Business Ideas

An inspiring case study plus Dan Kennedy’s best stuff for cheap

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Today I want to share an inspiring business case study with you, plus how you can get Dan Kennedy’s best teachings for cheap.

First the case study:

I’ve followed the writing of a guy named Glenn Allsop for years. Glenn writes about SEO and business opportunities. He’s very smart and very dedicated and very willing to share just about everything on his blog.

And Glenn just came out with a big new post titled, Generating Six-Figure Profits from $40 SEO Audits.

It’s just what the title says — amazing when you consider that an SEO audit is something most people can’t give away, much less make a business out of.

There’s a ton of valuable ideas in Glenn’s post, and if you’re offering any kind of service (copywriting, design, video…) it’s worth reading in full. But today, I want to share just one thing that I found most striking out of the whole case study.

Because really, why would a highly successful guy like Glenn waste his time doing tiny $40 jobs, even if it did result in decent profits? He has other business ventures that could earn him much more.

But here, from Glenn’s article, are a few things that came out of all this $40 work:

I’ve advised CMOs at billion dollar brands. Audited the official site of a major European football league (one of the big five). Directly connected with the owners of multi-million dollar per month affiliate sites, and spoken with the founders of dozens of TechCrunch-featured companies.

A $40 audit started our interaction, but then so many more things came as a result of these. Especially when people see how I look at their websites and point out things they just hadn’t thought of.

This brought to mind something I heard Rich Schefren say he heard Dan Kennedy say:

“Put your best stuff in your lowest-priced stuff.”

Glenn took this to an extreme, by actually doing per-hour, custom work for people. You may or may not want to do that. If you don’t, you can still create some kind of low-priced offer — a book, a course, a 10-minute sample of what you do — and make it absolutely amazing.

You never know who will take you up on your bargain-basement offer… or how much money they will be willing to spend with you after. That’s how Dan Kennedy got a lot of his clients, according to a recording I heard of him recently. And that’s why, if you want the best stuff that Dan has to offer… you will find much of it available for a few bucks a piece, right on Amazon.

Perhaps that’s not what you were hoping to hear. In that case, I can tell you you won’t like my email newsletter, because it’s filled with obvious value, rather than “secrets” or urgent opportunities.

However, if you are a reader, and you’re patient, then my email newsletter might suit you better. If you’d like to give it a try, here’s where to join.

Casino Royale positioning

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Last night, I finished rewatching Casino Royale, the first Bond film starring Daniel Craig. As you might know, this movie came out surrounded with controversy.

There was a lot of opposition to casting Craig in the Bond role. Fans complained that Craig — short, blonde, and blessed with “large, fleshy ears” — was a complete mismatch to the required Bond look and feel.

And yet, Craig has grown on Bond audiences. Casino Royale was a big part of that. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie gets a 94% approval rating, and the summary says:

“Casino Royale disposes of the silliness and gadgetry that plagued recent James Bond outings, and Daniel Craig delivers what fans and critics have been waiting for: a caustic, haunted, intense reinvention of 007.”

So I’d like to propose to you the idea of Casino Royale positioning.

Strip away the silliness and the gadgetry of the current offers in your market. Instead, offer a short, blonde, large-eared alternative that nobody in his proper mind should want.

Here’s a famous example:

Back in the late 1950s, the American car market was dominated by beasts. Each year, American car models became larger, with more chrome and more tailfin. When that game went to its extreme, the unlikely winner turned out to be Volkswagen, with its promise of a small, ugly, practical car.

Example two:

This one comes from closer to home, namely, the financial newsletter market. In that market, the typical promise goes something like,

“How to double or even you triple your investment — as soon as next month!”

In other words, the typical promise is to get rich quick. And then get richer, quicker! And then even richer, as of yesterday!

So into this market came Gary Bencivenga, often called the world’s greatest living copywriter. And rather than coming up with creative new ways to promise millions of dollars in the next 14 minutes, Gary did a Casino Royale. The promise in his headline?

“Get rich slowly”

And yet, this short, flat-faced, large-eared promise turned out to be one of the bigger successes in Gary’s very successful career.

So if your market is outdoing itself in silly promises and gimmicky mechanisms, Casino Royale might be the thing to try.

Strip everything away… look into your customer’s eyes with an icy cold stare… and say, like Craig does when asked whether he wants his martini shaken or stirred…

“Do I look like I give a damn?”

I’m planning on putting out a book in the next few months with more positioning ideas. If you’d like advance notice when that book comes out, along with more free positioning ideas before then, you might like to sign up to my secret service MI6 email newsletter.

Dan Kennedy’s grungy ghostwriting gig

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In 1933, Don Dwyer published an interesting self-promotional book. The title of the book was, “Target Success: How You Can Become a Successful Entrepreneur, Regardless of Your Background.”

There are two curious things about this book:

1) It was ghost-written by Dan Kennedy.

2) It was really a sales tool for Dwyer.

A bit of background:

Don Dwyer owned Rainbow International Carpet Dyeing & Cleaning Company. This was a franchise carpet cleaning opportunity. For something on the order of $10k, you could buy into the franchise and get set up with your own carpet cleaning biz in your own town.

So Dwyer’s Target Success book was there to give him credibility and positioning… and to pitch the business opportunity of buying into Rainbow Carpet Cleaning.

And here’s the clever bit:

Dwyer could have published a self-promotional book like, How To Be Successful In Carpet Cleaning. But as Dan Kennedy said, Dwyer was too smart for that.

Because such a book would not elevate Dwyer’s status. Quite the opposite. It might diminish his status.

So instead, Dwyer had Dan write a generic success book. Lessons from a self-made millionaire… how to set goals… what really makes successful people tick. And once you’re well into that story, well, then you find out about this carpet cleaning opportunity. It might not have sounded great right in the headline… but it sounds pretty good 150 pages into the book.

That opportunity might have sounded almost as good as the following simple rule:

When writing copy, it’s always better to get more specific. Always.

Except when it’s not. Sometimes, when you get specific, you turn off potential customers and clients… you narrow your market too much… you can’t get attention because you’re talking about something too fringe, cringe, or grunge.

In that case, it makes sense to go up a level or two or three, and make your appeal more ethereal. This is true whether you’re positioning an offer… or writing a sales letter… or just a sales bullet.

Maybe you didn’t find that useful at all.

Maybe you did. In that case, you should know I write an email newsletter on similar topics… quick and grungy. In case you’d like to join the newsletter, here’s where to go.

Taking over abandoned but rich online oil wells

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Jay Abraham likes to tell a sexy story about two marketers. The story is true and it goes something like this:

Two marketers started selling fake diamonds through ads in the same local newspaper.

One marketer wrote a brilliant ad, got a high response, and made a bunch of sales. After ad costs and fulfillment, he was left with a profit of a few thousand dollars.

​​”What a waste of time,” this marketer said. And he moved on to bigger and better opportunities… ones where he could make tens of thousands or maybe even a hundred thousand dollars, using the same approach.

Then there was marketer two. He only wrote a passable ad, and got a lower response than marketer one. He was left in the red after ad costs and fulfillment.

But when marketer two sent his customers the fake diamond, he also included a letter. The letter said something like,

“Behold your beautiful fake diamond! See how it shines and sparkles! And if you by chance find it sparkles a bit less than you expected, perhaps it’s the modest size. But worry not. Send back your beautiful but modest-sized fake diamond… and we will credit it to your next purchase of a magnificent and ginormous fake diamond. Just enclose a check for an extra xyz dollars to…”

In other words, marketer two created a back-end of upsells and followup offers. Result? A business that made something like $25 million in its first year.

(By the way, I only found out later that marketer one, the brilliant but short-sighted copywriter, was Gary Halbert.)

I thought of this story today because I’m seeing something similar right in front of me.

For the past two years, I’ve been writing copy for a client in the ecommerce space. Over the past year alone, they have abandoned about a dozen hot funnels. Yes, including fake diamonds.

Each funnel had an in-demand product… copy that was working… a large, hungry, accessible audience eager to hand over their money.

So why abandon ship? Because fulfillment got tricky… or shipping got expensive… or ad costs went up and made the funnel unprofitable. So on to the next opportunity, the next oil well that can be exploited with just a bucket and a rope, for as long as it lasts.

I had the idea this morning of taking over some of these abandoned but rich funnels. But my first thought was, how could I possibly succeed where my client had failed? After all, they have a gaggle of ad buyers, a herd of ad production people, and money and resources and connections I can only dream of.

So how could I succeed? Perhaps, by having a back-end of upsells and followup offers. By tapping this oil well a bit deeper… and using strategies that go beyond a bucket and a rope.

Maybe that’s doable… but it also sounds like a lot of work. Which brings me to the point.

Last autumn I wrote about my idea of a “cash buyers list.” In a nutshell, I am looking for people who are willing to partner with me in some way on investing in online properties, whether that’s product funnels or blogs or sudoku solver software.

And if you have interest in partnering with me on some tried-and-proven ecommerce funnels… and you either have money, or relevant skills to contribute, then get in touch. Maybe we can create a new case study together for Jay Abraham to talk about for years to come.

Near miss: 100-0 in business and private

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A tense and awkward situation today:

I was walking on a large, wide, empty road. Down the road, I saw a guy walking toward me.

I recognized him. I see him every time I go to the gym. I’ve never spoken to him, but I bet he recognized me, too.

So we were walking toward each other. There were no other people around, and no other distractions.

He saw me coming nearer.

I saw him coming nearer.

Would we say hello, even though we’d never spoken before?

Or would we ignore each other, even though we’d spent hours in close proximity?

At about 10 yards to impact, the guy dropped his gaze and started studying the pavement. I kept my eyes in the middle of his chest — a safe place in case he decided to look up at the last minute, but also not accusatory.

He didn’t look up. I kept quietly staring at the middle of his chest, without making any sudden movement. We passed by each other, as David Ogilvy says, like ships in the night.

Thank God. A near miss.

This brought to mind a post written by Brian Kurtz. You might know Brian as the former VP at direct response giant Boardroom.

Back in the 80s and 90s and 00s, Brian was the guy who hired all those copywriting legends like Gary Bencinvenga and Parris Lampropoulos and Jim Rutz. And today, Brian is still a very successful and well-connected guy in the direct response industry.

Anyways, Brian once shared an idea he called 100-0. 100-0 means you put in the extra effort to build and keep up your relationships. And you don’t grumble about it. Because it will be worth it.

It’s something I clearly need to work on, because it doesn’t come natural. I’m passing on Brian’s idea to you because maybe you are the same.

You can draw your own conclusions. But if, like me and like my nameless gym buddy, you keep waiting for others to make the first move… perhaps try 100-0 and see what it can do for you. In your private and your business life.

And maybe you’d like to start a modest relationship with me today.

Just by email. At least for now. In case you’re interested, here’s where to start.

UpCopy: Open for business

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I was leafing through the newspaper and I read that LinkedIn is launching a freelance marketplace. This could be interesting to you, whether or not you’re offering services for sale.

But let me give you a bit of background first:

LinkedIn got started by buying assets of UpCounsel. This was once a marketplace that connected freelance lawyers to clients.

So the first planned step for LinkedIn is to start its own marketplace by offering legal services. It could happen as soon as September.

Step two will be to repeat the same model across “100 different industries.” That’s according to Matt Faustman, who founded UpCounsel and is now heading the LinkedIn marketplace effort.

Of course, there’s already UpWork and Fiverr for finding freelancers. But if you ask me, LinkedIn could grab a position for itself. Perhaps higher up than UpWork, which is itself higher up than Fiverr.

I bring up this up for two reasons:

1. Maybe you’re a copywriter (or other service provider) looking for clients. If you haven’t done so yet, it might be high time to get on LinkedIn. Start posting articles or videos of yourself. Tap into this marketplace thing before others do.

If you need more motivation:

A LinkedIn spokeswoman said there’s been a surge in people hiring LinkedIn users who list they are “open for business.” Maybe that’s mere puffery. But maybe there’s something to it.

Still, LinkedIn client hunting might not be your thing. In that case…

2. I’ve got a business idea for whoever wants it.

The world of copywriters is notoriously disconnected from the world of business owners. For a long time, I only knew one half of this equation. But as I wrote a while ago, I’ve now seen the other side too. There really are many business owners who want to hire a good copywriter — and even pay him well. But they don’t know where to look or what to look for.

So my business idea for you is to create UpCopy, a freelance marketplace specifically for copywriters.

You’ll probably need to be well connected in the industry or at least good at networking. And even so, there’s a chance that may top copywriters will never want to be listed on your marketplace. It would be contrary to the kind of positioning they want to cultivate.

But who needs to know that?

If you can get a bunch of good-enough copywriters to sign up, getting business owners might be easy. And even if not, the end goal here is not to really create a thriving marketplace.

The goal is​​ just to build something that 5 months down the line, LinkedIn will be happy to pay for. Like they did with UpCounsel. I don’t know how much that was… but my guess is it’s more than anybody can make in several lifetimes of writing copy.

For more free ideas:

You might like to sign up to my email newsletter. It’s like a newspaper, in that it arrives each day. To get your trial one-day subscription, fill in the order card here.

How to get hired without trouble or questions asked

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“Do you have some samples you could send me?”

A few years back, copywriter Dan Ferrari wrote a sales letter for supplement company Green Valley. The sales letter was so successful it sold out the entire stock of Genesis, the supplement Dan was promoting.

But before Dan got hired to do this job, he had to send a few samples to Lee Euler, the owner of Green Valley.

I thought this was interesting. Because Dan was already a very successful copywriter. He had a long list of controls for several financial publishers. I guess Lee, who is an A-list copywriter himself, wanted one final, personal check of Dan’s skills.

Yesterday, I talked about Ogilvy’s famous ad for Rolls Royce.

Well, in the world of direct response copywriting, Dan has Rolls Royce positioning. There are few copywriters out there with his skills and his level of results. That’s why Dan was referred to Lee, who is always looking to hire top new copywriters.

Now here’s how this is relevant to you, in case you’re ever sending over samples to a potential client:

Dan had never written a supplement promo before Green Valley. So he sent Lee some of his earlier financial sales letters. Lee probably looked over these sales letters with his copywriting eagle eye, and he saw what he needed to see. “Looks good. Let’s get to work.”

But that’s Lee Euler, a copywriter with decades of experience, and the guy who wrote The Plague of the Black Debt… and that’s Dan Ferrari, who already had a string of controls at big DR publishers.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

A lot of newbie copywriters obsess over creating a portfolio. “What should I put in there? Which niche to write for? What formats do I need to include?”

My personal opinion is this is waste of time and mental energy. Because when you are new, or just not at Rolls Royce level yet, then your samples should be exactly what the client is hiring for right now. And if you ain’t got that, then write it, then and there.

For example, a couple years back I wanted to get a job writing VSLs in the real estate investing space. I knew a company that was hiring, and for this exact type of copy. So I wrote two new leads for their existing VSLs, and I sent that in. I got hired without trouble, with practically no questions asked.

Thing is, I had already written VSLs at this point, and some were successful. But they weren’t for real estate. I had even written a lot in the real estate space, just not VSLs, and not about investing.

Would those square-peg-in-round-hole samples have gotten me the job? I don’t think so.

​​Maybe this will drive the point home:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rimac comes from the electric engine”

Never heard of Rimac? They are an up-and-coming electric sportscar maker from Croatia.

Maybe one day Rimac will be as recognizable as Lamborghini or Rolls Royce. But today, a headline like that would make most people just say, “So what?”

Because until you become a known brand that people lust after, you have to spell everything out for your potential client or customer. ​​You have to speak to his exact problems… and make the exact promises he wants to hear… in terms that require minimal, or better yet, no thinking from him.

This applies to selling products, and it applies to selling yourself. Don’t expect you will have an understanding and eager Lee Euler evaluating your copy samples.

Instead, g​ive new potential clients no scope to think you are not the person to hire for this job. Even if they know little to nothing about copywriting. Do this, and you will get hired, without trouble, with practically no questions asked.

Finally:

I write an email newsletter about copywriting and, occasionally, about the business of copywriting. In case you’d like to try it out and see if it fits you, you can sign up here.

Copywriting: a business or a job?

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I was out of clean underwear, and things were looking bleak.

I was staying in an Airbnb apartment. I put my clothes to wash earlier in the morning.

But halfway through the cycle, the washing machine got stuck. It blinked stupidly. Even though I talked to it and comforted it, it wouldn’t spin or finish the cycle. My clothes, including all my underwear except what I had on, were stuck inside.

I wrote to the owner. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she answered. “My husband will come after work to take a look at it. If he can’t fix it, we’ll call the repairman.” It was 10am.

A few hours passed. I walked by the washing machine and spotted that the floor was wet. The washing machine was leaking somewhere. Water had pooled behind the machine, and was running along the wall all across the room. It even reached the next room, with the hardwood floor.

I wrote to the owner again. “Oh my God!” she said. “I’ll call the washing machine repairman right away!”

The point being, incentives matter. And on that topic:

Today I got paid the second 50% of the biggest copywriting project I have done to date. And so I did a debrief for myself, to see how the project went, and what I could learn from it.

My conclusion was this: I did a good job. I put in a lot of work, I gave the client much better ideas than they had initially, and I delivered solid copy.

And yet:

Will the client actually get value out of my copy? Will they simply send some cold traffic to it, and have the copy make money out the gate? And if not, will they know what to fix and tweak and test?

If I’m being honest with myself, I know there would be a bunch of things I’d have done differently if there were was some revenue share at stake on this project.

I would have taken more control of the project to put this copy into action sooner… I would have pushed back harder against client ideas that I thought were suspicious… I would have insisted on being involved in the project even now, after I’d delivered the copy.

Royalties are a good system. I’ve told my clients this for a while. And if you’re a copywriter, maybe you can do the same, using the same argument I’ve just given you.

And if you need an argument to bite the bullet and actually make this suggestion to your clients, and to even insist on it, then remember Dan Kennedy. “Copywriting is a business,” says Dan. “You have to get paid on the back end, otherwise you just have a job.”

That’s all the motivation I have for you for today. Now for the sales pitch:

I write an email newsletter. Sometimes I talk about the business of copy, other times I talk about copywriting itself. If this is the kind of thing that floats your lancha, you can join the newsletter here.

Crank positioning

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Yesterday, Ben Settle sent out an email with his interview with Ken McCarthy. And in the first part of the interview, Ken says the following:

So my positioning was, I wanted to be the honest broker of information on internet marketing.

And I also wanted to be the guy that you could trust on innovation issues. That if he said something was worth looking at, it was worth looking at. Not worth mortgaging the farm for, but worth taking a look, worth carving a little time out of your week and making sure that you were conversant with it.

And then I also wanted to be seen as a guy that stuck to the fundamentals, and valued the fundamentals, and drilled the fundamentals. Because the fundamentals really are, at the end of the day, what’s going to get you through everything.

I think there’s a fine line, running from Dan Kennedy, through Ken McCarthy, to Ben Settle, following this type of “honest broker” positioning. Dan and Ken and Ben all follow the three points in the quote above.

But there’s another positioning ingredient shared by all these guys. The best way I can describe is they are all cranks, in the various meanings of that word. For example:

“Being offended… hopefully you will be, at some point. I sort of pride myself on it.” That’s from the start of a Dan Kennedy seminar.

Or Ken’s current quest to prove corona is history’s biggest misinformation campaign.

Or Ben’s strategy of repulsion marketing. Ben mocks, shames, and drives away the many potential customers he does not want to serve.

All three of these guys also make a point of being low-tech, both in their marketing and in their private lives. You can only contact Dan Kennedy by fax. Ken started a recent email with, “Let me be clear: I loathe Facebook.” And Ben prides himself on ugly website design and on plain-text sales emails.

It is all just a coincidence?

I don’t think so. Rather, I suspect there’s a certain personality type that gets drawn to “honest broker” positioning… or perhaps the crank persona gives more credibility to people who adopt this position, and that’s why we hear of the cranks.

In any case, this might be something to keep in mind, if you too are looking to position yourself in your market.

On the one hand, this is probably not a position you can hold unless it matches your own personality on some level.

But if you already feel you are the honest broker of information in your market… or, on the other hand, if you have the personality of a crank, and you want to profit from it… then you might consider adopting the other half of this system.

​​With both parts in place, you can be the crusty but credible grouch, spitting and cursing (and making sales) in a marketplace full of crooks and idiots.

But if crank positioning doesn’t suit you, don’t worry. There are lots of other ways to position yourself. This is something I discuss on occasion in my newsletter. In case you’re interested, here’s where you can join.

My prediction about the future of direct response hits

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“The next Tesla may even hire creators to evangelize the company or at least, serve as a paid marketing channel. Creators are essentially media companies now, which means that the creators of tomorrow will operate a lot like the New York based publications of yesteryear.”
— David Perell

My email yesterday looked at some fancy science, and made a simple point:

A hit product is the result of chance. The first few raindrops of popularity determine which spots in the product landscape become lakes, and which ones deserts.

I think this leads to a few conclusions. One is that, just because a product (or an offer) was successful before, this doesn’t necessarily mean it is worth studying. It might have become successful due to chance more than any intrinsic quality or real demand. And vice versa. You clearly cannot count on the quality of your product as your only key to success.

So what can we do about this?

One option is simply to put out lots more offers. This will increase your chances of getting at least one big hit.

And then there’s the fact that early buzz seems to be crucial to long-term success. Which to me suggests that street teams.. astroturfing… or influencer marketing are really where much of your marketing efforts should go.

And that’s what David Perell is saying in the quote above. Media-savvy businessmen like Elon Musk are already using creators as their main marketing channel. And the “next Tesla” will probably do more of the same.

But hold on a second. Tesla? That’s a whole other country from the direct response businesses I normally talk about.

After all, if some guy in 1995 got a sales letter from Gary Halbert about a book on killer orgasms… he probably didn’t go down to the local bar to ask his buddies if they knew anything about this orgasms book, and if it’s worth the $39.95 Halbert was charging for it.

In other words, people chose traditional direct response offers in a more independent way than they choose cars or movies.

But as I’ve written before, I feel that’s changing. In the same way that traditional brand businesses are becoming more direct response savvy… traditional direct response businesses are discovering the power of having a brand. So the same reality of what makes a big hit matters for modern DR businesses too.

The way I see it, that means you’ve got two options:

One is to become a creator yourself, because businesses will need you more and more.

The other is to hire creators or influencers to promote your offers, so you can create enough initial buzz to make it a hit.

That raises the question of who to hire and when and what they should say… All interesting questions. I’ll talk about that another day. And if by some strange circumstance you want to hear what I have to say then, you can subscribe to my email newsletter.