The eternal truths of direct marketing

Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. It is, of course, home of the ambitious upstart, which means that we’ve got an audience of people who just love business so much that they’re here listening to me spend about an hour with entrepreneurs and business people talking about how they built their businesses and looking for ideas that we can use to grow ours.

I didn’t just start out like this when I started the podcast. I was hungry like this even when I was a kid. If you went into my garage right now, you’d see boxes and boxes and boxes of books. In fact, if you go back and watch my old interviews, you’ll see some of them over my shoulder. They’re now in boxes in the garage here. In one of those boxes is a collection of big black books that are like–I don’t even know how to describe them. They’re giant.

I remember not just reading them, but even more than reading them, I remember the ads that got me to buy them and the anticipation of having them come in the mail. It was the ads with one-sentence teasers of what you could learn and then after each sentence, the page number of where you could go and learn it. The ones that I remember were just about business. I remember holding those pieces of paper until the book came so that I could finally, finally get my curiosity satisfied about how this business tip was going to unfold.

Well, the man behind that is with us here today. He’s actually behind that and so many other pieces of copy. He is Brian Kurtz. He is the guy responsible for taking the company behind those books–Boardroom Inc. is what it was called at the time–he took it to a high of $160 million. He currently runs Titans Marketing. It’s an educational consulting business that teaches direct response marketing.

But frankly, over the years, what he’s doing now, what he’s done before is direct–he’s practicing and teaching direct marketing’s eternal truths. The stuff that worked for him back then still works today and long after he’s dead and I hope I never die, but if I do die, it will still work. And I want to find out how he grew that business, the logic behind that company. I also want to hear some of these eternal marketing truths that you and I could use tomorrow and maybe even within this interview.

It’s all thanks to two great sponsors that you’ve heard me talk about a lot because they keep buying ads because these ads are working for them. The first is a company that will host your website and do a phenomenal job of doing it. You’re going to want to fire your current hosting company and switch to HostGator. And the second is going to help you hire your next great developer or designer. I’ll tell you more about them later. For now, you should know they’re called Toptal.

Brian, let’s jump into it. Good to have you on here.

Brian: My pleasure. I’ve been an admirer of Mixergy for a long time. One of the better–there are so many great podcasts out there and you guys have really stood the test of time.

Andrew: Thank you.

Brian: That’s obviously a testament to you.

Andrew: Thank you. Do you remember what those little teasers were? You called them fascinations.

Brian: Yes.

Andrew: What are one or two business-related that maybe stand out?

Brian: Well, the business ones were actually less interesting. There were all kinds. We did books in business. We did books in consumer areas like taxes and then we got into the consumer business, which we can talk about. They were all fascinating because they were all fascinations.

Andrew: What are some of them? What are some of those little teases that got me and so many others?

Brian: I remember there was one–I want to give you one. There was a book that we had called “The Book of Secrets,” which was similar to the big black book that’s sitting in your basement or your garage. In “The Book of Secrets,” we were having a hard time making this book work.

It was actually finding four amazing fascinations to put on the outer envelope of that book that went from disaster book that was a loser to becoming one of our biggest winners of all time. Some of them, there was one–I think the first one was how to get a refund on a non-refundable airline ticket. We had how to avoid a mugger in a self-service elevator. We had how to know when a slot machine is ready to pay off. The anticipation obviously was incredible.

It was actually a format of writing that goes back to the 1950s and 60s by some great copywriters, one by the name of Ralph Ginzburg and another by the name of Mel Martin, who was very not well known at all who became our in house copywriter for many year. They also learned from one of the masters of all time named Eugene Schwartz, who wrote one of the greatest books of all time on the topic of advertising called “Breakthrough Advertising.”

So, we were kind of students of all of that. I wasn’t around then. I started in the company in 1981. But even in the ’70s, when the company was started in ’72, Marty Edelston who was the founder had been studying those copywriters and that kind of a format and to this day, some of the best copywriters in the world today teach their young copy cubs about how to write fascinations first before they teach them how to write narrative copy, which is kind of interesting.

Andrew: Why?

Brian: Because I think what happens is–Gene Schwartz, he didn’t write copy but he assembled copy. What he meant by that is that Gene would go in, like with us, he would have a health book, for example, and he was going to write copy for us. He would read the book, absorb the book and then look at the book and then he would start pulling out–basically the book has all the answers, right? But what are the questions that got you there? And being able to figure out what the curiosity might be that someone would want to go to this book–the book itself, sometimes the answers were way less interesting than the fascination.

One of our most famous fascinations of all time, which a lot of people know if they followed our stuff over the years was what never to eat on an airplane. We had a control package, meaning a winning package for one of our newsletters for many, many years. The answer to that question is actually nothing. You’re not supposed to eat while you’re flying.

Andrew: Really?

Brian: Yeah. It’s all about your blood sugar and whatever. So, the answer is not all that exciting. That’s the answer and it’s from a study.

Andrew: But the question just gets you so curious. Even as a kid, I wasn’t buying airline tickets, let alone wanting to get the refunded, the how to get a refund on an un-refundable airline ticket just meant like I had some kind of superpower that if I ever needed it, I’d be able to draw on it and exercise it.

The business actually, I want to get into the business and then I want to spend some time on marketing techniques that have worked for you. The business, as you said, was started by Marty Edelston. What was the idea behind the business?

Brian: Yeah. So, Marty was a voracious reader of business books and he was involved in direct response advertising for magazines, all different kinds of magazines back in the 1960s. He just loved reading business books and he always felt that books were where he got the most information because when he read the magazines–that time, there was still Businessweek, Fortune, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal–that when he read those, they really didn’t tell you how to run your business, how to hire, how to fire, how to really get into the nuts and bolts of your business.

So, he said “I want to go to the books.” He always thought that every business book had at least one chapter, not much more than that that was really worth reading. So, he wanted to become, in a way, the Readers Digest of business books, but he wanted to do it in a very intelligent way by interviewing the authors of those books, by getting into the nuts and bolts of what was in that book that was so valuable.

So, he developed a newsletter. Kitchen table startup, wanting to do this newsletter–he wanted to do a magazine but he couldn’t get the funding for a magazine in 1972 because he needed a lot more money. So, he launched the newsletter, newsletter meaning a magazine without advertising. So, he had to really make money in marketing and circulation. He called it Boardroom Reports.

It was a 16-page newsletter, no advertising, interviewed the best of the best. Marty had networked himself into all sorts of places through his advertising career and he just would go in–he’d interview Peter Drucker and interviewed Norman Vincent Peale and just amazing people and all the best accountants and all the best lawyers and all the best financial people he could find in New York mostly, but all over the country. He developed this newsletter.

As he started moving the business–and the business started growing. I got there in 1981. It was about 9 years old. Boardroom Reports had maybe 150,000 subscribers and he started doing some business books, sort of the like the big black book in your garage.

Andrew: And the business books were summaries of what was in the newsletters, some of the best of the best of the newsletters.

Brian: Yeah, greatest hits, absolutely. I remember there was one book when I got to Boardroom in 1981. It was called “The Book of Business Knowledge,” BOBK. BOBK was basically greatest hits from Boardroom Reports over the last few years, updated and all that. They were big. As you said, these books, I used to say we’d sell books by the pound. These were 400-500-page books, all just packed with information, indexed in all different topics, whether it was business taxes, employee relations, whatever.

So, the business was kind of focused on that. he did some stuff on estate planning. We had some books on tax planning for businesses. Then he came up with the idea and said, “All these people who are getting this newsletter on how to run their business better, they all have personal lives and they all need to know the best consumer information.” He was very unhappy with what was out there for people. There was no internet. The internet is tough too because you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad.

So, he said, “I’m going to do another newsletter.” And he called it Bottom Line Personal. Bottom Line Personal was–Boardroom Reports was to the executive at business and Bottom Line Personal was the executive at home. Bottom Line Personal very quickly eclipsed Boardroom Reports in circulation size, in where it was going. Then we started doing a lot of health information and Bottom Line Personal developed a health newsletter and the whole business kind of shifted.

I think the lesson here is that you go where the puck is going to be as opposed to where you think you thought you were going to go. He saw the ability for us to be a health and consumer publisher to be the way to grow this business rather than being a business publisher.

Andrew: You guys eventually were doing ads on television, I think maybe even the Wall Street Journal there were ads, but at heart, you were direct marketers, right? Buying lists–I think I read that you considered yourself an expert list buyer. That’s one of your superpowers.

Brian: Yeah. But it’s all related, Andrew. When I said I’m a serial direct marketer and I never medium I didn’t like, every media we go to, whether it’s TV, whether it’s space advertising in newspapers or magazines or direct mail or now the internet, it’s all direct response marketing to me.

So, even when the ads you saw on TV were in the mid-2000s where we did a health book with Hugh Downs, the legendary newscaster, that was a $200+ million franchise and all of the techniques we used in those TV spots believe it or not were fascinations. They were all the things that we did in direct mail back in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s and the same was true when you saw our ads in the Wall Street Journal or in newspapers or in inserts in bank statements.

Andrew: Really?

Brian: It was all the same kind of fascinations.

Andrew: You just kept looking, “Where can we find another channel that still gives us all the features of direct marketing? We need to know who we’re reaching and we need to know how well the ad is doing.” By the way, I see a lot of podcasters use fascinations to promote their interviews with you or just any interviews. They’ll say something like, “The one thing you shouldn’t eat on airplane–listen to minute 8:12 of the interview,” etc.

Brian: Yeah.

Andrew: Let’s get into how you put together this book with Hugh Downs. Is that the book that you were up late night watching Kevin Trudeau sell on an infomercial? What did Kevin Trudeau sell in an infomercial?

Brian: Yeah. So, Kevin Trudeau was–I basically wanted to be–this is a 20-year story which I’ll condense to a couple of minutes–but it was 20 years I always wanted to be on TV. I never met a medium I didn’t like.

Andrew: When you say you wanted to be on TV, do you mean you personally wanted to be on TV?

Brian: No, our products. I thought it was a medium that was so perfect for us and yet it was hard because we didn’t have a brand that people knew. So, back in the 80s when I started and we were one of the best direct mail companies, we couldn’t go on TV like Money Magazine or Time Magazine or Sports Illustrated because they had a brand people knew. You could do a two-minute spot on TV for one of those magazines and it was immediately recognizable. You could sell subscriptions very easily on TV. It became another source for those magazines.

I wanted to do that. I had TV envy. I wanted to sell our books and our newsletters on TV. So, I tried a lot of different two-minute TV, never got it to work because I couldn’t tell my story in two minutes because we had a bigger story to tell. People didn’t know who Boardroom was, who Bottom Line was. We had these consumer books. No one knew who we were.

So, fast forward to the late 80s when infomercials became popular–the first one that I remember seeing was Tony Robbins. I said, “Wow, Tony Robbins is selling this whole thing with books and VHS tapes,” the “Master Your Life” series. “We help consumers master their life. Let’s do it.” I met with Guthy and Renker of Guthy Renker, the big infomercial. We never got to a point where we could do a show. I couldn’t come up with the right idea, kind of let it sit. But I always had this like TV envy.

Fast forward again, 2004, I’m up late at night. I’m watching TV and then Kevin Trudeau comes on selling the book, “What They Don’t Want You to Know.” It’s all this stuff that’s like Boardroom-type stuff. I don’t know if Kevin’s backing this stuff up or not. Kevin was a master salesman. He ended up going to jail at some point.

Andrew: I know. He did. He was a guy who I watched as a kid do memory CDs using the same standard memory stuff that you hear from everyone else. But he was on all the time. Then he got this book about this health stuff. Like you were saying, it was like this collection of small tidbits of what you should do to be healthier. Like you said, he ended up in jail at some point.

Brian: He wasn’t backed up by docs. There were a lot of claims he was making. You can get away with it because we have free speech in this country, thank goodness. The Second Amendment rights–the First Amendment rights, not the Second Amendment. I keep saying Second Amendment because I’m watching the…

Andrew: Yeah, politics all over the news.

Brian: The election so much. So, he was protected by being able to say almost anything. But I’m watching this and then I’m thinking, “Wow, he’s got 28.5 minutes there to do this infomercial.” That’s the kind of format on TV that I needed to be able to sell my product because I had a long story to tell. My direct mail was very long. I had 12-page letters, 24-page letters, very long direct mail because I was building the story with fascinations, with the background on the company. It’s almost like a short letter is to two minute as a long letter would be to 28.5-minute TV.

So, I saw the way to get into TV. It was infomercials. But we did it our way. We didn’t do it the Kevin Trudeau way. What I mean by that is that we didn’t sell like all kinds of third-party products on the back end. We sold other books from us that we published. We had a three-year run on TV. We were one of the top infomercial advertisers with a book called, “World’s Greatest…”

Andrew: But the thing that I think is interesting is you saw what he did and you said, “We can do the same thing.” Didn’t you go and write a book just so you can have something like that?

Brian: I had a book in direct mail called “The Treasury of Health Secrets,” which was a big one of these 600-page books with all these tidbits.

Andrew: Okay.

Brian: So, we had the book, but what we did is we adapted it to TV by saying how will we be able to without using the typical type of fascinations we could use with direct mail, how would that translate to TV? The way we translated it to TV was the experts. So, we went to the people who had the answers in the books who were all doctors for the most part and we went around the country interviewing them and we got like a snippet from each one of them saying with a plaque behind them–Stanford University, Harvard Medical School.

These were like some of the best doctors in the world, the exact opposite of what Trudeau was doing. He was saying off the top of his head, “We have the goods.” And then the doctor would be looking into the camera saying, “I’ve been doing research on Alzheimer’s for years. We’ve finally identified the molecule and you can read about it on page 67 in the ‘World’s Greatest Treasury of Health Secrets.'”

Andrew: I see.

Brian: So, we took everything we learned and we adapted it to the medium, but we didn’t really write the book for TV. It was basically a direct mail book that we adapted what we had and made it an amazing run. Getting Hugh Downs was awesome. Talk about getting a spokesperson.

Andrew: What did it cost you to get Hugh Downs?

Brian: It wasn’t a lot. He was already retired at the time. We paid him a royalty. We paid him something on sales.

Andrew: When we’re talking about not a lot, are we talking about $50,000? Hugh Downs used to do–

Brian: It was less than that. But it was probably more than $20,000, less than $50,000. But it was also against a royalty. So, we had to pay him for his time and his effort and a sitting fee and all of that. He’s a wonderful man, too. And then the interesting thing is that we had him interviewing in the show, if anybody remembers the shows, they’re available somewhere. He was interviewing a guy by the name of Arthur Johnson. Arthur Johnson is actually a direct response copywriter.

Andrew: Okay.

Brian: He had written the direct mail package for the book. Now, when we put Arthur Johnson’s title–obviously Hugh Downs, legendary newscaster, under Arthur Johnson, under his name, under his picture we wrote on the screen, it said, “Medical writer and editor.” And I’ve got to tell you, I did not lose one minute of sleep because I wrote that.

The reason is because Arthur Johns on did more studying of health information. He read the book cover to cover–remember I said Gene Schwartz assembled copy because Gene Schwartz read the book cover to cover and knew exactly what was in it? Arthur Johnson knew more about the information and the advice in that book that any doctor would have–

Andrew: Because he wrote it and researched it.

Brian: That’s right.

Andrew: Did he write it because he assembled it?

Brian: He helped assemble the book. He said, “I want to have an article about X. Let’s go find the doctor who can find us the article about X and put it in the book.”

Andrew: I’m just surprised that Hugh Downs would be willing to do something like that. You’re talking about an anchor man, like you said, legendary anchor man. I didn’t even know that he was on the Today Show, right?

Brian: 1964 with Barbara Walters.

Andrew: I just happened to be listening to Barbara Walters biography and I heard that, and then of course 20/20. The fact that you then get to take all the credibility that he’s built up over the years and just for just a few thousand dollars get him on camera leading this and adding that credibility to your product…

Brian: Here’s the lesson, the lesson for anybody with a product or service or anybody that wants to go to market–you’ve got to love what you do and you’ve got to be proud of what you do. He saw what Boardroom was doing. He saw the quality of our editorial, that we had these real doctors. For him to look into the camera–he didn’t want to do the sales pitch. That was something he didn’t want to do. Arthur did that.

But Arthur looked into the camera many times during the show saying, “I can’t believe Boardroom got these doctors to come on, on their own time and their own dime. I didn’t pay any of them to say those things and to be part of the Boardroom medical team, like the greatest medical team ever assembled was assembled by this little publisher in Connecticut. How did they do it?” So, Hugh had to be sold by use that he would do it. So, there was a long process that got him.

Andrew: You mentioned plaques on the walls. I’m going to come back and ask you what’s behind you on your walls because I think it’s kind of interesting. But first, I have to talk about my sponsor and my sponsor is a company called HostGator. Let me ask you how you would do this, Brian. You’re an incredible marketer. Here’s my sponsor, HostGator. They do web hosting, fantastic uptime, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited email addresses. How do you sell something like that?

Brian: How do I…? So, very important–I think that there’s a perception in a lot of online vendors of sorts, we’ll call them an online vendor, that it’s commoditized and that everybody sort of does the same thing. This one sends out email. This one does web hosting. This one does that. So, how to sell it is obviously differentiation. So, you have to figure out how HostGator–HostGator?

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: How they differentiate from the competition is the first thing I would do. If I was a copywriter, I would spend time with all the people in that company, not just the people who run the company, I want to talk to the people, the developers, the customer service people, the people who have heard all the complaints but all the good news about the company. I want to know all the testimonials of satisfied customers.

I want to look at everything about them and then figure out why would I–I’m a candidate to be their customer. I have a web hosting service. It’s not them. But you’re getting me interested now. If they’re hosted on this show, that gets my interest too. The fact that they’re going to be affiliated with you, they’re choosing their partners wisely because they’re on a great podcast, but I think it’s all about differentiation.

It’s all about taking commodity and making it specialty. That’s why I think the phone companies have such a hard time. How do you differentiated between Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile?

Andrew: I’m finally switching to T-Mobile, largely because their CEO’s personality made me reconsider them.

Brian: Right.

Andrew: And of course I discovered all the other features that I like about them. You’re right. Here’s what I did. I started talking to the people at HostGator. I even asked to talk to their customers, just one on one without HostGator paying attention to me. There was this one woman who was so interesting that I actually recorded her and I played two minutes of my conversation with her in one of my past interviews.

The reason I did it is she setup with HostGator a website for one of her clients. The client had some trouble–I’m hoping I remember all the details right–but essentially what it was, was the client had some trouble. She started calling up tech support.

Tech support, which ordinarily would blow people off and say, “Go read the manual, go read the website or deal with it. you’re just paying for hosting, not paying for us to do tech support on your site,” stayed on the phone with her for over an hour working through this problem, trying to figure out what kept the website from operating properly. She said that no other hosting company gave her this kind of tech support help.

Brian: Yeah. I think the personalized service is huge.

Andrew: Huge. There’s no way that they made money on her because frankly, I’m looking at HostGator.com/Mixergy now. Their packages start from $4.87 a month. There’s no way. I think they just lost money on her, but that’s the way that they do business.

Brian: It’s a long view. That’s the other thing. I’d want to sell a company like that on the long view. There’s a guy in my mastermind group that’s also in a much more commoditized area in terms of merchant services. I keep telling them–it’s funny that you mention this one on one phone call. I said, “Do you call your best customers on a regular basis to check in?” And these are higher ticket.

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: It’s amazing how people don’t do that. The fact that these guys were able to do that is pretty incredible.

Andrew: Here’s the thing. We’re still in the sponsorship message and I want to break out of it in a moment. Here’s the thing about that. Tech support is insanely helpful when your site goes down and you need somebody to talk to, when you’re having trouble setting it up and you need someone to talk to.

But Brian, when someone decides which web host to go with, they’re not thinking about the disaster scenario of the site going down. They’re not think about what happens when they’re setting it up and they can’t get the thing right. They’re assuming it will all work out. They’re thinking about price and maybe they’re thinking of one or two other little features that seem important but probably aren’t.

So, how do you, taking it away from just HostGator–how do you take an issue that’s really critical that doesn’t matter to the customer at the moment that they’re deciding whether to buy and make it important?

Brian: Yeah. We call it how do you make episodic marketing work? So, the example is I always talk to people who have like a used car lot, for example. I’m not equating HostGator with used cars. But if you have a used car lot and you send out a postcard every week of what’s on the lot, you’re only going to get somebody to come to your lot when they’re ready to buy a used car.

However, if you can get them to opt in to your list as a car expert–so, for example, I told these guys to send out a mailing, a postcard that says, “Opt in to our list and find out the five things you need,” fascinations, “Five things you need to know when you’re buying a used car.” They go on your list, they download this free special report, no advertisement. Now I’ve just given you incredibly valuable content. Now you’re on my list and I start blogging to you every week. Every week I give you another piece of information. How do you know when the car dealer is trying to rip you off, three telltale signs–see page whatever.

Andrew: I see what you’re saying.

Brian: At the end of that, when you decide to sell them later on, where are they going to go when they’re ready to buy a used car? Are they going to go to the one that’s got the credibility, going back to the Hugh Downs credibility argument? Same thing.

So, you can’t make the sale like it’s . . . Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook,” right? You’ve got to keep jabbing at people in a good way, without making them bleed, but giving them great content. It’s content marketing. And the internet enables you to do that. Then when they’re ready, when they’re ready, they’re coming to you. So, you can’t expect to make that sale right away every time. I think list building is everything. I came out of the list business.

Andrew: I wonder why HostGator and my other sponsors don’t do that. They ask me to talk about the service and sign people up, but I think what they’re expecting is at any given moment, small percentage of people are ready to switch hosts. If we can just keep doing ads on Mixergy, we’ll keep reaching that small percentage whenever they’re ready and that’s how we’ll sign them up. I wonder why none of these sponsors is willing to do something like have me talk about their mailing list, get my audience to join their mailing list and then they have my audience for themselves to build a relationship.

Brian: I’ve got a better idea. They should give you a special report or a whitepaper.

Andrew: Right.

Brian: And you should offer the whitepaper on the interview and that would send them to the site. They get on the list. And as long as they don’t–if they bombard them, then people are going to unsubscribe anyway. Then it’s up to them.

Andrew: But it would be more interesting if I can say to people, “There’s a way of keeping your WordPress website up. Here’s what you need to do. Here are the nine plugins we recommend you install on your website.”

Brian: Yeah. Give me a fascination. Write a fascination, Andrew, go ahead.

Andrew: I can do it. The nine plugins that you have to have on your WordPress website, the one plugin that will get more people to go to URL anytime.

Brian: Bingo.

Andrew: You can do that. I think what it is, is that they’re getting so much bang for their buck for podcast ads–largely for Mixergy and we charge much more than others on a CPM basis, for sure, but also from podcasting in general that they just can buy their ads and all they want to be is in the ad buying world, where they just buy an ad and convert people to customers. Frankly it’s working. So, I can’t be upset.

Brian: No. The other piece of it is that I think the test would take a while. For example, let’s say they gave you the special report, they get on their list. They’re not going to know for six months whether that was better than what they’re doing already. The difference will be, I guarantee you, that the people that end up signing up from them after reading their content, being engaged with them, they will have a higher lifetime value.

I learned even to this day, despite the fact that direct mail is not as big as it was and the internet is everything, if an internet marketer learns how to do direct mail and they get people to come on to their list via content and they stay on their list because they read more before they came on the list, then they sign up, that customer will always have a higher lifetime value.

Ask any direct marketer, any copywriter. They will tell you that yes, you’ll get sales cheaply on the internet and they’ll be good, but you can get even people that will stick with you a lot longer and be much more loyal to you if you get them from other mediums.

Andrew: I get it. I guess what they’re thinking is Andrew is going to be our content creator. We’re going to keep paying Andrew month to month to month and he’ll keep entertaining his audience and using Gary Vaynerchuk’s parlance, jab, jab, jab meaning give, give, give and then occasionally ask, which is that right hook.

So, they’re hoping I keep giving with these great interviews and at some point I do an ad and some number of people are going to go convert and I’m glad that people are. I think I just got an email from them yesterday saying, “Can we lock in 2017 before other people do?”

Brian: Oh my god.

Andrew: We keep selling out. I think we’re almost sold out for this year. Maybe we kept a couple in our pocket just in case for the last month of the year. But I’m glad that they’re doing well.

Brian: I’m going to tell you, I’m not just saying this, I’m going to look into them.

Andrew: HostGator?

Brian: Here’s why I would look into them. This is a good example, right? Credibility.

Andrew: Oh, I will tell you this. My audience knows my email address. They know my address physically. They will come to 201 Mission Street, 12th floor to complain if there’s a problem and I encourage them to. They know my email address is Andrew@Mixergy. They know if they sign up for HostGator and there’s any kind of problem–I’m not even talking shenanigans, there’s not going to be any of that–any kind of problem, they email me and I get livid. I jump in and I take care of it.

Brian: I’m a prospect now. You sold me anyway.

Andrew: Good. But don’t go to HostGator. Go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. If you go to HostGator, you’re going to see their regular prices. If you go to HostGator.com/Mixergy, you’re going to see the lower prices for me.

Let’s talk a little bit more about how you would market today in the digital world. To understand that, let me see. You are kind of marketing today. You’re marketing.

Brian: I do a ton online.

Andrew: You do a ton.

Brian: All of my consulting clients, everything I do in my masterminds, it’s much more online than off.

Andrew: What do you sell? You sell consulting. You sell masterminds.

Brian: I have two mastermind groups. I’m writing a book. I’ve got consulting clients who I work either one on one or in groups. Yeah. I’m doing a lot of work in the marketplace today and almost all of that is online.

Andrew: So, how much money are you making with Marketing Titans?

Brian: As a business?

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: It’s early stage, but right now it’s a very low seven-figure business.

Andrew: Actually I should call it Titans Marketing, right?

Brian: Right. As a consultancy, yeah, it’s not a huge thing. After running a very large business my whole life and being more of intrapreneur because Marty took me in early in my career and made me a partner in the business. So I’ve gone from intrapreneur to entrepreneur. It’s been a very interesting journey because–

Andrew: How long have you been doing this, Titans Marketing?

Brian: Only about a year and a half.

Andrew: A year and a half? And you already hit over $7 million? Where’s the bulk of it coming from? Excuse me, not over $7 million, over $1 million.

Brian: No.

Andrew: You’re doing what, $2 million I’m assuming, right?

Brian: No, no, no, a lot less than $2 million.

Andrew: A lot less than $2 million but over $1 million.

Brian: Yeah.

Andrew: Okay. So, you’re doing over $1 million within a year and a half. Where’s the bulk of it coming from?

Brian: It’s a combination. It’s split fairly evenly between a mastermind, a high-end mastermind group, a second group, which actually started as a live event and then went to a second group, which is more of a teaching group as opposed to a high end direct response marketing group. Then I’ve got at least a half a dozen large direct repose marketers who I have on a retainer who pay me on a monthly basis.

In some cases I’m earning equity over time as I perform. And then I haven’t made anything on my book yet, but I think the book will be a lead generator for building up my list. Plus, I did an epic event in September of 2014 with Boardroom before I left and then when I left, I had all those assets. I negotiate to keep all those assets.

Andrew: What’s the asset? You mean the recordings of the event?

Brian: Yeah, all the video from the two-day event, which had all the best speakers. The speakers at this event were Dan Kennedy and Gary Bencivenga and Jay Abraham and Joe Sugarman and Greg Renker, Perry Marshall. It was an amazing event. I have all the video from that. Plus I gave away–remember I mentioned before the greatest packages that Boardroom has ever done. I gave away all those swipe files for people to look at.

Andrew: You were telling this to me before you started recording. You’re saying you have somewhere a collection of all those ads that I’m talking about that got me hooked in. You’ve got them somewhere and people can use them as swipe files.

Brian: Correct. They can buy them. So, I can sell them. I have the rights. I used to be able to sell them digitally. Now I actually can sell them as hard copy. It’s 1,000 pages of PDFs of all of the best–I have basically every great fascination that we ever wrote that mailed–well, maybe not two billion pieces, but somewhere over 1.5 billion pieces.

Andrew: What happens if somebody sees one of those fascinations and says, “I want to get the book to understand the answer to what I shouldn’t eat on airplane.” Can they still do it?

Brian: Yeah. Most of those books don’t exist anymore, unfortunately. But we can probably find the answer somewhere.

Andrew: They can probably Google it today.

Brian: One of my favorites was we did an estate planning book. It was like, “What your lawyer will never tell you when you make out your will.”

Andrew: I was going to say you could Google all those answers, but that’s not the kind of thing you could Google.

Brian: No. You don’t know how accurate they’re going to be. That’s a problem with the internet, obviously.

Andrew: Well, it’s not even accurate or not. It’s the way that you’re framing the question, like what are the things that–he’s not going to tell me his Social Security number, right? He’s not going to tell me all kinds of stuff. It’s what do you mean that is so amazing that I need to know that I want.

Brian: I’ll tell you one quick little funny anecdote. We had a book called the book of inside information, which was a consumer version of the “Book of Business Knowledge.” So, it was the consumer book greatest hits. That book sold three million copies in direct mail, big 500-page hardcover book, over about five or six years, three million copies.

And I remember that we were sitting in a creative meeting once and someone said, “Let’s do the Book of Inside Information 2, the sequel.” We’re sitting around. We’re getting really excited. We’re going to do another “Book of Inside Information.” And I said, “I don’t know. The first book was like all secrets. If it’s such inside information, I don’t think we should make this so easy to get.” We started thinking about the logic that people go into in terms of buying “inside information.” It was a good title.

Andrew: I’m wondering about some of the marketing that you guys have used, like the survey gimmicky package that you told Jeremy, our producer about. What is that? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Brian: Yeah. So, basically what I talked about with Jeremy was this idea is–and this is true in offline and online. So, this is one of those eternal truths. How you market or how you sell is how your customer or prospect is going to respond.

So, for example, I’ll give you the two extremes. One extreme would be–I talked before about a promotion that was heavy copy, that the prospect had to read 24 pages. They were really engaged. That prospect may not respond in an impulsive way, so your response rate might not be as high on the front end, as we say, but then when we went and tried to get money from them, they would pay up at a higher rate because they were more engaged and when we went to them later one, these were per subscriptions, we would try to renew them.

When we renewed them, they would renew at a higher rate because they knew what they were getting all along, they were very engaged. So, you got how they were marketed to–

Andrew: No, how are they marketed to?

Brian: So, it was long copy–long, involved, heavy reader copy. So, they had to really engage in order to get to the point of buying which then got them to the point of renewing as well.

Andrew: I see.

Brian: The opposite would be something that would be like a sweepstakes, a contest, a survey, something really quick, something really impulsive. They fill the thing out. Then you sell them a trial subscription to something, they try it. But what they’re trying might not be directly related to all that copy that you just did because it was a sweepstakes. It was a contest. It was a survey.

So, therefore, that customer, my experience over 35 years–that customer, you may make money on that customer in the first year. They’re not going to renew at a higher rate as the one who started in a heavy reading, engagement capacity. So, the point is how you sell is how they respond and how they stay with you.

Andrew: I see. You’re saying even if I write something short and quick and get a customer, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be happier. It doesn’t mean they’re going to keep buying from me. It might mean the short stuff doesn’t work nearly as well.

Brian: It’s true. Now, you should always test everything. In online, there are certain situations where short copy can beat long copy. But for the most part–and most of the online folks I work with, we’re really trying to figure out ways–no copy can be too long or too short, just too boring. If you can write long copy that’s engaging, that people will stay with and then they buy, that is the ultimate.

So, most of my online clients, they’re trying harder and harder every day to figure out how to make long copy work, which sounds counterintuitive. It’s like, “Why don’t we get in and out, short copy, easy, we’ll get the order. Boom.” But, I think what’s happening today is that a lot of online marketers are realizing that lifetime value, how long someone stays with you, how many other products will they buy from you through an ascension model, is really where the money is made. It’s not made on the first sale.

Andrew: And it goes up if I get them to be engaged–but you know what? I’ve never read any of the long copy ends that I’ve seen online, not once. I’ll sometimes even Instapaper them to go read them later on and I don’t get to it. I either buy or I don’t. Are there people–am I such an anomaly that most people are actually reading every bit of this long copy?

Brian: The answer is yes, but of course video has changed everything too. So, I think what you find now are what we call the video sales letters that are really popular online are really the versions of a long sales letter in a video. And a lot of times they’re done as PowerPoints.

Andrew: And a lot of times I can’t even fast forward through them.

Brian: No. There’s no controls. That’s one of the techniques.

Andrew: Why? Who’s doing that? Who’s actually listening to this?

Brian: There’s a famous video sales letter called “The End of America” from Agora Publishing. That video sales letter I think has got to be at least 45 minutes. That video sales letter I think is responsible for $100 million or more in sales, probably more than that. So the answer is that a lot of people are listening, a lot of people are going to the end. Again, one sentence follows another.

Andrew: What’s the psychology then? We don’t even want them to leave. If they leave and decide they’re going to buy right now because they’re going to be so excited, then they’re not going to be good customers. We need them to listen.

Brian: It’s possible. I think the real reason is they might not have enough information yet. It’s all about storytelling. Storytelling is one of the key things in direct response marketing as it is in any kind of marketing. You’re building up a story–I found this in my infomercial business. If they went seven minutes in to go buy the book when they were ready to buy the book, they didn’t, in my opinion, have enough information, I haven’t given them enough that once they go to the sales page, they’re going to be like, “Maybe not.”

But if I can really work them up into a frenzy by the end of the sales page, not I’ve got them and in fact, we revolutionized this in the infomercial business. 28.5-minute infomercial–we did not have an offer for them to buy the book until somewhere around 24 minutes. There was nowhere for them to go. The story was so compelling that they were in a frenzy by the time they went to the end.

Now, it’s different if you have like exercise equipment where you can demonstrate it for seven minutes and then take them to an offer page. They kind of know what it is. But if you’re selling information, I think building up the story–so, the video sales letter to me is sort of an outgrowth of that type of infomercial where the storytelling really is the key.

Andrew: All right. My second sponsor is a company called Toptal. They’re a network of developers and now designers too. You call them up and you get it. Here’s the thing that I noticed, Brian, that they did for growing their business. They did an event here in San Francisco. Now, buying an ad here on Mixergy, much cheaper than doing an event. But they got space. They brought in speakers. They asked me if I would come in and volunteer to be the moderator, which I did. They filled the space up with all potential customers.

And they basically said, “Andrew, don’t sell Toptal. Just talk about hiring in general. We just want to bring these people in who are trying to hire to talk about how all these companies are hiring.” That was it. There was no sale at the end. I don’t even know if people really truly knew that it was Toptal that was organizing it and not necessarily one of–well, I guess they did because the host was from Toptal. What do you think of that as a sales technique?

Brian: I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s similar to what we talked about before in terms of content marketing because basically what they’re doing is they’re establishing their credibility at a very high level. They’re giving everybody incredible value in content. I would bet that at the end of that conference if they didn’t sell anything, people were probably asking, “Where do I go to find out more about this? Where do I go to be able to cash in one what you’ve taught me today?”

I do think though in that situation, it sounds like there should be some sales pitch of some sort at the end just because it’s almost your obligation to say, “Look, if you like what you heard, come get us,” kind of thing.

Andrew: I wonder if what was happening is–I don’t know exactly what they did, but I wonder if the organizer who works at Toptal was then following up with each person who came individually to say, “What did you think? Did you get what you wanted out of the event? How is your hiring going? By the way, it was good to see you, but we didn’t get a chance to have a drink, so I thought maybe I’d check in.”

Brian: What’s their average customer wroth, do you think? A new customer for that kind of business is probably pretty high, right?

Andrew: Probably, yes.

Brian: So, they could probably afford–I love that approach very much.

Andrew: That high-touch. Yeah.

Brian: Yeah. Nice. Do you know they did that for a fact?

Andrew: Talked to everyone individually?

Brian: Yeah.

Andrew: I don’t know for a fact, but here’s what I did notice. I talked to as many people as I could. If I’m moderating, I want to know who’s listening to my interview. Almost every single one of them knew this guy who was organizing the event or came as a direct or indirect relationship with him. It wasn’t like they were just brought in off the street or from an ad.

Brian: Interesting. Real qualified audience. Yeah.

Andrew: Very, very qualified. They thought very highly of this guy. I get it. he’s like a likable nerd, I would say. He feels like he could just code with us. He feels like he could just hang out with us. But he also would remember your mother’s name and she had a back injury last week without having to write it down. It feels like that’s who he was. So, I think that was his angle on it.

All right. The spot here is for Toptal. You guys already know. I’ve talked about them forever. They’re a network of developers and designers. If you’re looking to hire someone to build your website, to code up your new app, to add to your current team, you should go check them out.

There’s one thing that I learned from them that I didn’t know about Toptal before this. That is there are a lot of dev shops, shops of developers who don’t have, say, an Android developer on hand because they don’t have enough business to keep someone full time as an Android developer. What they do is they work with Toptal. And then when they need an Android developer, Toptal gives them an Android developer who basically acts like he is part of this dev shop and often interacts directly with their client.

I think that there are going to be these groups of dev shops and creative agencies where many of the people who work at the agencies, many of the people who work at the dev shops actually don’t fully work for the company because the company doesn’t want to keep all these different skills on hand. They don’t want to do all the hiring and all the paperwork involved with it. So, they’re outsourcing to Toptal because they know that Toptal gives them the best of the best people. It’s one of the ways that I’ve seen them do it. So many other ways to do it.

Go check them out at Toptal.com/Mixergy. You’ll be surprised when you add that /Mixergy at the end by what they’re offering Mixergy people. So, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy.

You’ve been watching, Brian, a lot of online marketers today. What are some of the things that you watch them do that you feeling like, “Ugh, this is just a dumbass thing. We’ve got to stop you from doing it?” I mean the good ones, not the dumbasses, but the people who are smart but are still making stupid mistakes. What are some mistakes that you’re seeing?

Brian: Well, it’s a broad thing. I think there’s a rule of thumb in direct response marketing that the success of the campaign is what we call a 40-40-20 rule. So 40% of the success is based on the list that you go to, 40% is based on the offer that you make, and 20% is based on the creative and the promotion.

Now, that makes it sound like, “Well, the creative is not that important.” That’s not true. But the rule of thumb in direct marketing is that you could take very limited creative or very non-developed creative and if it’s going to the perfect list that is so targeted and is the perfect avatar, demographic, whatever, you’re going to make some money. You’re going to make some sales. But the opposite is not true. If you go to the wrong list of customers with the wrong offer with the creative written by the best copywriter that ever lived, no one is going to buy a thing.

So, what the mistake is that I think that because many online marketers–not all. I hang out with some of the best in the world. This is not like me condemning and being Grandpa in the back of the room saying the online marketers don’t know what they’re doing. By no means am I saying that. But what I do see a lot of is the fact that they don’t pay a lot of attention to the creative because they don’t really have to and because the affiliate marketing world has enabled people to be a little bit lazy with their creative.

What I mean by that is that if you and I both are in businesses together where your audience would be good for my products, you’re going to do an affiliate mailing for me. You’re going to endorse my product and me and everything I do. I don’t have to do very much. You’re going to send out an email. I’m going to make a lot of sales and I’m done.

But the ones that really take it up that next level even in an affiliate thing would be I would give you all of this great swipe copy that would be about things that you never would have thought of to talk about, that I actually went to a copywriter who researched my product or service at such a deep level and then I gave it to you, so now you sold much more to your list.

Andrew: I see.

Brian: So, I think that there’s a laziness among the inexperienced online marketer that creative doesn’t mean that much and if you have a really cool flashy red box on a squeeze page, it’s good enough.

I think what I’ve also found is that the people who I respect the most are coming to me and saying, “Brian, do you know some good copywriters that I could hire maybe full-time in house to help me write in my voice so that I could take myself out of the muck of writing all this copy but I could oversee it since it’s my product or my service and I could upgrade and take my game up to the next level. I know how to do list building. I know how to get an audience. I know how to do offers. But I could step up my game on creative.”

What I found, you look at a guy like Ramit Sethi, I’m not sure if he’s somebody that you’ve interviewed.

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: I’m sure he’s been talked about on your show and somebody I really look up to. He’s always invested so much in having people around him that he works with on his copy. There are a lot of guys like that and gals. Those are the ones that I think have taken their internet marketing businesses from good to great.

Andrew: You’re saying they’re not doing their own writing anymore. They’re bringing somebody else in to help with the writing and often even get them started so they’re not sitting with a blank piece of paper. They’re maybe doing an interview. I’ve done that, where I’m interviewed, somebody writes it down and then I add some changes and then it’s good to go in my voice because it’s based on me. You’re saying that’s what they need to do.

Brian: They need to do it and they also need to–the training period is not six hours. There’s one company I consult with that basically brings in in-house copywriters to write in the voices of their various gurus. It’s in the investment category. Basically anywhere from six months to two years, that new copywriter never gets to write copy.

Andrew: Really?

Brian: They teach them how to do research. They teach them how to really get down deep. Now, they write pieces of copy. Maybe they write fascinations. They write pieces of copy, but then they start getting the skills, so they basically start working their way up.

By the time they’re trying to write in some gurus voice, they’ve had that really long training period and as you just said, now you’ve got a situation where the guru is really happy with the voice they see because it’s their voice and when they copy cheat, like you put the icing on the cake, that’s a lot less of your time and you might end up with a much better production the end.

Andrew: I remember being so turned off by all that, the idea that they’re not writing their own stuff. Every word is not being written by them and then I read a book on Johnny Carson. I said, “I’m doing interviews. I should actually see what other people had done before.”

I remember reading about how Johnny Carson was shocked about how the people he was watching on television weren’t writing all their stuff. They were reading it or telling other jokes that there was a team of writers in that back that wrote. I thought, “That’s so silly, Johnny Carson.” Then I realized maybe for his time that must have been shocking, just like for my time now to know some of the stuff other people are posting wasn’t written by them.

Brian: I still think you’ve got to put your personal stamp on it and you’ve got to really make sure that–

Andrew: I do too. But how do you it in less than, as you were saying, a year and a half of talking with this person and training them? I don’t think most people can afford to wait a year and a half. The whole business might change and they may not even need the writer in a year.

Brian: In this particular case, they have such a stable now of writers they can wait because they have some that are already up to speed. I think if you’re starting out, it would be a tough thing to do. It doesn’t have to take that long. It can be three to six months. Someone has really got to spend time. You’ve got to make sure that it’s the right person. You don’t want to be dancing with somebody. You’re getting married. Having that in house copywriter who becomes part of the business and a partner in the business, all of a sudden they become a co-guru of sorts.

Andrew: Yeah. They’re like your brain. It’s like Gary Vaynerchuk–again, speaking of him–I asked him, “You didn’t write your book. Who wrote it?” He talked about the woman who wrote it. But it was him on a call with her talking into a recording and then her taking it and writing it and they’ve been working together for years.

Brian: Going back to Marty Edelston and Gene Schwartz, the first promotion which is in that swipe file for Boardroom Reports back in 1972 came out of an interview that Gene Schwartz, the copywriter, had with Marty. So, people said, “Gene, that was the most brilliant piece of copy you ever wrote. He goes, “I didn’t write it. My client wrote it.”

He was interviewing Marty and Marty said, “What is this newsletter? What is this thing going to be?” He said, “Yeah, you’re going to be able to read 300 business magazines in 30 minutes and get the guts of each.” Boom. Gene Schwartz had his headline. It came from a client who was not a copywriter.

Andrew: How do we get some of this copy that you’ve written?

Brian: Well, the Boardroom copy would be available–it’s part of a bigger package of all the Titans stuff, which includes interviews, includes the DVDs of the event. I only have a very small quantity of that left. I don’t know if I’m going to go back and reprint it. But it’s a $2,000 package of–

Andrew: Why don’t you put one or two of them online for people to go see?

Brian: I have done it in my blog. If people sign up for my blog, I actually have–

Andrew: You do this via email, right?

Brian: I do it through email. That is correct. I have an email blog that I do once a week, not every week, but I often put copy on there. I think that’s a good idea, actually. I might take one of the mailing pieces and put it up there. I also did things like I was talking about infomercials in one of my blogs and I took the session from my Titans event where I interviewed Greg Renker on stage and I gave it away. Talk about giving away content. I gave away one of the 12 DVDs basically for free.

Andrew: I see. I want to know more. What’s one thing that’s worked for one of your clients today? These guys are paying you a lot. They want your best stuff. What’s one thing that’s worked for them?

Brian: Let me think of some of the ones that have been really good… One of them–well, that wouldn’t be for most people who are listening. One person in the health business wanted to get a wide variety of copy because they had multiple products. So, they started researching like all the best writers and they put them up against each other. That’s sort of the idea, again, of really investing in creative. So, that was a really big one. I’m trying to think of the people in my mastermind group, some of the things that–

Andrew: Did you have anything–

Brian: Memberships–I think the idea of turning the idea that instead of selling products, the idea of selling a membership and watching what people are doing with the continuity. To me, selling a book was great. Selling a subscription was far more satisfying because now you had not only the responsibility of keeping people engaged for a longer period of time, but they needed to stay with you and it wasn’t just a one-shot deal. I think that’s been a big thing.

I think also one of the things that I’m doing in my teaching is really creating an environment in a mastermind group where you can do hot seats for people that are really mind-blowing in terms of their business. I think people take those things–they don’t take them as seriously. If someone is in a room kind of spilling their guts about their business, about what their biggest challenge is, to have a structure in place so that everybody in the room can participate in helping them, but you need a structure to do that.

One of the things I’ve done, I’ve developed a hot seat methodology that I think gets more out of 15-minutes than most people would get out of a hot seat for an hour because I want to be able to do a lot of them for a lot of people.

Andrew: What’s the methodology?

Brian: Methodology is a couple of things. One is that if you’re on the hot seat and you have a challenge for a room, that you don’t tell the people what it is. You have a partner that does it for you in the room. People, when they’re talking about their own problems or their challenges, they’ll spend more time explaining it and getting involved in details that people in the room don’t need to know to be able to help you.

Andrew: So, you have someone else say what it is.

Brian: Say what it is–and you have to narrow it down to one or two maximum three questions that you want answered, very specific, very succinct. And then another thing you do is if you have the right room of amazing people that are giving them advice, meaning if you’ve assembled–the best things about Masterminds is when you put the right people in the room.

So, you have this amazing room that everybody’s not going to participate on everybody’s hot seat. So, hands are going up and people are talking and hopefully someone is recording on a smartphone for the person on the hot seat.

But at the end of every hot seat, I require–people have to take a pledge at my mastermind–that they have to fill out what I call a Titangram. The Titangram basically says that even if I didn’t raise my hand or have an idea, if I heard something during that hot seat that I think would be the biggest idea, I would let the person know. So, plus one on Andrew’s idea regarding X, so then it comes back to the person and they start seeing three or four of those.

Now, when I go back home, when I’m inundated with all these ideas and I don’t know what to do first, there are like six people in this room who are brilliant who all agreed that that would have been the number one thing to do, now I’m going to take it more seriously.

Andrew: Got it.

Brian: So, you get a lot more bang for your buck, as it were, out of a room of–

Andrew: And it doesn’t force everyone to come up with an answer. You’re right. If you have a mastermind where one person is bringing up their problem and you have ten people sitting around. Not all ten are going to have answers that are good and are worthwhile, but if you’re pushing them, they might come up with something that ends up being a little bit jerky.

You’re much better off saying, “I don’t know anything, but Brian’s answer was really good. I’ve got to plus one that, pay attention to it.” If you see enough plus ones on Brian’s answer, then you’re more likely or I’d be in this case more likely to listen to Brian’s answer.

When you’re talking about fascinations, were there other techniques that worked for you back then, other marketing techniques or was it just fascinations that the business was built on?

Brian: I think the early business was built on direct mail packages that were mostly fascinations. But in that swipe file that I gave away at the Titans event, there were a couple of packages that I recall that they stuck out because they were different. One of them I remember in particular was written by a great copywriter by the name of Jim Rutz, who’s since passed. He’s probably one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived. He used to do very long-form, long copy. He used to do these things called magalogues, which were sometimes 24 pages long and they looked like a magazine, but they were actually promotion.

I remember Rutz did one and the whole thing was a story. It was with side bars, but there was a continuing story throughout. It was about how at the time, it was funny because it was about Hilary Clinton way before she was ever going to be considered–I think it was when she was the First Lady–about milking the American–whatever it was. He kind of used that as a theme throughout the entire–not just about Hilary, but also about how the government gets your money. It was for a tax newsletter, as a matter of fact.

Andrew: Okay.

Brian: I think if there’s a weaving narrative story to tell, it can work. The other one that works really well, we had this other format called a bookalogue. A bookalogue looked like a little digest-sized magazine and they were at least sometimes as thick as 64 pages. It actually mailed as–it’s the kind of thing you would put next to your bed because you didn’t want to throw it out. The whole thing was promotion. The whole thing we realized kind of came out of the fascination approach, but it was basically in the early days of direct marketing, it was all sizzle, no steak. It was fascination, page whatever, you don’t get anything.

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: What we did in the bookalogues and the magalogues is we started giving away content. We were like precursors to content marketing that’s going on online today. So, we would have something like, “The Five Things to Know that the Used Car Salesman is Going to Rip You Off.” And then you’d actually give away three of them. For the other two, see page 57.

Andrew: I see.

Brian: So, there was sort of a mix of content and fascinations. So, it was very, very tough for us as a company to learn that because direct marketing in the 60s and 70s was all about you never give away the answer. You never give away the steak. So, we actually evolved into this giving away. Now you look at what goes on online. That’s why I think of Product Launch Formula, which I’m a huge fan of and Jeff Walker is one of my heroes, and he invented this formula that basically says, “Give away a lot of content. Give away a lot of content. Give away a lot of content,” in the pre-launch videos.

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: Then we go in for the right hook. I think that’s a jab, jab, jab, right hook mentality that works beautifully. And you know what? If you don’t buy the products that use Product Launch Formula as their methodology, you’ve got a bunch of downloaded videos that are really good content and you feel really good and frankly, again, talk about the long view, maybe you didn’t buy a product from that particular niche guy or gal that time, but you’re on their list because you opted in to get the free videos.

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: They’re going to keep sending you content and someday you’re going to buy. There’s a guy, a good friend of mine, I just saw him the other day, who’s got a site called FuzzyYellowBalls.com, Will Hamilton–great marketer, number one tennis instruction guy online.

If he does a lot of pre-launch content on a product–he’s doing a product right now with Martina Navratilova–if you don’t buy that product, you’re on his list, the next product with Patrick Rafter or learning how to play doubles with the Bryan Brothers, you’re going to be open for that. And when he launches an event at the US Open, you may go to that even though you didn’t buy the Martina.

So, I think that using the content–so, I learned so much by moving from straight fascination approach to giving away some of the steak to what I’m seeing now online. I’m actually–this is all good news. I’m very excited about it. I think it’s the most exciting time to be a marketer.

Andrew: I’m surprised. Here’s why I’m surprised. You’ve been doing this for so long. I wondered what your attitude would be in this interview. Would you be so burned out on talking about this stuff after having done it for so long. Would you feel like, “I’m better than this. Why am I coming in behind all these other guys now that I’m starting fresh? I’m a practitioner. I’ve been doing this for most of my life. Now I’m coming in behind Jeff Walker, who’s way ahead of me. I’m coming in behind,” who is the other person that I was listening to an interview with? The guy from I Love Marketing.

Brian: Oh, Joe Polish.

Andrew: Joe Polish, right. You’re behind him and you don’t feel any of that. You don’t feel like–

Brian: I don’t think I’m behind them. I think I get to be a student. In fact, I’ll see Joe tomorrow and we’re going to be together for a while. We’re real good buds. He learns stuff form me still too. I don’t go in thinking that I know it all. In fact, one of the great things about my career has been that right now–I say this a lot. I say I have a golden ticket to get into rooms of people that are all smarter than me. What an opportunity.

The reason I have the golden ticket is because they do want to hear what I have to say and what I’ve learned over 35 years. That doesn’t mean that what I learned is better, worse. It’s all adaptable. To me, direct response marketing is very similar then–and that’s what my book is about. It’s all about classic advertising guys and what they did and how it all applies today.

Andrew: When is the book coming out?

Brian: It will be out this fall.

Andrew: This fall. Before we started I asked you what’s one sentence we could use to describe Boardroom. You said something and then you also said it hit a high of $160 million. What happened–and you specifically at its height it did $160 million. What happened after its height that took it down from there?

Brian: So, a couple of things. We started at $3 million. So, getting to $50 million and then $70 million and then $100 million was huge. And then we got to $160 million because of the TV business. We added–I think it was a good lesson here on both sides. The good news is always explore new media.

Always want to expand your media choices so you’ll have more options and if you’re only just on one medium, what if Facebook shuts you down and that’s your only medium? You’re out of business, right? So, I think the advancement of finding media, but not that you’re going to always continued to be successful in every one of them.

So, what took it back down immediately after about three and a half years was that TV stopped working for us. I just wrote about that as one of the biggest mistakes of my career on my blog, which was about reading my press clippings, thinking that I could–most people said, you’re going to get 1 out of 15 infomercials to work our 1 out of 20 and we had 3 out of 4 of our first ones to work. So, bad, bad. It’s really bad to read press clippings.

Then I thought whatever we’d throw up on TV we’d be able to make work because I had a formula. It didn’t work that way. So, that took us back down under $100 million. And then I will say we made some errors in terms of how we transitioned online with an older audience that were mostly into print and we couldn’t do some of the things some of the online marketers were able to do easily with the audience.

Andrew: Like what?

Brian: Look, I never got a chance to do like a full-blown PLF launch because I left the company before that. But I think we can do those kinds of things, but you’ve got to watch your list. The fact that when I left they still had 400,000 paid subscribers to the print newsletter…

Andrew: Wow.

Brian: Yeah. So, print wasn’t going away for that audience. But you have to keep looking ahead. What’s on the horizon? I will tell you this, though. I mentioned estate planning before as one of our topics that we had done stuff. The fact is that when people who are in their 30s and 40s today are in their 50s and 60s, they’re going to need to know about estate planning and tax planning.

The question is how are you going to deliver it. We always were able to deliver it in books and newsletters, print, and you’re going to deliver it online but you’re going to have to deliver it online in a way that is palatable, in a way that will engage with people because it’s going to be hard, those topics are not that exciting. You don’t wake up in the morning and I say, “I can’t wait to read about estate planning.”

Andrew: I know. I can’t imagine that on Snapchat. But I’m sure on some point, someone will have it on there.

Brian: It’s going to have to. So, that’s what I want to be part of that. I want to be the guy who can help knowing what I know about the mindset of people who need to know about estate–I don’t care if you’re 30 today. When you’re 50 or 60, you need to know this stuff. I think the hot buttons are going to be the same.

I will bet–I probably won’t be alive to prove it–but I will bet that I can take fascinations out of direct mail that I did in the 1980s for estate planning, use it for an estate planning product online 30 years from now and with the right offer and having the right copywriter, whether it’s a video or whatever, those fascinations will work.

Andrew: I would bet that too, the exact ones.

Brian: Exactly.

Andrew: I bet that if all those paid numbers were replaced with URLs, people would want to go see the URLs.

Brian: Bingo.

Andrew: All right. The website for anyone who wants to go check you out is BrianKurtz.me?

Brian: Which also tells you that I was too late to get BrianKurtz.com.

Andrew: Let’s see who’s got that. Let’s go see who has it.

Brian: It’s a…

Andrew: You do have Titans Marketing, right? Do I have the name right?

Brian: Yeah.

Andrew: It’s TitansMarketing.com. Why don’t you just use that instead of your name?

Brian: Maybe I will. I have and I’ve been using it for other things, but yeah, I think you’re probably right.

Andrew: I feel like you intentionally don’t show your blog. I had to do a site search to find your blog. You want people to join your mailing list before they can see the blog, right?

Brian: Yeah. I think so. You want to connect with them on a deeper level. I agree with that.

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: But I will tell you this–when I connect with people on LinkedIn, I have a methodology with LinkedIn. When I get a LinkedIn request, they’re piled up now. I don’t just accept, accept, accept. I actually go to every single LinkedIn request when I get the time, and I haven’t for a while. I look at their, the person who’s linking in with me, I look at their profile, I look at what we have in common–number of connections, maybe I see they’re a copywriter. I see that they’re this.

Then I send them an email and the email basically connects me to whatever that thing is. One person recently had like 240 connections in common. I write, “Thanks for linking in. 248 connections can’t be wrong. I see you’ve been to the AWAI Copywriters Conference.”

Andrew: Why? Why do you take that time to do that?

Brian: Because then I tell them about BrianKurtz.me, “If you want to learn more about me…” I don’t know of those hundreds of people–this is about list building. I think you list build from the ground up.

If you’re going to eventually, especially if you’re selling high-priced products–I’m selling a high-priced mastermind, two high-priced masterminds. I’m going to sell books. I’m going to sell course. I sell the Titans product for $2,000. They are going to be high-ticket buyers at some point. I don’t know who they are. Just by hitting accept, accept, accept and having them on a LinkedIn file doesn’t do me any good. Having them opt in, maybe listen to an interview–hopefully everybody hasn’t shut down listening to me with you.

But I basically built my list through podcasts that I’ve done as guest. If they listen to me on a podcast with you, now they go to BrianKurtz.me. They sign up for my list. It’s a free download of another interview I did and they listen to that, I think they might like me at that point, either that or they’re going to unsubscribe immediately.

Andrew: You know what I like about your sales process too? You have one of those long sales letters on one of the sites. You actually don’t link it from your homepage specifically. You do have a video at the top of it. It’s full of all these names and people that we recognize. I scroll to the bottom to see what it costs and you don’t show the price. What you do instead is something that’s worked really well for me. You say, “Click here to get this Titans DVD.” I click it, then you ask me for my name and email address, then I hit continue.” That’s when I see the order form with the price.

I know why do it. I do it because I want the names of the people who don’t buy based on price after they see this to understand why they didn’t buy. It’s totally fine that you didn’t buy, but what was it that didn’t close the deal for you. I think that’s really helpful. I also want to know how many people are interested but still not enough to pay the money. Why do you do it?

Brian: I do it–in this particular case, I know why I did it. The sales letter is so–the original sales letter for the event was amazing. This is a version of that. Basically it was because the letter is, I thought, pretty engaging. It talks about Perry Marshall. It talks about Joe Sugarman. It talks about Jay Abraham. Frankly, I want you to read through it. It’s sort of like the infomercial. I don’t want you clicking off after eight minutes when I know I’ve got 20 minutes of good stuff to give to you. I don’t think you could make a really good decision on buying this product until you see everything that it’s about.

Andrew: Even if you do read it all, you don’t show them the price until they give you their email address. Then you show them the price, right? What’s the thought behind that?

Brian: On this particular thing, I think that the price is not going to ever be–I never want the price to be a sticker shock. In my opinion, after reading that and going through all of that and getting swipe files for the ages and those DVDs with those people, they’re going to look at the price of $2,000 and say, “Wow, I was expecting a lot more than that.”

Gary Bencivenga for his main big event, he still charges $5,000 for those DVDs. I think in this particular case, when I did it do my list originally, house file as a launch to my own list, as a launch, it was $1,500. Again, I did the same thing. I didn’t have people clicking off when they got that far. Once they got that far, they were buying.

Andrew: All right. I like that sales letter. Why don’t I close it out with this question that I kind of brought up before but forgot to go back to–why is “Pulp Fiction,” that big poster behind you? What’s the connection to “Pulp Fiction?”

Brian: Yeah. So, there are two things behind me. The other one is Mariano Rivera, who was a pitcher for the New York Yankees. So, “Pulp Fiction” is there because it’s one of my favorite movies, but also–I’ll turn this just a second–that’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” my face is on Jimmy Stewart’s face. Someone gave that to me.

So, in college, I was the film critic for my school newspaper. So, I thought I was either going to be a baseball umpire or a film critic. It reminds me of my past and my love of movies and my love of culture. “Pulp Fiction” is one of my favorites, as is “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Plus, the juxtaposition–“Pulp Fiction” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” very different films if you’ve seen them.

Andrew: Yeah. What is it about “Pulp Fiction” that you like?

Brian: Actually, I like the fact that it’s not a straight narrative.

Andrew: Right.

Brian: I love that piece of it. I think Tarantino, the storytelling is incredible. It’s a little gross. There are some parts there that make you squirm and squeal. I think it’s one of the best written–I’m a fan of great copy. I think it’s one of the most incredibly–if you just look at that script. Read the script of “Pulp Fiction.” Even just the one scene of Samuel L. Jackson in the apartment, that copy–and how he switches from focusing on them to taking the bite of the hamburger and every scene is like that. Every scene in that movie–

Andrew: So, well-written. It breaks so many of the rules of writing and it just does a great job. You’re right.

Brian: He wrote a movie called “True Romance,” which he didn’t direct.

Andrew: I didn’t know that.

Brian: You can see his writing.

Andrew: I didn’t know that was him in “True Romance.”

Brian: He wrote it.

Andrew: That’s with what’s his name…

Brian: Christian Slater?

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: He wrote that.

Andrew: Christian Slater? No, Quentin Tarantino wrote it.

Brian: Tarantino wrote “True Romance.” I just want to tell you about Mariano Rivera. Basically Mariano Rivera–and I talked about this at the Titans event in my opening session at the event. Mariano Rivera, listeners who don’t know, was the best closer of all time. And what that means is he was the pitcher that comes in to get the last three outs of the game for the Yankees. He’s the best at that ever. Ever. I don’t think anyone would ever argue that Mariano Rivera–and in big games, like World Series… Amazing record as a closer. The hardest three outs, he always got them, right?

The thing about Mariano Rivera, though, that I talked about that I love–this goes to something in business that I really believe in–is that Mariano Rivera had one pitch. Most pitchers have two or three pitches. They have a curveball. They have a fastball. They have a knuckleball. Mariano basically had one pitch. It was this–it wasn’t a split-fingered fastball, but it was a cutter. The ball would look like it’s coming in, it would just drop like that. Unhittable, right? When he was on, he was unhittable.

The thing that Mariano Rivera did is that anybody who ever wanted to learn the pitch, all they had to do was ask him. He would sit with almost any pitcher any time during his career, he would teach them how to pitch it, maybe because he knew they wouldn’t be able to do it as well as he could. But he always would teach it.

In his last year when he knew he was retiring and he was doing his final tour of all the stadiums, he went to every other opposing team and he said, “Any of pitchers want to learn the pitch? I’ll do a little clinic for you, the coaches, anybody.” So, what the lesson is competition is coexistence. Basically, all boats rise when we’re all better at what we do. In direct mail and direct marketing, when we used to exchange lists, I exchanged hundreds millions of names with my toughest competitors and we all did better because of it, I’m convinced of it.

Andrew: Because you were getting to mail to their people and they got to mail to your people.

Brian: Exactly right. We both had products. We were not in commodity businesses. We all had great products. My diabetes book would sell to Rodale Press and Rodale’s blood sugar book could sell to my list and we would exchange hundreds of millions of names.

The thing is what I’ve seen in the online world–you asked me something that bugs me about the online world–is that in the affiliate would, everybody is mailing for each other and there’s this whole concept of reciprocation. I understand that if you do for me, I want to do for you, but I’m a much bigger believer in what Adam Graham talks about in “Give and Take,” which is to be a supreme giver, you have to give almost 100-0 until you figure out if there’s something else that you can be given in return.

At some point, you may say no if the person is just a straight taker, but you’re not calculating, you’re not saying, “If I do this, I get that.” I’ve never lived my life like that. If I start living my life like that, I might as well end it now. I don’t want to get crazy. The guy was a baseball player. I get it. That’s why Mariano Rivera is on my wall.

Andrew: I get it. I get the story and I actually am now looking at .gifs of his pitch. If you just type in Mariano Rivera cutter, .gif is automatically suggested and you see all these quick clips of that one pitch. That’s a great story. I can see how you’re making the rounds teaching your pitches to other people and I’m proud that you’re on here to talk about it. Again, anyone who wants to go check out your website can go to BrianKurtz.me.

Of course, my two sponsors for this interview are two great companies. The first is the one that’s going to help you host your website right–

Brian: Maybe me.

Andrew: Maybe you.

Brian: I’m going to look into that.

Andrew: They will even transfer–they will move your site for you. Why? What don’t you like about your hosting company?

Brian: I like my hosting company, but again, one of those things. You don’t think every day about transferring your hosting company, but as I said before, they’re one of two sponsors on Mixergy, I think I should check them out.

Andrew: They will do it for you. If you or anyone else wants to migrate over to them from a WordPress site, they just do it for you. Anyone else you can do it fairly easily if you want–HostGator.com/Mixergy. And the company that will help you hire your next developer or designer, the one that did that event here in San Francisco, it’s called Toptal. Go to Toptal.com/Mixergy.

Thanks, everyone. Bye.