent, the funeral parlor and that is where they think that they have to start working. That is not necessarily bad but it is an erroneous assumption. Now the one really good thing to always keep in mind when you are creating for a business that only markets itself locally, like a cemetery, is that what you do for the one in Indianapolis, IN has value to hundreds more in other parts of the country so we talked about contracts in the other call—if you do that kind of work, you want to retain rights to that product outside of that marketing area and be able to turn around and bicycle it and sell it in one form or another from someone in market a to someone in market b. Local clients, meaning clients who market themselves locally not necessarily that live in your are—a dentist or a cemetery or someone who only markets themselves to their own town but acquired nationally can be the very best. For example, if you are going to write copy for dentist, rather than trying to get a dentist in your hometown, it is actually easier to get dentists from different parts of the country by attacking the entire profession. The reason why is there is is that percentages don’t change they probably will never change in terms of success and in every profession in every industry in every business there is a bout 5% at the very top who are successful, progressive, ambitious doctors, big spenders, there is another 15% that are almost there, and there is 80% that have their heads firmly where the sun doesn’t shine and are very reluctant to have them pried out. If you are attacking dentists only in Indianapolis, and there are 300 of them there, there are only 60 that are even going to pay attention. There are only really 15 who might be good clients. But, if you attack 50,000 dentists in America, that 5% is now 2500 and so when you cream a professional in industry on a national basis, you get more winners to surface. National companies that market themselves on a national or international level they may fit some categories of the criteria better in terms of their ability to spend, the size of opportunity and so forth, you have to think about whether you are ready to tackle them, whether you are ready to travel, or whether you are able to command (as I do) that they all come to you. Those are the 3 geographic questions. From there we can move to some real specifics if you want.




LORRIE: It’s up to you. DAN: We can take a look at where where rolls into how. You can really divide all of the methods to get clients into an active pursuit or what I call, magnetic attraction. The active pursuit items, most of which I have never done, some of them I did a long time ago, but they can all work—some of them I have done. Let’s go down the list: you can advertise your services—for example, you can go into trade journals like DM News, and if you go into the back you will see copywriters running ads for themselves as copywriters, often offering free critiques. Last week in the issue of DM News, Bob Bly, who’s an accomplished, professional copywriter, Bob periodically runs a full page ad for himself as a copywriter. You can run these ads—you can run them in the trades where you get mostly mail order and direct marketing type companies. You can go into niches—so if you have been successful writing copy for a local dentist, now you go into the national dental trade journal and run an ad announcing your availability to assist with dental marketing materials. I don’t like it, I have never done it, but a lot of copywriters do it. Similarly, you can do direct mail in your community or a niche or certain types of advertisers essentially making the same kinds of offers. For example, free critiques, free consults, you do a critique on spec, those sort of things, there are people who for example—there is one that I have consulted with who writes copy for yellow pages ads in 5 different industries and he direct mails to leads he compiles out of the yellow pages of the smaller advertisers and offers to critique their ad for free and help them build a better ad, he generates prospects that way. You can pick out prospects from industry directories. Almost every industry has a national association, a state association, there is a local association, and there are multiple associations. For example, a client that was here to day that I wan tot go after for commercial mortgage brokers and lenders like him all across the country, there is about 4000 of them, they are all in the directory he had with him with addresses, the CEOs names, the email, the fax, statistics about how big they are, how many employees, it’s all there for the taking. So, you could pick out prospects from directories and proactively attack them. Something that I did do early in my career is picking them off based on their own ads and mailings. Again thinking back to the criteria, I want people who are already marketing, who don’t indicate by their marketing that they are completely ignorant. I want a client where it looks like –I spot something that I might be able to do for this client that would be effective, and I have a




prospecting letter that I would send in response to their own direct mail or their own ads. LORRIE: A lot of what you have mentioned so far sounds like a lot of work and you are saying that you didn’t really do a lot of these, is that right? DAN: Yes, I prefer magnetic attraction; I will confess that when we get to the magnetic attraction list, these things require more patience. Attracting people to you is a little more slow and ponderous –grabbing a club and going out and hitting one over the head and dragging them back to the cave. You can certainly do these things, I think it is useful if you are willing to do any prospecting at all to have a little elevator speech—the way you describe what you do. When I used to travel a lot, early in my business, I would get clients from people sitting next to me in first class on the planes. I’d get them at conventions and cocktail parties through conversational marketing. I can recall 2 instances—once I was on the plane with this guy who was a CEO of a fairly big ad agency, as a result of our conversation (he didn’t actually hire me to write copy) he hired me to spend 2 days at each of his 4 offices teaching his people how to write copy. That was a very lucrative contract. Another one that spent over $200,000 with me over several years came out of a conversation on an airplane—I haven’t used it in years, usually I don’t want to talk to anybody, if the person next to me now asks me what I do, I usually say I’m an IRS agent—that usually ends the conversation for the duration of the flight. My old elevator speech was, I am so and so, what do you do? The wrong answer is, ‘I’m a copywriter’ first of all most people don’t even know what the hell that is. In many cases, they think you are talking about copy write law; it is not an answer that is going to open and continue to be productive. So my old elevator speech was—I work with entrepreneurs and companies to cut all the fat and waste out of their advertising and make their sales people or efforts at least 500% productive, guaranteed. And then I would shut up. Invariably the person sitting next to me would ask—how do you do that? Now that is permission to talk at length about what I do and how I do it. Usually I start asking questions about their business to see if they fit my criteria. That is personal prospecting-- You can certainly exhibit at trade shows and offer to do beat the controls on spec, and we talked about that in the first call, you have to be careful who you do it for but generally you can get in over the transom if you chose to. That’s all the active pursuit stuff. The attraction stuff that I prefer and recommend and encourage people to do, is about putting yourself out in a place and positioning yourself in a way that causes good clients to seek you out. To initiate the conversation of ‘what can you do for me?’ here are the things on that list—one is you publish, you get




product out there. Books help, they don’t have to be books with a real publisher or on a book store shelf—although that can certainly help they can be books that you can distribute that look like they were published by real publishers. You can advertise with a book in DM News vs. a service. A newsletter is a powerful tool because you are now showing off your expertise in a successful example and makeovers to a target prospective audience that can be used over and over again. If you look at Jeff Fischer in Entrepreneur magazine and another guy who does it in Direct magazine but their regular monthly article is a makeover of a bad ad and how they would make it into a good ad. That is great newsletter stuff and I do a fair amount of that in my newsletter as well. I would say t hat over the years about 50% of all my clients have first been newsletter subscribers and have come out of the repeat exposure that has happened from the newsletter. Articles in magazines read by the clients you want this is extremely important and generally easy to get articles into trade and professional journals—they need content. A cross over tactic, I had a client some years ago, he was a speaker, he lives in Minneapolis and didn’t want to travel anymore, he wanted to do a lot of local work—which is very hard to do. He wanted to work for sizeable corporations doing in depth leadership and membership training—it is a miserable topic to try to sell—he was trying to prospect with letters and speaking places, he was getting zero attraction because he really needed to talk to the CEO and he was getting to the human resource director and getting stalled in middle management. His question to me was, ‘how can I get to the CEO?’ the strategy we devised was that he was going to write a book which was called, 21st Century Leadership Techniques of Minneapolis Businesses. He was then going to write to all of the CEOs he had on his client hit list, and say I am doing this book and I want to interview you for the book—we want on that exemplifies management and leadership and I would like to interview you for the book. I don’t recall the exact numbers but that pitch went to 200 CEOs and generated 120 appointments. Now he has face to face appointments with 120 CEOs that he has identified as his ideal client prospects so he goes in and interviews them but now he has an hour long conversation with the CEO about management and strategies and problems—of course the CEO is telling him about his problems and frustrations with his company. The interviewer, the author, is telling him about case histories from his clients. This does not require a lot of sales competency, the CEO is going to ask the question—do you think you could do anything for us? If so, what do you think you could do? That gave him his book of business and kept him busy for many years. So that is a criss cross between the 2 strategies—you could do surveys and polls and you can issue white papers. So again if you want to write copy for dentists, you can go to all the dentists you identify as good prospects with the fact that you are a marketing expert and you are going to issue this white paper on new marketing strategies




issued by successful dentists and they need to fill out this survey. If they fill out the survey, they will get a copy of the finished white paper for free. Now you have dentists filling out surveys telling you what they are doing smart, dumb, and what their frustrations are, what their marketing problems are—now you have compiled all of that which creates the white paper that goes out to them—which is actually a sales letter for why they need a professional copywriter and marketing consultant and coincidentally, you happen to be that. A second thing you do is you speak—and you have to get good at it. There is no more powerful place to be than in front of a group where there are at least 2 good prospective clients and you get to show off your expertise with show and tell and teach strategies and principals. It will generate people coming to you, asking the magic question—can you do stuff for us? In many cases it can generate a lot of business. Twenty years ago I spoke at 5 Gary Halbert seminars in Key West and I made sure that I was on the first day—I offered free 20 minute face to face consultations to anyone who wanted them and then for the next few days, I worked my ass off starting at 5 AM and working every lunch and dinner break, and worked from 10 that night to midnight or 1 in the morning in order to get everybody’s consults in. from the first seminar—I don’t remember the rest of them—I walked out of there with 210,000 dollars in business. So that is a very powerful thing to do. Seminars, filling your own seat, not a topic we have anywhere near time to deal with tonight but it is an effective strategy—from 1983 to 1987, I had a company that I did some of the presentations for—we had a speaker do most of them—we did free introductory seminars to sell a particular program to chiropractors and dentists, we had over 12,000 doctors in some 300 seminars we conducted. Out of those came lots of, not only in the marketing program we sold, but copywriting requests the time we had a little factory doing yellow page ads for doctors at $1500 an ad and I think the average months we were doing 50-60 of them. They were all coming out of the seminars. If you use strategies to fill your own seats in a niche, which is the easiest thing to do, you can really control this process. You can be in 5 marketing areas in 5 nights with driving distance in between and have 20-30 prospects in each seminar in which you present yourself. Host/parasite, very useful. It is not a strategy you want to rely on for life, but it can be a great launch strategy. What you want here is a host, someone who has influence, who is providing a product or service to a group of people who could use you—who need sales materials written for them. The host doesn’t provide it, doesn’t want to provide it, he knows they need it, his influence with them is useful, and he will endorse you— either for money or now. He will arrange to put you in front of them some how. I have a coaching member, Shirley Hanson, and basically she is a copywriter for websites for professionals.—financial advisors, employers, doctors, etc. She is really just




getting started in the field and a large financial product firm that provides products for resale to financial advisers arranged for her to do teleseminars for all of their advisors, talking to them about topics very common to us—selling proposition, target marketing, how to figure out what your particular sales message ought to be as a financial adviser and right on the teleseminar she sold them a copywriting service—although not called that—to interview them and their clients and come up with a unique selling proposition and then create or makeover their website or brochure or their prospecting letters, their complete marketing kit. She took dozens of clients in at one time, replicated the process with another host in the same industry. Working through somebody who can put you in front of a group of prospective clients, all needing fundamentally the same work and give you their endorsement—very powerful. Corporate training is another way to create demand. Almost anytime that I have gone into a company to do direct marketing training for a group of their executives and group of their marketing people, even a group of their copywriters—anytime I have gone in to do this, I have walked out of the door with a copywriting book because when you show them how to do it, and they get that you know how to do it better than them, generally speaking—they now want you to do it. The same thing with coaching type environments. If you put business people into a marketing type coaching arrangement of one kind or another, you are going to get them wanting to hire you to do some or all of the work for them. That is sort of my package for how you attract clients. This about deciding who you want and then matching up these strategies with that group of ‘who’ and applying them to those prospective clients. LORRIE: I would like to come back to the takeaway selling a little bit later before we do that, I know that you wanted to discuss something that most people who think of themselves as copywriters like us don’t think of but that you encourage and that is to be your own client. DAN: This is a sort of a bonus to the topic of the call—I think it is extremely important and extremely useful, it is a great answer to the beginner and of all the questions you sent me (there were a lot of them) all fall into the same category of –‘I am starting and I don’t have a portfolio to show, I don’t have a bunch of successful work to show, how do you solve the catch 22?’ I want to do your stuff, but I haven’t done anyone else’s stuff—who wants to be the guinea pig? The answer to that is to be your own client. To successfully apply your copywriting skills to direct marketing something of your own. When I say I have always been a part time copywriter, I always have because I started my own mail order business and my own information products in 1972 and I have always been writing copy for my own products and my own newsletter—it’s a subscription for my own businesses and at the same time I’ve been




doing work for clients. Halbert said at his seminar ‘I am the only freelancer who consistently puts his money where his mouth is and writes copy that he spends money on mailing and advertising. It attracts in and of itself—if you have an information business, that you are operating and marketing in the same niche or observable in the niche that you want clients form, and you are putting effective ads and copy out there—they will come to you, they will chase you down. I have gotten a lot of work over the years because somebody has said—who wrote this mail piece or who wrote this ad, I want them to write my stuff – and they have chased me down. There are 3 basic ways to get in the game; one is to take control of someone else’s ignored or neglected back end. LORRIE: That is another call isn’t it Dan? DAN: Yes people on the call who have followed and studied Jay Abraham would know that this was for many years Jay’s stock and trade so this is about finding a business that has customers, that has a front end marketing operation, and is not really doing much, if anything to sell them additional goods and services on the back end. You literally take that business, in some sort of joint venture or arrangement for them where you are not only writing the copy but you are really controlling the marketing, and you may have in fact even be putting up the money to market it. Another is your own information products and your own information business. I would say anybody who genuinely has good copywriting skills can make a lot more money in the information business as their own client--selling books, tapes, courses, manuals, coaching programs and seminars, than they will ever get from an outside client. A third way to do it is that is really very appropriate for copywriters, and we have talked about it a little bit a couple of times, but I want to make sure everybody gets it—is to take a local winner and sell it nationally. So if you think about this, if you take any type of business and you have written effective copy and you write some ads and sales letters that work for a dentist, or a CPA, or a pet shop, or a beauty parlor, or a hardware store, or you name the type of business—and it works for that client in Tupelo, that same copy and work product that has value to someone in that business and it is a way to leap into the information business. I will give you a couple of examples and then I will tell you the 3 options. First year I was writing copy, I did some ads for a small local chain of optical stores. I invented the Pearl Vision that was later stolen and was useless to the small independent. From a small independent I invented the one year eye glass warranty where if your glasses get broken, we replace them for free no matter how they got broken. So our deal was a free 24 month warranty that




they would repair your glasses. This advertising in its time was revolutionary and new and scary to the client—and worked like gang busters. I turned around and sold that same thing, tweaking it for optical stores in 27 markets. At the time it was pretty cheap—I sold it for $1000 a package and so in a 2 month period of time, based on the success he had, I sold it 27 times for $1000 a piece. I took his name and logo out and put in the other clients. Very recently, a client of mine who owns a direct mailing company, he created a new postcard campaign for a chain of car washes-he did it as more of a favor than anything, the guy is too small to be a client for his mail house—but he did it and it worked great. He told me how great it worked and I said—that one guy is too small for you but 200 car washes are just right for you now you can package up that campaign along with the mailing service and sell it area by area to car washes. So here is the reality, copywriters can work—one of course is that you can write a successful campaign for the local business and get paid. Let’s look at jewelers, you write a couple of Mother’s Day ads and you come up with a Mother’s Day promotion, you write a Mother’s Day direct mail piece for this customer and the jeweler pays you $500 or $5000 or if you are a top provider and it is a good chain of jewelry stores, they give you $15,000-- regardless you got paid to do work and now it’s over. That is how most copywriters think and it is not how you should think. Option 2 is that we do the same work for the same local chain of jewelers and it works great. Now we put it into a kit and we put it on a disc and we put it in a notebook and we write some instructions about how to use it and we sell it to jewelers all over the country--Based upon the fact that it is already a tested and successful campaign. Maybe that kit will sell for $400 and I can tell you if you did a lot of direct mail to jewelers across the country to sell that kit and you sold it for $400, it is probably going to cost you $300 to make each sale and deliver the kit. So you have $100 net, if you sell a 1000 of them that is $100,000 in the same way you might have gotten paid $500 or $5000 for. If you can sell 3000 of them, it’s $300,000. This is very common for a lot of the niche marketers that I work with. Within their informational businesses they have this sort of informational kit, Bill Blazer who of course runs Blazer Kennedy inner circle, and also has a BGS marketing company that sells marketing information to retailers by niches including yours. Bill has a prefab promotion of Thanksgiving card promotion that he sells as a package—it is the same and it is the same copy and it is the same everything to retailers all across the country. A platinum member of mine--Ron does a thing called the car club which he sells to auto repair shop owners. Altadonna has an entire fibromyalgia kit with newspaper ads and sales letters and a website and all of the follow-up pieces that he sells to a chiropractor and chiropractors buy it—it is a tested and proven campaign and now they can use it as they see fit.




A third model is to take the same work that we did for that jeweler so we have this Mother’s Day campaign and we bundled it up just as I described, but we sell it to one jeweler based on an exclusive basis and we say to the jeweler you will be the only jeweler in Tupelo of all 36 jewelry stores, who get to use his campaign. There is a member of mine who has subscribed to my newsletter for years, who was a newspaper ad and a radio ad that for medical doctors who do the thing where the cut off part of your stomach and tie it up so you lose weight and can’t eat. LORRIE: Gastric bypass. DAN: So he has an ad campaign to bring in gastric bypass patients and he sells it on an area exclusive basis, to one doctor in each area who gets to use it for a year and then they have to renew the fee to use it for a second year. His marketing campaign is really very simple, he has proof of results, he sends a letter to all of the docs in Cleveland who do gastric bypass, he puts a list of all of their names at the top, and says this went to all of these guys—I sent it to them on the same day by FedEx so everybody has an equal chance—the first guy in the door gets it and no one else is allowed to use it—and the race is on. Now let’s say we take that jeweler campaign and we sell it in a very exclusive basis at $2000 a piece, which would be cheap, and we sell 30 of them to jewelers across the country—we just brought in $60,000 for work that we may have only gotten paid $500, $1000, $2000 to do. We sell 100 and we bring in $200,000. It gets even better, if we get better, so if we have not just a Mother’s Day campaign but we have 8-10 campaigns for jewelers and they all work. We have been working with this local jeweler for a year, we have a Mother’s Day campaign that works, we have Valentine’s Day campaign, we have a Christmas marketing campaign that works, a birthday campaign for his regular customers—we put that all together into a licensing system to one jeweler per area and allow them to use it and customize it for them—that is like a $20,000 fee. I have a handful of clients --and I am in this business which I will describe in a minute—so now if we get 100 jewelers across the country who want to use this system in their area and be the only one who can—one client in Cleveland, one in Cincinnati, and we charge $20,000 for the package—that’s 2 million0 dollars. It’s the same work we would have done for the local jeweler and maybe been paid $15,000 to $20,000 to do; now the same campaign generates 2 million. If we can get 200 jewelers across the country, it’s $4 million. For example, I have a client who has influence over a number of financial advisors, very recently, I built a multi-step direct mail campaign for the financial advisor to get him appointments with business owners it’s a ‘gift with appointment’ driven campaign—the gift is one of my books, so I have integrated myself into the promotion—it is predone, all the copy is written,




the graphics are done, everything is done it just gets tweaked for the user and only one financial advisor per city gets it. That’s a $9000 sale, the first wave of his people there were 30 sales--$270,000, my share is $2000 a piece which is $60,000. For 3 simple letters and enclosure pieces there is no way that you would get 1 client to pay you $60,000 but by rolling it out, you put yourself in the information business, you put yourself in the licensing business and you get to resale the same work product again and again. It is an easy way to get into the information business and the magic to it is that only one person in this area can use it. That gives it added value naturally, there are a lot of psychological reasons why that drives demand for it including the fact that I may want it but I sure don’t want that SOB across the street to have it! That drives this demand a lot so these sales are not difficult to make. there are ways for a copywriter to take work product done for one client, and in many cases, work product that is done for a local client that is not necessarily a great client overall—can’t and won’t pay you a lot of money--but you get to create a few winners and now turn around and sell them where all you do is tweak and customize on a very exclusive basis. With all that in mind, I want to tell everybody on the call about a couple of relevant resources. One is that if you want to learn the information business so that you can be your own client, there are a couple of things you can do. One thing, in addition to my regular marketing newsletter, I publish a special newsletter just for information marketers—the No BS Info-Marketing Letter—it comes out 6 times a year on alternating months the subscribers get an in depth special report of one aspect of the information marketing business. There may a report just on direct mail marketing seminars, a report just on teleseminars, maybe one just on the newsletter business—this is very comprehensive and it’s current. It includes actual examples of what I am doing, what my Platinum members are doing, what my clients are doing in informational marketing. Depending upon whether or not you are a regular Glazer/Kennedy circle member, and whether you are getting a newsletter, whether you are a gold member or whatever—you will find that this is about $58 and $68 a month. You stay only as long as we are wow-ing you every month: you can cancel at any time. LORRIE: What is the difference between $58-$68? Is that international? DAN: Shipping chares are different which you will see on an order form but there is a price differential depending on whether or not you are a Glazer/Kennedy inner circle member and you are adding this on or if it’s the only thing that you are subscribing to. Nobody gets any discounts other than that but because you asked me to do something for everybody, if they subscribe by 3:00 tomorrow, they will get the September issue FREE. So they




won’t be billed for that. By the way, it includes a big pile of updated information on seminar and boot camp marketing by direct mail, fax, and internet. Also, if someone is interested in being their own client in the information business, there is a really good Fast Start option. There is an Information Blueprint Seminar that Bill Glazer taught last year and he teaches it several times a year and it is really the start from zero, step by step—what are the options for information businesses, how are information products put together, how are they sold, who are they sold to, how do you find a market, etc. The whole seminar is on 6 CD’s with over 500 pages of notes and examples, so there is a ton of copywriting stuff in there that works. There are sales letter sequences, lead generation ads, web sites, all of those samples are worth their weight in gold and they are from current, working, profitable information businesses. That is catalog priced and sold at our web store for $697, Lorrie has arranged for you guys to get $100 off—so it is $597. we also have the annual Information Marketers’ Summit coming up in November—I don’t know if there is room or not, the last time I heard there were like 435 and I believe the room capacity is 450—if there is room, it is still up at www.dankennedy.com if has been taken done, that means there is no room left at the inn. LORRIE: I will be there—I’m excited! DAN: Good, the last thing I want to mention for serious copywriters is my Look Over My Shoulder Program: every month we send out a pretty big package. The size varies, but it is a package of my actual copywriting work, in various stages, so people see the rough drafts, they see stuff in revision, the see stuff as it wins it way into final product, detailed analysis of why it has been done the way it has, what’s worked, what doesn’t. You see how I move from start to finish, sometimes you see correspondence with clients and this is all real work: stuff I am working on for actual clients for my own business on a current basis. This puppy is cheap because it is very narrow in it’s focus and there is a relatively small number of people who have interest in it—probably half of the subscribers are professional copywriters—the investment for that , depending on you membership status, is $275 to $312 a month. Again there are no discounts but you wanted something special so again, if they subscribe by 3PM tomorrow, they will get September issue FREE—and it includes a very complex project that I did for Cory Rudl’s company—it is a very successful direct mail campaign. Lorrie—can you tell them where and how to order before we move on? LORRIE: Absolutely—is this a new program?




DAN: No, it is in its second year. LORRIE: Amazing. If people are interested they go to my website, which is www.red-hot-copy.com/dan.htm that has all the information that you need. For the newsletters, the special report, and the Look Over My Shoulder program: there is an option to fax in your order and I will get it to his people so he can get you in his system. but, as far as the products go you can click through the shopping cart there. Let’s move along, I’d really like to go back to that Takeaway Selling, the book—No BS Sales book is fascinating so I want to know if you have more to expound on? DAN: I would quickly urge people to read Robert Ringer’s book either the original, Winning Through Intimidation or the updated, To Be or Not To Be Intimidated. It had an enormous effect on me, fortunately I got it early in my career, what I have to say in my book about Takeaway Selling, is in part inspired by Ringer. the simple truth is, selling things like consulting, or copywriting proactively, is extremely difficult because of the perverse nature of people—wanting what they can have least, not what is readily available to them—and the fact that it just doesn’t feel right. If we’re at a cocktail party and I overhear you having a conversation with somebody, and you are describing a business problem you had that I have solved 500 times and can do it in my sleep, and I come over and said, ‘I overheard your conversation, you have problem x and I have solved it 500 times, I’m the guy that can make it go away for you’—you are moving away from me. It just doesn’t work right. Now, if the other guy says, ‘you know, there is a guy who solved that 500 times and can do it in his sleep with one arm tied behind his back, I suggest you go talk to this guy, Kennedy’—or if you find a book or an article, or you come to an event and hear me speak from stage and describe how I solved that problem 500 times—you chase me. So, then I get to do takeaway, then I get to be the one being pursued. There are 3 very important things about this—this will get back to the question you had about questionnaires. One is that this is a business of self-aggrandizement and self-promotion. This is not for the shy timid writer who wants to sit in the attic and write--I suggest you get a job. This is a business about self-promotion and about making yourself god in a particular category of expertise. Secondly, initial positioning is extremely important. What happens at the beginning controls everything. I will tell you how I have always started with new clients—first of all it has been 20 some odd years since I have gone to lunch for free—we have a saying around here, No Free Lunch, No Free Phone call, No Free Nothing! Everything is paid and so years ago when I was hustling for business, I would work the National Speaker’s Association to get




clients. I had business cards at that time but my business card was really an appointment card that someone filled out to meet with me for 15 minutes while we were there—it cost them $200 for the meeting. They gave me their credit card info and if you don’t want to spend $200 to talk to me—I don’t talk to you at all. It is now $800 for the initial phone call if we are going to have a phone call. All my client relationships have begun as they do now, they only thing that has changed is the dollar amount and my willingness to go to them. Every new client relationship begins with a paid day of consulting at my based fee, which is currently $9200. So the dollar mount has changed, the process has not. Every new relationship begins with a paid day of consulting which is designed to be diagnostic and then scripted. It is during this day, rather than have them fill out a standard questionnaire; I prefer to look more like a wise seer who is pulling it out of the (inaudible). We sit and talk for 6-7 hours, and we begin with them telling me their story and showing me where they are, where they want to go. And I start asking questions that in many cases determine that they don’t really have a clear picture of where they want to go. So we get to things like—what do you want your business to look like in 3-5 years? If you could wave a magic wand, what are 3 things you would change now? How much money do you have in the bank, how much do you want to have in the bank? How much income do you have? This allows us to build a picture of where they are, where they would like to get to, and any ideas that they have about the bridge in between, and of course all the problems, frustrations and ills that are occurring in the industry itself. I mentally catalog: missed opportunities, things they aren’t doing that they could be doing, things they are doing badly, where the business can be reinvented—the first half of the day is that. The second half of the day is then prescriptive—here’s what I think you ought to do. What is important here is that they are not telling me what I am going to do, they are not sitting down and telling me I want a sales letter, or I want 3 ads—they may start that way, but we clear that up very quickly. I am now going to tell them what they need, and how it ought to be implemented, and what the moving parts are, and what this business is going to look liked when that happens. I am laying out a marketing strategy now using tools that all require copy. So now, during prescription, I am taking the tack all the way through that theoretically they could do all of this themselves. In many cases, giving them resources that would help them along the way—here’s a good model to go see here, this kind of website—here is 4 websites to go look at of clients of mine who are doing fundamentally the same thing. I give them resources, sometimes I give them a sales letter copy of my file—that sort of thing. It doesn’t detract from their desire to have it done for them. So now I am doing a prescription. By the end of the day, we have laid out a detailed plan, a prescription of this needs to be done, this needs to be done, this needs to be done. I am waiting for them to say—can you do it, will you do it,




if you can do it when can you fit it in, and how much is this going to cost me? Then I figure out the project. They have paid for this day so from the beginning the position is that they have bought and paid for advice. they have not come to me with an assignment and I am not a vendor salesman pitching them. They have paid and come to me for advice and I have spent 3-4 hours probing them and listing to them and having them talk to me about their business while I am mentally cataloging all the things that out to be done. That is my client intake procedure. The other thing that has changed is that I used to be willing to travel to them and they now come to me. I used to go to them so they would pay the fee plus first class air round trip. I used to give them full credit for the day toward the project fee that came out of the back end of the day. It made the day feel like it was free—I no longer do that. I probably could have stopped doing that sooner than I did but I am guilty like everyone else is. and I am not a vendor salesman pitching them. They have paid and come to me for advice and I have spent 3-4 hours probing them and listing to them and having them talk to me about their business while I am mentally cataloging all the things that out to be done. That is my client intake procedure. The other thing that has changed is that I used to be willing to travel to them and they now come to me. I used to go to them so they would pay the fee plus first class air round trip. I used to give them full credit for the day toward the project fee that came out of the back end of the day. It made the day feel like it was free—I no longer do that. I probably could have stopped doing that sooner than I did but I am guilty like everyone else is. So, that’s the takeaway selling process, it starts from square one. LORRIE: I am blown away—that’s amazing. Well, we are moving toward the last quarter of our time, shall I jump into some of the other questions? DAN: Sure. LORRIE: Raja has a question about what to do with a prospective client who says he can’t pay what you ask, but wants you to do the project for less because he is going to give you more work down the line. DAN: There is nothing about that that can’t be curd with a bullet. I mentioned early about the client who immediately tries to negotiate, this is not negotiation any more than you negotiate with a heart surgeon. This is: here is the project fee, here is the royalty, here is how I work, this is a take it or leave position. Now you may put 2 or 3 possibilities on the table for a client, but you control the options and they pick one—you can’t be negotiating with them. The world is full of clients who want to play Whimpy—Please give me 2 cheeseburgers today and I will pay you next Wednesday—the world is full of those clients, you make me rich and then I will pay you. That is a good




way for you to stay poor. If you let bad business take up your desk space, there won’t be room for good business. Most of these questions arise because the process you started with your client, all the way back from the who you selected, how you attracted them to you, how you dealt with them from the beginning and how you were positioned with them –you screwed that up to allow these kinds of questions. LORRIE: It all interconnects. DAN: Yes, most of this goes away when you are properly positioned fromthe beginning. LORRIE: Myself and another copywriter who had lunch with Dan--and it was not a free lunch—I bought! He wrote you a testimonial from that lunch—he made $16,000 off a letter just from some advice you gave us at that lunch. DAN: Glad he made money. LORRIE: I want to fire a few questions at you and then open it up for other callers. There are a lot of questions like Reed’s—how do you handle clients who want to change what you have written? Or Cathy Goodwin—how do you work with a client who wants short copy with dancing graphics? Someone else asked about the client who comes back with criticism of the copy from his wife. DAN: If we have time, I have a very funny story about that. First of all, again, this has a lot to do with how you were positioned from the start. Whether you are being a writer given a job, or you are a guru who is in control of the process—prescribing and telling them what needs to be done. Another part of this has to do with who you get as a client in the first place. A lot of these problems come from having really dumb clients, they are trying to figure out direct marketing 101—what is an envelope, why a wide stamp, so you will have these arguments over every little thing. The best way to eliminate that is to have a smarter client. At the very least you have to bring your client up to speed. For example, I won’t work with anybody who hasn’t at least gone through my Magnetic Marketing System and read the Ultimate Sales Letter book. That is like ground zero, so at least we are speaking the same language. It has to do with the client itself and who you’ve got. It has to do with how strong you were at the intake, and by the way, I always prep clients for all of this. I have a little talk that I give them about that you aren’t your customer, and your likes and dislikes are irrelevant—just as are mine, just as is your mother-in-law, your employees—the only vote that counts are the people who give you money. LORRIE: You should put that on a DVD, Dan.




DAN: I have this little talk with them early—that they aren’t necessarily going to like what they get, and everybody around them is going to be making fun of them, and criticizing it but they have to prize results more than they prize anything else. It also has to do with your contract language and how your relationship works. For example, changes—here is how it works with me, I will make one round of changes that have to do with factual inaccuracies, legal issues that are true legal issues—not a lawyer trying to be a copywriter but a lawyer being a lawyer—and anything that I consider to be a legitimate input from the client. However, I am the writer—you aren’t, so I will make one round of changes and then I deliver it in it’s best form that I believe will be the most effective. If you insist on butchering it after that—I don’t get my hands bloody. You can do all the damage you want if you insist on it—but I am not doing the damage—you will kill yourself with your own sword. LORRIE: That makes sense. There are a few more questions that were sent in, that kind of represents the group—if I could just throw those at you. Michelle Pariza Wacek asks how you can grow your copywriting business in recession. DAN: Well—A. I can’t imagine why the question is asked, I hope to God it is not a reflection of her thinking we are in a recession. I cannot recall as good of an economy in my life time. Money is flowing elbow deep in the streets and anybody who tells you otherwise is either an imbecile or an incompetent. However, I did start my business during the Jimmy Carter recession, and the fact of the matter is it doesn’t make any damn difference whatsoever. The pros and cons are different but in a recession, there is automatic economic pressure on the winners and those who are going to survive to work harder, and market harder. They need you more urgently—they may have a tougher time paying you, but they need you more urgently. So you still have a great card to play. LORRIE: Cathy Goodwin wants to know if she should publish her rates. DAN: It depends on what you mean by rate. I do not believe in things like dollars per hour, dollars per page, a fixed price or direct mail campaign stuck up on a website or a price list. What I have always published are the consulting fees—the price for the day and the price for the hour if it is telephone consultation—every one knows they are getting the same deal. The other stuff has to vary by project. There is no way to give a fee until I have done diagnosis and prescription. I am basically calculating the final fee based on the amount of time it is going to take. It may take me a lot longer to write a 5 step direct mail campaign for Charlie than for Harry, in part because of




Charlie and they are in 2 different businesses. Depending on the amount of material they are bringing to the table—so those fees, I would never publish. LORRIE: How long did it take you to establish yourself as a leader in the copywriting profession? That’s from Yancy. DAN: That’s a flowering question and I may be less visible than some people but I am certainly maybe the highest priced. Here’s what a more relevant answer is, it is not that big of an advantage, it really is about creating demand for yourself, not creating prominence. For example, I don’t have any DMA awards on my shelf and could care less, it is about creating demand for yourself and making supply and demand work in you favor. I began representing myself as THE expert, THE go to guy for the clientele I sought from day one. I have changed very little about the way I handle all of that from day one to now. You can’t think of this as some kind of logical, sequential process—like you go to school for 4 years and then some authority figure bestows upon you a degree and you get to put some letters after your name, and then you get an apprenticeship, and then you get to grovel and then claim a greater amount of credibility, and somehow there is a logical progression of fees and compensation and demand that matches your ascension up the career ladder. That is not how this works. This works through self-aggrandizing and self-promotion. As Ringer says in his book, you want to leap frog, you don’t want to ladder climb. LORRIE: Niki wants to know how a creative writer who wants to get into copywriting develops a salesmanship mentality. DAN: The good news is that she asked the question. The bad news is probably the answer. Because direct response copywriting is selling, and the copywriting business is sales. You do need a sales mentality and the only way I know to get a sales mentality is through selling. The truth of the matter and the best piece of advice that you could ever give to somebody who freely acknowledge that they don’t have it but are otherwise a competent writer is to take a year off, don’t write any thing, and go to work for 3 months selling fire alarms in a house, 3 months selling vacuum cleaners in a house, 3 months at a car dealerships selling cars, and 3 months selling life insurance—if it takes you longer than 3 months to get good at it, then stay there until you get good. If you do that, you will come out the other end of that funnel, totally qualified, capable, competent and able to write great direct response copy. Since most people will ignore that advice entirely, the next best thing is that you have to be a serious student of salesmanship, so you have to dig into stuff like Zigg’s, The Secrets of Closing the Sale, the book, The Closers, you have to get sales training—if you at least work at a go sell of vacuum cleaners, fire alarms, insurance, and automobiles.




LORRIE: Got it. So Tamara says I get direct response marketing materials I find insulting. They don’t work on me. Do they work enough to be successful? I’d never write such crud myself. DAN: I have had my stuff called worse. Look, it comes back to the same speech I give clients--you aren’t your customer, your likes and dislikes and personal opinions and preferences are completely and totally irrelevant as are mine and as are the clients. The only thing that matters here is what works and what works best. You have to get out of your own way. Direct response is not a place to be subtle. This is far more akin to the sale of the vacuum cleaner on the floor wrestling the money out of the guy’s wallet than it is advertising or creativity, and to pretend otherwise, as pleasurable as it might be to pretend, is foolish. You have to get over any little biases you have about long copy and analogies and ugly gold paper and sneak up gimmickly and goofy grabbers and all of that stuff is what works in direct response. Does it work well enough to be used—yes, it is what works regardless if you are selling to people to make a million dollars a year, or $10,000 year—whether you are selling to them in their home or the corporate board room. There is very little difference, there is very little difference between online and off line, and you have got to get out of your own way. LORRIE: That is why it’s used because it works. DAN: Absolutely. LORRIE: I would like to open it up for questions since we do have some time left. I want to thank you for letting us have access to some of your products at a discount and remind people to go to www.red-hot-copy.com/dan.htm before 3PM tomorrow--that is Pacific time. There are some great alternatives to getting more access to Dan so I encourage anyone to take him up on that. Why don’t we open it up for questions? CALLER:I just want to get back to what you said about from the beginning you charge clients for your advice? When you are just starting out, DAN: It doesn’t matter; I did it from the beginning. CALLER: How did you do it? DAN: I did it from day one. It is here is how we do things around here—think about when you go to the doctor’s office, you walk in and the first thing they do is to hand you a clipboard with a form to fill out. They tell you to go sit in the corner and fill out this form. You go do it and they tell you how you have to pay, and you pay. They tell you, here is how we do things around here, and you do them. I suppose every once in a while somebody walks out, I don’t know, but that is how it works. so you are a professional just like them




and people want to deal with a strong, firm person, not a weak person, you are a trusted and expert advisor and there is no reason for any reasonable sane person to expect your time or advice to be free. You can’t even assume the expectation—most of them will never have hired one of what you are and how you position yourself, so it is not like they know how things are supposed to be around here, until you tell them how things are done around here. When someone now asks the question-can you help me? Or can you create marketing for me? Or can you write copy for me? Or can you solve my marketing problem? The answer is quite possibly and here is how I work. And then I say, everything starts with an initial consultation and the fee for the consultation is x and I used to say the amount of the consultation fee is fully credited towards the project fees, if in fact we end up going ahead with the project. The rest of that little speech is, for the day—we get together for a day—it is a diagnostic and prescriptive 9 I go through all that) and at the end of the day, one of 3 things happens (I don’t say this anymore but I said it for many years), one, if that you consider the day to be a giant waste of your time and you didn’t get any value out of the day—tell me and I hand you your check back. Two, you got what you needed out of the day, you got a great battle plan, you got answers to your problems and you are going to go forth and do things on you own and I will applaud you as you succeed. If you need additional time from me, you can buy it hour by hour on the phone. Three, you and I are going to agree on some project work that I should do for you to implement marketing, and to write copy, and make the plan happen. If we do, we will agree on a project and we will agree on a fee and the good news is the fee you gave me for that day will be fully credited toward the product fee. I used to do hour appointments; it was the same basic speech. You’re buying an hour for diagnostic and prescriptive, at the end of the hour … LORRIE: Who else has a question for Dan? CALLER: You said that if the person wasn’t happy with their consultation that you gave them their money back. Which is effectively a risk reversal guarantee, do you do any sort of risk reversal guarantee with your projects? Or did you do it in the beginning? DAN: No. Never did, never do. Once they are passed the day, they have had enough exposure to me to either know that they want my work or they don’t. There are too many ways that the client can screw it up. Whenever that question is raised, I am very blunt about that. I say unfortunately this depends as much on what you do as it does what I do. I cannot control what you do. I used to have a big sign in my office that I got from Halbert, 82 ways copywriters can fail to get paid and the first 81 of them are that the client screws it up. I never did, never have, and never would. The question does come up though—how do I know that I am going to get results? Frankly, I don’t know if you are either. Based on my experience, we are going to give it our best shot and we have our suppositions about what we think will happen.




As long as you keep testing, I am going to keep tweaking to make it work but there are no guarantees. CALLER: Dan, when you are evaluating a client, and sizing them up in your mind—first if you go back a bunch of years and not look at things as you see them today—how did you evaluate client in terms of going for a piece of the action? How do you add things up in your head? DAN: Well, I very rarely did those equity deals. CALLER:I am talking about royalty or is it a flat fee? From the very beginning that I discovered royalties in the 70’s it has always been fee plus a royalty—just as it is today. So again, the dollar amounts have changed but the formula has not changed. CALLER: What is the formula? DAN: The formula is a project fee plus a royalty. I am calculating the fee based on how many days I believe it will take me to do the project if I locked myself in a room and did nothing but that project. That is not, of course, how I do the work. I am figuring out—if this is going to take me 8 days, doing nothing but that, if it is 8 days—it is 8 times whatever my minimum fee is and that is the project fee. Then the royalty is between 3 and 7% depending on the product category. In hard product where they have low margins and high manufacture cost, I maybe at 3%. In soft product like seminars and information products where they have enormous margin, I may be at 7%. So there is a sliding scale where I set the royalty. That has always been arbitrary within that range. The formula has never changed. Just the collar amounts have changed. I always assume that the royalties are my get rich money; the fees are my wage money. I always assume that there will be no royalty. That is a happy thing when it happens—because again, there are too many ways the client can screw it up. I won’t do a project if I am not happy with the fee for the project. Then I hope for the royalties to grossly exceed the fee and to stretch out over a long period of time. A secondary issue is that I am trying not to get myself saddled with a client that I truly believe is so dysfunctional that they can’t implement at all. Every once in a while, you miss. My misses have been more with major corporations than with entrepreneurs. It is always fee plus—it is never royalty instead of fee. There are copywriters who do that, if that guy should do beat the control, they are all off the back end. So they only start getting paid if theirs becomes the new control. I don’t do it but there are guys who do it and do a lot of it. CALLER: You only do on money and not on mailing pieces?




DAN: Like use fees? For each piece they mail? CALLER: Yes DAN: I try to stay out of those games. We went over those different compensation structures on the first call. I prefer percentage of gross revenues. There are times when you can’t do it. Sometimes there are legal impositions in an industry where they literally can’t pay you a percentage of revenues—then you have to come up with a structure where they pay you by the lead, by the number of times the phone rings, the number by piece mailed. I have done infomercials in a couple of industries where there was no way I was going to get paid on gross revenues, so then I got use fees—where every time they aired the show they have to pay $75, that kind of thing. Lorrie, I think we can maybe squeeze in one more. CALLER: What you just said when you are calculating in your mind how long it is going to take you to finish a project in terms of the number of days, is your day like an 8hour , 10 hour day, or is that irrelevant? DAN: It is relevant to you—I think I terms of an 8 hour day. If I lock myself in a room for an 8 hour day, how many days would it take me to finish. LORRIE: One more? CALLER: You mentioned that you could take a piece like for jewelers in different cities—how do you do that on the web? Because there everybody can see everybody else’s work? Can you make packages of copy for websites? DAN: Sure. However, the way that is geographically licensed, it is more complicated than an answer that I can give you in a minute. Fundamentally, it means you have to control the sites themselves. For example, in a campaign that I just did—it is tied to one that I described in the financial advisor category—there is a national site with a name—this isn’t it but let’s say it’s the National Association of Certified Small Business Financial Advisors—there is a national site and within that there are state sites, and each participating individual site. A user is going to go down the tree to find them, and I am controlling the whole site. So you have licensed copy on a site that you are renting from me—and if you stop paying the monthly rent, you get disconnected and I resell it to somebody else in your area. So that is the way you play geography on the net. There is also industry to industry licensing, where you might be able to take the same copy you did for a dentist, tweak it slightly and use it for an optometrist and tweak that slightly and use it for a cosmetic surgeon—you might be able to license it industry by industry. I’m sorry, that’s real quick but I hope it is something you can use and find helpful.




CALLER: How do you change your contract? If you are going to resell an ad campaign, how do you deal with the client? Like the client says, well you are reselling that for $400 and DAN: Sorry—that’s business, you retain the rights to the work product outside his market area, or his niche, or his industry, however it is you are going to carve it up. CALLER: What if he complains that I charge him a $1000 to create it personally and now I am selling it at $400—what if he complains about that? DAN: Read your contract sir. I retain the rights to the work product. LORRIE: We are out of time. Dan, thank you very much for doing this. You have done a great service to us copywriters. I will be sending everyone a summary of the call, the audio will be up tomorrow, and the transcript will be ready within a week. Do stop by www.red-hot-copy.com/dan.htm to see what is up there. Thanks everyone. DAN: Thanks a lot gang. Good night.

dan kennedy class two - running a successful copywriting business

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