The Home Service Expert Podcast - Writing Copy That Makes Customers Ready To Buy

Episode Date: August 9, 2018

Ben is a renowned Internet marketer and one of the top email marketing specialists in the world today. He has over 15 years of experience doing direct response copywriting for his clients, helping them earn multimillion dollar sales in hypercompetitive markets. In this episode, we talked about email marketing, sales, lead generation...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. All right, welcome back. It's Tommy Mello, the home service expert, and I'm here with Ben Settle

today. Ben, tell me a little bit about the last 15 years, where you were, where you got started. I mean, you've been copywriting a long time. Let's just jump into it and tell everybody what you've been through. Well, I mean, I can't say I've had it really bad compared to anyone else, but everyone's challenges are relative, right, to whoever they are. You know, I actually started in business back in 1998. And when I say started in business, I really mean play business. I wasn't doing actual business.

I was sitting there as an MLM distributor, not knowing what I was doing. I fed up with it, really sucked at it, didn't do much with it, got in a lot of debt buying leads and, you know, programs and all that, products and all that, but didn't do anything with it. A couple years later, a few years later, I got in so much debt. and programs and all that, products and all that. But I didn't do anything with it. A couple of years later, a few years later, I got in so much debt just making really dumb decisions from this MLM stuff, which I had no business being in. I was living in an office because I couldn't afford a real place to live,

and so that was all I could find. I wasn't really supposed to be living there. I was just kind of, you know, I told him I'd be there a lot landlord but I go I would go around I would literally go around town passing out cassette now this was back when Fred Flintstone ruled the earth right yeah there were cassette tapes right so I was I was passing out cassette tapes to businesses I was getting laughed at yelled at you know people for me kind of like patting me on the shoulder like, good luck, but get the hell out of my store, that kind of stuff. And it wasn't the funnest time in the world, but because of that, I stumbled into direct response copywriting, which is a whole other world. I'm kind of an introverted guy.

I'm kind of crotchety and all that. I don't really want to be talking to everyone saying – they told us to go around saying, do you keep your options open for making ways for making money? Like to anybody, like at the post office, wherever. That's not me. I have no desire to do that. So when I found direct response copywriting, which is basically just writing sales letters, which is, you know, you write a letter, you mail it to however many people and they either buy or they don't. It was perfect. So when I got into that, life got really interesting. I didn't like, I wasn't a natural at it or anything don't it was perfect so when i got into that life got really

interesting i didn't like i wasn't a natural at or anything but it was real exciting i knew i wanted to do it i did it for a few years um most you know i don't know several years but all that during that time i really wanted to build my own thing because even as a direct response copywriter with clients i was still basically an employee and i don't like authority or anything like that. You're just a high-paid employee with a little bit more freedom. So I always knew I wanted to get out of it. But the challenge was, okay, how do you do that? How do you build your own little side business that you can grow and make a living off of comfortably? And so I spent a lot of time, a lot of years up until 2011, figuring that out. After I did, I launched what I do now, which is a print newsletter. And I haven't looked back since I don't do client work or anything anymore. I just sell my own stuff and

use email primarily. I teach email marketing and email copywriting. And, uh, it's been pretty good so far. I don't have a lot of complaints anymore, but those early days weren't very much fun. Yeah. You know, you got to start somewhere and it sounds like you just kind of dove in and developed your own strategy. And I like that because you got the grassroots, you saw what not to do. And I think that's how we all learn. You know, when I first started, I was working 10, 12 hours a day at relationships suffered. It was really tough. And I worked all the time and I still have a lot of problems with that today is, is it's really my passion. I love business.

Tell me a little bit about your challenge. Do you have a challenge with time or is it, do you feel like you've got your time back now that you're selling your own products? Well, my main challenge was figuring out how to build my own thing and doing it in the most simple way possible. I'm a very simple guy. I don't like complicated things, which is why I don't do a lot of complicated stuff with email or anything else.

I don't think complicated works as well as simple. But I remember even back in like early channel 2004 or something, what it was, I had gotten on the mailing list of this guy named Matt Fury. And Matt Fury to me is like the email king. The guy's genius. I mean, I learned a lot just from studying his stuff and studying his emails and all that. And he had the perfect lifestyle for me since I didn't want to do client work. I didn't want a job.

I just want to do my own thing. I want to wake up, write an email, and be done. Like, that's, to me, the way I want my business to be. And that's what he was doing. He would write an email bragging about it. He's like, you know, I just spent four minutes on this email. I'm not even going to edit it, so I'm sorry if there's typos, but here's my product and here's why you should buy it.

And I'm going to go off and do whatever, ride elephants in China, wherever it was. And I thought, that's great. That's what I want to do. So I spent the next seven or eight years, however long it was, trying to figure out how to do that while also juggling client work and all that. And the irony was it's a lot simpler than I thought it was. And I wish I had not tried to complicate things. But, you know, like everybody does, it complicates stuff.

So that was probably the biggest challenge as far as what I ultimately wanted to do and what I'm doing now. Which, you know, it wasn't the end of the world or anything, but it was a huge learning lesson going through all that. Yeah. One thing I noticed is you use criminal profiling research to understand your customers more. And what I'd like to understand is getting inside the heads of the psychology of the serial killers, terrorists, criminal masterminds. Tell me how that relates to customers and your perspective. inside the heads of the psychology of the serial killers, terrorists, criminal masterminds.

Tell me how that relates to customers in your perspective. Well, you know, it's all about the market. Whatever you're selling and whatever kind of product or service, it's always about the market. And that's where everybody goes wrong. This is why when you drive down the road, and I'll pick on service business people here as well. I know several people who do that kind of thing. And when you go down the road and you see their sign, and it's all about them and it's not about the customer.

It's not about the customer's pain. It's always about them and whatever they're offering, which is completely backwards to how it should be. So when I'm talking about that, I'll give you an example. So one of the clients that I did a lot of work with back when I did client work, he was in the self-defense niche. He sold – his name was Captain Chris Pizzo. He was the world leader in self-defense training at the time. I think he sold that business a few years ago or whatever. But it was like a $30 million business, selling like DVDs and that kind of stuff.

And the first thing I did when I started working for him was he handed me this thick document. And I don't remember how thick it was, but it was really deep and dense. And I go, what is this? And he goes, well, this is called a Claritus report. And Claritus's report, it's a company that does like, they work with the Nielsen TV ratings people to figure out who's watching what shows and all that and demographics and psychographics and all that. And he knew, and what they did is they took 10 000 of his customers and they ran it through whatever they do at the claritas report and you got this output of everything

you need to know about them like i used to joke saying like if they even go to the bathroom at a certain time of day i'll probably know about it like that's how much like you know a lot you know everything they're watching every show every tv show every talk radio what's how much – like you know a lot. You know everything. They're watching every show. They're – every TV show, every talk radio, how they voted, how much money they make, what their jobs are. All this stuff that is all – it's all about the market. It's like you're profiling the market as if – like law enforcement would profile criminal. You know like everything. You know what products they've bought, which means you can go see what advertisements sold them and you know how much money they spent on certain products and all these things like this that would

just, nobody would really know just using conventional market analysis. And so that's what I do now. Like, for example, I have a part ownership in a golf company where we're going to be selling various golf related things. And I'm doing the exact same thing. I mean, I like to golf every now and then, but I'm not like a hardcore golfer. So I'm going through the same process that I would if I had a client, where I'm going to profile these people.

And I've done it before because I've worked in this market before, but I'm going to do it again as if I know nothing. This market's changed. And I'm going to know everything I need to know. And I'm in the process of doing this, and it's great. Some of the stuff we've already done, we've blown things out of the water. And it's all because I'm some genius writer or anything. It's because I know the market.

So I don't care what you're selling. I don't care what the product is or anything. The more you know your market, the better you're going to sell them. And you cannot sell your customers properly if you don't know them, if you don't understand them at a very deep level, if you don't really become one of them, at least temporarily while you're trying to sell them. It's a huge shift in thinking, and it's probably the one thing that most copywriters never bother doing enough that they should. And you can have someone who doesn't even have that much talent. Well, wipe the floor with someone who does just because they know the market better.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. And I don't think it's easier said than done for a lot of us. You know, we've got this audience out here going, we've got all this stuff going on, right? You want me to do this, this, this, this, PPC, get involved with this. But in my opinion, email marketing is top of the list because it keeps you in front you know i always talk about there's three ways to make money you get new customers you charge the current customers more

money or you keep them coming back more often those are the main three ways to make money and email marketing is probably the lowest hanging fruit top of mind just staying in front of them you know i have so many questions i'm just so i got a list. Let's just say I've been collecting emails for the last few years. I've got 10,000 emails. What kind of formula would you recommend to stay top of mind? And is there like a video, then a tip and then, and how often do you send it out? Those are like the basics, just letting the audience know where to get started. Okay. so I wouldn't, I told you, I'm very simple. And I'm going to say something before I give my answer. I want to preface it with something.

About 10 years, almost 10 years ago, when I was doing client work, I did some work for a guy named Ken McCarthy, who's basically the founding father of internet marketing as we all know it. A lot of people don't know who he is, probably, especially outside of internet marketing, but he's one of the reasons we're selling online. And he used to do these seminars called the System Seminar where he'd have all the top internet marketing minds assemble and all that. And he was doing this internet marketing for newbies presentation for brand new people.

So like, for example, anyone listening to this who doesn't know where to start, it's for them. And he was doing it with this guy named Lloyd Irvin, who's like a, he's like some champion, world-class, resilient jiu-jitsu guy turned info marketer. So between the two of them, they probably, you know, multi, multi millions of dollars in sales. And I remember somebody asked him in the audience, they asked him, they were doing some Q&A. They say, you know, do you use YouTube and videos and, you know and do you use social media and all that? And they said, look, you can do all that stuff. There's nothing wrong with it. It's fine. But the vast majority of money being made, if not all of it for the most part, in direct response, not the internet, but using direct response marketing, which I presume we're all talking about here. It's very simple. It's capture page where you capture their email address, send them daily emails forever,

and that sends them to a sales page that sells them. So it's capture page, sales letter, unlimited email follow-up until they buy it. And then when they buy something, you sell them something else. And it's the most simple formula in the world. Yet everybody out there complicates this beyond comprehension with funnels and drawing circles on whiteboards. All you've got to do is start very simple. Think of an offer that your email list wants. If you don't have an email list, you've got to build an email list, which is probably a whole other discussion.

But assuming you have an email list or your customers have given you their email address, you want to sell them stuff that they want, that they're already buying via email. And you want to do it in a way, though, here's the key. You want to write emails in a way that they like reading and buying from, which almost nobody does that. I don't really get a lot of spam.

I get very few spam complaints. I think I've gotten one in the last two months or something. Even though I mail every day and sometimes twice a day. It's not because I'm a genius writer. It's because I know how to write emails in a way people like. And to write emails in a way people like, you just have to be interesting. And to be interesting, you have to know what their pains and problems are. So there's a book. I'll recommend this book to everyone. It's real simple, real short. It's called The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy.

Now, first of all, it's a great sales book for writing sales letters, but that's not why I'm recommending it right now. There's a bonus page, like in the very beginning of the book, of questions to ask about your product and your market. It's like 10 questions. If you take the time to answer these 10 questions, you will have a whole new outlook on how to sell your customers, whether by email or anything else. Because it asks questions like, what are their top three daily frustrations? What keeps them up at night with acid in their esophagus boiling up? What do they wake up thinking about that they're worried about that you can relate to your product? These are the kind of questions that if you get the answers to them, you'll never not be interesting to them. You can't, not if you're talking about their problems

and their desires and that sort of thing. So I hope that answers the question, but it really comes down to that, the market. Yeah, I love Dan Kennedy. I'm looking at a book called No BS Direct Marketing by Dan Kennedy, and he gives amazing guy. And direct marketing is the main thing we're trying to push people to do in the beginning.

And he says branding doesn't even make sense if you can't get a direct response. So there's a book that I'm reading right now called Ask. And it's the counterintuitive online formula to discover exactly what your customers want to buy. And it's about four different surveys you give them. And it really helps define who the avatar is and what it is that they might not like. Cause maybe you didn't ask them the right way. There's the, do you hate me question? And what have you, do you know anything about that? And do you give your people surveys to kind of figure out really how to narrow down the focus? Well, actually I'm, I'm friends and used to be business partners with Ryan Levesque.

We used to run a mastermind together. Oh, okay. I'm very familiar with, yeah, I'm real familiar with him and what he does. I actually helped sell one of his first version of Askle back in 2014. Yes, but I think he's a genius at this stuff. I really do. He's just way too complicated for me. Yeah.

I'm not saying that. I'm all for buying his stuff, by the way. I really do. He's just way too complicated for me. I'm not saying not use it. I'm all for buying his stuff, by the way. I really am. I think if you want to do that, there's no one better to go to. However, he likes to teach something called deep dive surveys, which is perfectly fine. And in fact, I mean, there's a lot of wisdom to that and to using it. If you want to learn how to do that kind of stuff or hire one of his people to do it for you is even better. Then you don't have to, like, learn this new thing if you don't want to. What I like to practice is the opposite. I like to do shallow dive surveys.

And this is what I mean by that. Assuming you have a list. Now, his stuff is perfect if you don't have a list especially. But it works if you have a list too. But I like to – I'm just not going to. It's too complicated for me. So what I do is when I want to know what to sell people is I go old school direct mail. Now, old direct mail, that's what built this industry.

And a lot of Internet stuff has gone away from the old school things that I think is a mistake. And you mentioned Dan Kennedy. He rails about this all the time, you know, like don't get away from the direct response, offline principles that made online work. And yet everybody does. But the old school direct mail guys, what they would do is, and they still do this, actually, it's not like they don't do it anymore, but in direct mail is they don't just blindly go out there and sell to people. What they do is they rent lists from their competitors of customers. So for example, if somebody bought a book about arthritis, I'll just use that as an example.

It could be anything. But if they're selling a book about arthritis, they will go rent the list of their competitors who have bought books about arthritis. So now they know they have a very, very good prospect that they're talking to. They're not just throwing stuff out there. So how does this relate to email? Well, you can do the same thing if you want to do a shallow dive survey like I would do, is you would simply ask your list, what was the last product that you bought and what was the URL?

So what information does that give you? Well, first of all, it tells you what they're buying, like what they're spending money on. And believe me, people will tell you what they want and they'll, you know, I want this, I want that, but you know what they really want, but what they buy. I mean, it's just, that's the only people will lie out of their teeth. They just, if you ask anyone what the most read book is or what their favorite book is, almost all of them will tell you the Bible just because they own one doesn't mean that's their favorite book. I mean, they probably like, like Stephen King or something better, but they'll tell you what you want to hear. What this does is say, here's what they're buying.

What did you just buy recently in the last 30 days? Because recency, frequency, and unit of sale is very important in this case. And so you'll find out not only what are they buying and spending money on, but you can even, if they give you the URL of a sales pitch, you will know exactly what appeals sold them. And I'm not saying this is 100% guaranteed way to sell, but it sure does put the house odds in your favor, I would think. Okay, so I'm going to dive into something that I probably shouldn't even ask you about. But

we all know in the internet marketing how easy it is to scrape lists. I'm pretty familiar with skip tracing. We use TLO. I could get people's email addresses. And I just wanted to hear your perspective on this. And like I said, I don't think you'll have a really direct answer, but we all know that if we get enough spam and people don't like what we're giving them, the servers get burnt and it's a cluster

and it's not the right way to probably go about it. But let's say you want to hit all the golfers and for some way you were able to get a list of 10 million, okay? But they're not opted in. Do you have any good thoughts on a way to use that list to get it clean? Or is that just not even a good way to even think about it it's like kind of a black hat thing but i'm just wondering from your perspective if there's a way to get that list cleaned up a little bit well i mean i don't mail to anyone who hasn't opted into my own list but there are these things called solo ads and mail drops and that kind of thing

if the list owner would let you mail his list, which they just, it's a solo ad. In other words, you'd mail something to their list. And, you know, there's ways of doing that. And, you know, it's probably beyond the scope of this. But, you know, if you just look up how solo ads work. Let's say there was a list owner like that. You know, ideally, they would mail their list on your behalf. You would pay them to send an email to their list promoting you to get on your list.

Okay, so there's a little formula for everyone to know. This is not something I invented. It was something coined by this guy named Ed Mayer, who was like the dean of direct marketing at one time. Very brilliant guy. And he made the insight that 40% of the battle is the list, right? Like if you don't have a good list of, you know, good lead source that you're talking to aren't like predisposed, like they're not, they don't want what you have, for example, that you're dead out of the water. And so the list is really the most important part or the media you're using. Like if,

like you've mentioned Val Pacquiao, the second most important part is the offer, which is another 40% of the battle. You have the right offer for the right person at the right time, you can almost write the worst sales pitch in the world and you'll probably get sales. And then only 20% of the battle is actually copy. Now, personally, I think it's more of like 50-30-20. 50% list, 30% offer, 20% copy. But either way, realize the copy is not the most important part. I mean, it's important. I'm not saying it's not.

I mean, it's very important. But getting the offer down, getting the right offer to the right people at the right time, which Dan Kennedy's world would say message to market match, is really, like, if you did nothing but focus on that, you will do well regardless of how good your copy is now as far as writing copy i'm a big fan of uh creating a vision before giving them any kind of proposition so i'll just coin that phrase vision before proposition so let me give you an example there's this guy and here's another name i'll drop his name is jim camp he died a couple years ago he was known as the world's most feared negotiator.

I mean, this guy would go again, like the FBI had him in to teach their people about negotiation. And he would go to like, you know, $500 million companies and negotiate these long, huge negotiations with companies like Intel and all that, who apparently had the most hardest, most hardcore negotiators. And he would win a lot. And that's why he was the most feared negotiator. The big takeaway he teaches, and I mean, this to me is just so important, because I think his book No, Start With, or it's called No, actually, is probably a better copywriting book than most copywriting books, because it's all about creating a vision first, before you go, a vision of a problem. So I'll give you an example. Right now, and we're talking to service businesses. I don't know if this would count for a service business, but in the town I live in,

my dad lives in the same town. And this guy I'm telling you is his yard is inundated with mole hills. He's got like 40 mole hills in his yard, right? Now I can tell you right now, there's nothing you could say to him about moles that would not get his interest. So we're talking message to market match. But someone would have a much better time selling him. Let's say someone does mole removal, whatever. Whoever does mole removal, whatever, exterminators, whatever. If they approach him by talking about all the really bad, evil crap that's going to happen to him if he doesn't get that fixed,

and starts with that before saying he has a solution, instead of just coming in and saying, look, we have the best rates and we've been around for 30 years and all this crap that nobody cares about. What he cares about is his problem and that vision. By building that vision up, saying here's the five things that can happen if you have molehills for more than three weeks. I'm just making this up. I know nothing about molehills. And you talk about some serious bad stuff that could cost a lot of money in the future. You start with that, and then you say, at the end of the day, then you talk about, well, here's how I can help you with it.

It's a huge difference between what most people do, which is they would just start out talking about the benefits of whatever their service is. And that applies to any kind of copywriting. I don't care if it's an email, if it's a sales letter, if it's a newspaper ad. It really doesn't matter, even if it's a Google ad or something. Talk about the problem first on the same page with you. It's so important. I mean, it's just one of these things that almost nobody wants to do.

It's like everybody gets excited about the product, the product, the product. The product is almost inconsequential, actually. I mean, you should have a good product, but it's not really what does the selling. What does the selling is giving them a vision of the problem and making sure they realize it and really putting the fear of God in them. In fact, there's this book called Breakthrough Advertising by this guy named Gene Schwartz back in the 60s. A brilliant copywriter.

It's like a $125 book and only 200 pages, but it's very expensive, but a very good book. The most important part of that book, even though I've read it like 20 times, I'm still trying to get gold out of it, is in the introduction. Where Gene Schwartz says, this book is not about building better mousetraps, i.e. better products. It's about building bigger mice and putting a terrifying fear of them into your customers. Because that's when they'll buy. They won't buy a mousetrap because of the mousetrap. They buy it because they're scared of the mice and all the crap that could happen from it.

So very long-winded answer, but that's what I would say about that. No, it's great. It's great. You've given us a lot of stuff. I've got everything written down from Ken McCarthy, Jim Camp, the Breakthrough Advertising, Matt Ferry. So you've got this different mentality when it comes to frequency. Most people would advise don't inundate your customers all the time. And I think that you've grown a relationship.

You're top of mind. You really have. Now, in the service business, I might see you once every five years as a garage door guy, a couple of times a year as an HVAC guy, carpet cleaning a couple of times a year. I like the idea of once a day, which it goes against most marketers, but it's working for you. So talk to me about that and then talk to me a little bit about really what the right thing. And I don't know if you've got an answer for this, but what would be a good frequency for the customers that you don't see? They'll obviously spam it if it's a garage or a company coming every day you know i just don't think that's going to work for what i'm doing so tell me a

little bit about what it works for and where the frequency might have to change for like maybe the home service industry communication i get why you're saying that i really do i understand because that would be most people's first reaction but the problem is you don't want to talk about garage doors daily. You want to write something daily every day to prove that, A, you're a real person and you're a likable person and that you're someone they can trust. That's the most important. That's why you want daily contact. People don't buy it because they just don't trust in a lot of cases. I mean, other than people just pick a name out of the yellow pages or whatever.

But think of it this way. Let's talk about garage door people. Again, that's not like my specialty or anything, but I can tell you this. Writing about garage doors would get very boring and monotonous, and you're right. They would get bored of it. But you don't write about garage doors. You write about garages, and you write about just general home improvement every day. Maybe even get some good tips or tell some stories.

You don't have to write about garage doors. Let's say you're a garage door repairman or whatever, or installer, whoever it is. And you've serviced somebody's garage before, right? So if you could capture their email address on site, which I think people should do, and their snail mail address, all you need is like an iPad or something. Just bring up your website and say, here, type in your email here and you'll be on our list. You're right. They're not going to need another garage door. They're probably not going to have, you know, for a while, right? But why couldn't you sell other things to them that are related to their house?

Or why couldn't you make joint ventures with the local, like, insurance people and, you know, the other service providers out there that work on other things like the plumbers and all that you can make joint ventures with them where you sell them leads sure you got a lead and i you know what i mean like you can do that you can or just share leads you don't have to sell them to each other in fact there's a um a concept called a breakfast club i don't know if you've ever heard of it or not but it's basically like you'd have five or six people in the same town in different businesses. So you'd have the garage door guy.

You'd have the plumber. You'd have the web designer. Maybe you even have like an accountant or something. It really doesn't matter. You only have one of each person. You don't have two competing people. And all you do is you get together every week and you exchange leads. And so, you know, some of these people are bound to know someone who has the problem that you can help with.

And now you have an introduction. It has nothing to do with email, by the way. It was just like a brain fart. But that's the thing. Like if you're selling drills, you don't sell drills. You sell how to drill better holes. And when they're ready to buy a drill, who are they going to go to? So it's the same with garage door stuff.

Or I know we keep using garage door, but like anything, you don't have to talk about garage doors. You can talk about other stuff, and you can sell them other stuff that they really want. And you'll know that by knowing your market. I have a friend who actually has a rental company, rental equipment. He rents equipment to everybody. He still hasn't taken the plunge into email yet, but we've had many discussions about how he could use email, and it really comes down to that. It's just knowing what they want. What else can you give them? Be the Amazon of the garage door world. By that, I mean Amazon is like the old Sears catalog. It's like the modern-day Sears catalog. You can buy anything on Amazon.

The old Sears catalog, you can buy everything from a house to a hat. Well, now Amazon has taken over that. We're not all going to be Amazon, but we could be the Amazon of our industry. So if you're selling garage door stuff, find out what else do they need. Well, maybe they need a paint job or something. Who knows? Whatever you need in a garage. Garage door is just one part. I think of my garage, shoot, I wish there was something in there that would take the stink out of it from the garbage can.

It could be something stupid like that. But if you're the one who offers all these other related things and you're in their email box every day with helpful tips that just have something to do with their home and their garage and their whatever, you don't have to be selling garage doors every day. Of course, you will sign off every email with your name and company name. And when they need a garage door help, who are they going to call? Or if they know someone who also needs a garage door help, who are they going to forward to? Those emails will get forwarded around the neighborhood.

So what it is, is it's stepping outside of what we sell in our industry and say, what else can we offer them? Because there's a whole lot of stuff people are already buying. And they're going to buy it from someone. They might as well buy it from you. Makes sense. I like the concept of selling the leads. I already do some lead generation and sell to different companies. But the biggest thing is making sure to just make it genuine, real stuff.

And I think that's what, you know, when you were talking just now, I think about the book Blue Ocean. Because the main concept of Blue Ocean in mind, is you're selling a blender. You're really not selling the blender. You're selling the healthy lifestyle and the longevity of life. And that's what Blue Ocean is all about. And it makes sense. And that's how I think what you're saying, too, is to tailor some of your marketing to blue ocean strategies right yeah i mean i'm just thinking about this kind of stuff it's like you're not really selling the things you're selling the benefit of the thing you know i'm thinking about people who worry about who would have a garage i mean i'm just saying garage door stuff i'm not the expert i mean i have a door. I actually need to hire someone to put like a security pad on it. So I don't have to like, in case I lock myself out.

You know, but there's like, think for example, like there's things like people are worried about people breaking into their house and everything. Right. So that's a whole, that's a related thing. Well, we got your garage door in, do you have a good burglar system? You know, because these garage doors are not foolproof, you know, people could get in or whatever. And so it's just relating. What do they want? What are they buying already? Make a list of that.

And then you start offering as much of that as you can. Right. And that, you know, we're going into storage solutions that hang down. We also do some stuff. We work with an epoxy company. There's other things like parking assist when you're driving in and we put it on your ceiling or a laser. I'm a lot more complicated. I think I love KPIs. I love drilling down on performance and like seeing progress. And you said at one point, you don't really

care about your opt-in rate. You don't know really the percentage of the open rate. I mean, you're just kind of a little bit more lax about that. You know, do you think measuring the open and opt-out rates and opt-in rates are relevant still? Or is that something that just is we might pay too much attention to and miss the big stuff? Well, it's okay to look at it and all that. But, you know, in fact, you should look at them every now and then. I personally don't do it every day or anything, but if you notice a drop in sales or something, you might want to look at what's going on. There could be something wrong with your website. I just had something wrong with my contact form the other day, and it got me in some trouble because I didn't get someone's email. But here's the thing, and I'm want to go back to the guy I mentioned before, Jim Camp, because I didn't really think this way until I learned some stuff from him. And he was not a big fan of making sales quotas and all this stuff.

And he's talking about salespeople, but this applied to him. I apply this to email and everything else. You should know what your numbers are. I don't want to say I never check this stuff, but I don't obsess over it because I can't control it. I have very little control over if anyone opts into my site. I have no control if somebody buys from me. I have no control if someone clicks on my site.

I have no control if someone opens it. I literally have no control over any of that. What I do have control over is getting up every day, making myself better at this every day, being consistent every day, trying to make myself smarter at what I do, all these things I can control. So it's kind of like if you're trying to lose weight, right? Let's say somebody's 200 pounds overweight. They can't control how much the scale is going to say every day, but they can control eating better and exercising. And so in my way of thinking, it's better to focus more on getting better at writing better

emails and being consistent, being there every day, doing those two things and coming up with better offers and really trying to bond with your list and talking to them in a way where they want to be talked to. These are things you can control. Things like open rates, you can't control them. In fact, open rates, I'll tell you the problem, though. There's two problems with open rates. They're not very accurate, for one thing. I had this subscriber to my print newsletter about email. This was actually about a year ago and he's like ben i joined your your email players newsletter and my client just made more money in july than they did like the whole year before but here's

my problem ben we're only getting nine percent open right so i'm thinking she kind of focused on the wrong thing you know i mean like yeah who cares? You just did more in one month than you did like, you don't worry about your stupid open, right? So here's my point. Android phones, because a lot of people are checking, and most people are pretty much checking emails on phones. Android phones have HTML turned off by default because of viruses and that sort of thing. Well, if HTML is turned off in your email program, it's not recording your opens. So right out of the gate, your opens are probably higher than what you think they are. Two, this is something I just heard through the grapevine, so don't quote me on this.

I can't prove it or anything like right now, but I believe it. And that is a lot of people have Gmail addresses, and Gmail now remotely hosts the image or something, so it's really whacking up open rates. And that's why everybody's running around flailing about their open rates and freaking out, when what really matters is your sales. I mean, at the end of the day, if email is the sport, then sales should be the scoreboard, as far as I'm concerned, not like opens and all that. Again, I'm not saying to never look at that stuff. It can be very helpful to look at it, but to obsess over it and worry about it. And same with opt-in rates. Now, opt-in rates, I could get, I think my opt-in rates are probably under 20%. I really don't know what they are, but that's because I do things on my opt-in page to weed people out.

So for example, I make them click a box before they can even opt in, acknowledging that I'm going to send them daily promotional emails. So they have to read that. It will not let them opt in unless they click a box that clearly says, I agree to get daily promotional emails from Ben Fedel, which is, of course, going to turn people away, the people I don't want. I could take that out and get a higher opt-in rate, but I'd also get junkier leads who just want the free stuff or whatever, and you're just going to complain to me.

So what I have is a very highly responsive list, even if it's smaller than what it could be. And I'm far more, I'm more of a four quarters versus a hundred pennies kind of guy. Like I'd rather have a few people or quality than a lot of people who aren't. So my opt-in rate means nothing to me. It really doesn't mean that much to me because I could get it way higher. But at what would be the point? It would just be for my ego and not for my sales and peace of mind.

So these are some of the things I, what I'm talking about when I say not obsessing over that stuff. I'm not saying never to look at it. I'm just saying to obsess over it and worry about it over sales is kind of silly to me. Because at the end of the day, when you go to the bank, they don't ask you how many open rates did you get. They're just depositing the money you made. So, to me, it's all about sales and not getting bogged down in all these other statistics and metrics. Sure, sure. So, you brought up a great topic for me because I'd like to know, we've got Gmail. A lot of people have Gmail.

You've got primary social and promotions. And I don't know the success rate, but I know my stuff. I read all the primary. I don't really go to social very often. I don't really for sure, but you have to have an opt out. And Google could pretty much detect that and throw it in the promotional section. Doesn't get completely thrown away in the spam necessarily or go straight to spam. But what are the key secrets? And I'm sure there's a formula of how much HTML, how much just non-HTML, what not to have in there. So it makes it to the inbox. Well, I don't even use HTML emails. I actually use plain text. I want it to look like a real, like it's a personal email at a glance at least.

Even if they know it's not, it just, it could be. So, you know, I don't, I can't speak much for HTML and how often that ends up in those folders. I will say this, for Gmail, one thing, a good thing to do, the more you email, the more people are going to email you back to reply to whatever you sent out. And whenever Gmail users do that, Gmail knows more and more that you're a real person. It's not foolproof, but just getting them, Gmail people, just hearing back from them. And this is a good reason to email daily, actually, and to talk and be interesting. And it may even be controversial or whatever, is you want Gmail people emailing you back. Even if it just means sending an email every now and then asking a question,

some kind of survey question. I don't even know what it would be for a service industry, but I'm just saying some kind of email you send out where they have to answer you back. And then when they answer you back, it helps up your chances of not being in the promotions folder. From what I understand, I don't pretend to be the genius on this, but this is another reason to mail daily. If you're the kind of person they want to hear from and they look forward to hearing from, trust me, they will look for you and they will say this is definitely not spam or whatever. They will adjust their settings because they got to hear from you. When people opt into your list, you should be offering them some kind of bribe to do it.

Like this is one big thing. Some incentive for them to do it. I don't know. It depends on what the business is or what the bribe would be. Like, for example, I give people a free issue of my $97 a month newsletter as a PDF. So it's very valuable. So people look for it, and if it gets lost somewhere, they're going to have to go find it and they'll, you know, they'll move it to the inbox. And so Google's like, okay, you must, they're probably a real

person. So there's ways around it like that. But what it comes down to is focusing on those things I was talking about, writing better emails and doing it consistently every day and being the kind of person that they want to hear from where you're not an imposition. You're what Dan Kennedy would call a welcome guest and very few other people in their inbox are, and you do that right. And you'd be surprised how many people will root around in their Gmail, looking for your email because they need their fix of you. And so there's probably more technical things you can do, but I'm, again,

I'm just very simple minded and I don't want to have to mess with all that, but that's worked for me pretty well. And, uh, you know, and you'd be surprised how many people do read their promotions for actually it's it's, and then you'll just stand out even more in there. Yeah. That's interesting stuff. And that's a great point because you've done a really good job with coming up with really good headlines. One of the guys, Gianni, that works for me, he said, it's impossible not to open your emails. So what's some really, really good tips to come up with a headline that people are going to open? But also, I made the mistake of putting stuff like, I have a referral for you or something, you know,

in the past of stuff that just, it gets open, but people get annoyed that they feel like they got tricked or something. And I don't recommend that by any means. So what would you recommend? Well, you can never go wrong with curiosity. I mean, of all the ways to get an email open curiosity that will do it. So the more curiosity you can work in there, eight ways your garage doors could end up killing your youngest child or something weird like that.

You know, like you talk about all the security problems with bad garage doors, right? Or how eight ways your garage door could kill you or something. It's going to get open, right? But you just have to fulfill on it. You don't want to be like you said, be annoying. So curiosity is good. But here's the thing to think about. And I really believe this just based on so many years of doing this.

And maybe some people would dispute me on this, but I always say it's not against the law for them to be wrong. So I don't mind. But, okay, so the name at the top, your name, where it's coming from you every day, after you've been mailing people for long enough and they start to like you and like hearing from you, that's the most important thing is the name at the top. If it's coming from you and they like you and they know your name instantly, they're going to open it. Or at least, I won't say they're going to open it, but they will not delete it. So your name gets it not deleted on site while everybody else is getting deleted on site.

The subject line is what then gets it open and what prevents them from putting it off until later. So it is very important, but it's not as important as that front line. But if you're going to do subject lines, curiosity is good. There's something call the uh shock effect subject lines where you say something really just shocking that you know but they're almost like what the hell is what you know they have to read it you definitely have you have to pay it off like for example i did one called

i think about you in the shower right like that is a subject line once in the subject line once. I did it enormously well. I did one word, you know, it doesn't have to always be that kind of stuff. It doesn't have to be, like, sexual or anything. I'm just saying, like, something where you say it

and they're, like, they're so, like, they're just astounded somebody would say this. And then you just, you know, want to pay it off right away. But that's another, I call that the nuclear option

in the subject line, actually. You don't want to do it every day, but it's good to do it, like, once a week or something if you can. But, you know, those types of ways, it's being, just saying something different and interesting that not everyone else is saying. Not talking about your product is another thing. You want to talk about something that's, you know, completely out of that. I'm a big fan of using a lot of entertainment in these emails and being entertaining. And that includes your subject lines. You can be entertaining entertaining you can have fun with this kind of stuff in fact email should be fun

while you're writing it you should have a good time doing it should not be something that that you dread it's almost like it's just like a talk radio show it's like a talk radio segment you're just going to talk for a little bit and then you're going to ask them to buy something very simple it could be you could be ranting to someone. You could be giving them a tip. You could be saying something controversial, which is one of the things I like to do. There's just so many ways you can make checklists of things they're doing wrong. Tell a story. That's a really good way to do it. Just tell a story about something bad that happened to someone in your market and then talk about how your service will help prevent that

from happening to them or can fix it if it already did happen to them. There's so many ways of going about this. But at the end of the day, you've just got to be interesting. And you've got to say something. And I mentioned Ken McCarthy earlier. He has this book called The System Club Letters. It's a great book. It was my bathroom reading for like eight years. And I told him it was a joke once, but I don't think he believed me.

But it really was. I just read it over and over and over. What is it? It's called The System Club Letters. And it's actually really was. I just read it over and over and over. What is it? It's called The System Club Letters. And it's actually really good. It would be very helpful, I think, for your audience to read that book. And it's a really easy read. But he said something like, before he pushes the send button,

he asked, does this email warrant me interrupting my prospect's day? And that is a really good guide to go by, actually, because if you're not going to give them some kind of entertainment or something, some kind of entertainment or some kind of piece of information that's going to like make it worth them to read your email, then you should write something else. But, you know, I mean, teaching email, email is a very interesting thing. Once you get into it and you do it enough, it actually becomes very fun and it's not something you dread. And when you see sales coming in every day, you're like, it's even more fun. Because like you said,

it's really, to me, it's the best way right now of making, certainly the fastest way of making sales I've ever seen. Yeah. I met a guy recently, Mike Costigan, who's an expert in real estate, and he is a very good, he does Rios and he's very good at email marketing. And I think he's got like four Lamborghinis, a couple of Ferraris. And, you know, we, we think we always think like we got to do Facebook good. We got to do pay-per-click. We got to do all this stuff. And I, I love marketing. I mean, I absolutely love it. I think that's the name of Joe Polish's podcast. I love marketing, but, but I do, I really do. And I love to get involved. I love learning about this stuff. And you're one of the top five marketers probably in email marketing in the world. I mean, you're world renowned at this stuff. And I just love that you took the time to do this. And I got a few more questions if you got a few more minutes. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, cool. So let me ask you this.

From your perspective, a customer gives us their email because we email them their invoice. Now, they are our customer. They bought from us. This is a great question for our audience. Is that an informal opt-in to say, you can email me now? Are you going to send an invoice? You might send out some warranty information. You might send up times that you should come back out, maintenance tips, stuff like that.

Well, I don't know what the legalities of that are, but I will say this. It's better to get their permission, you know, to get them to opt into an actual list where they want to hear from you. Some people will say, oh, that's playing it too safe. And I understand the way it is. But I just don't want to hear from irate people. I mean, like, like I don't mind hearing from if they're responding to something I said, that's fine, but I don't want them to be getting mad because they didn't know I was going to email them. So you could do that as long as you make it, like in my way of thinking, I think you should make it as clear as possible that now that you've got this, you're on our email list, but you can

leave at any time. I don't know the legalities of that, by the way. I'm just saying, like, I don't want to play that, but I'm saying just from like a, from my point of view, if I was going to do that, that would, that's how I would do it. Okay. But usually, you know, but the thing is, if you already have them on your email list already, it shouldn't be an issue because they've already opted in. But I guess if it's somebody that hasn't been on your email list, it never hurts to ask them, would you like to be on our email list so you can get XYZ discount on the next thing or whatever offer you want to make.

It never hurts to try to just get them in legitimately. I mean, that's the only way I would do it. I just wouldn't do it that way. It tends to leave a bad taste in people's mouth. You want to give them an opportunity to subscribe. You don't necessarily want to force them on there. Okay. Good stuff. So you're like a master of storytelling and you're persuasive without being pushy. And I got to tell you, when I read a book, I don't remember the facts and the statistics. I remember stories that tell me a lot of stuff. I'm working on a book right now that I put a lot of stories that taught me lessons.

I tell a lot of jokes because I remember them. It's a story. Tell me, what are the secrets to really telling a good story that's rememberable and it's persuasive and it pushes the stuff out there that you're really trying to hit home with people. Well, I mean, it's good to tell a story that the reader can relate to. So I'll give you an example. I mentioned I worked with this selling that self-defense niche. Right. And he basically hired me to write almost all of his rewrite all of his ads.

And he sold this product called Gorilla Grappling, which is about, you know, grappling. Okay. Now his list, I can tell you, we're not martial artists. These are not, they wouldn't even know the difference between Kung Fu and Kung Pao Chicken. They just, these people were just weekend warrior type A personality, executives, lawyers, doctors, people like that. And high part of it, you know, they just wanted to be bad-asses. That's why they bought his stuff. They would never read Black Belt Magazine or anything like that. So how do you make grappling sexy to someone like that? Right? Like you're going to be rolling around on the ground grappling. It's like the most unsexy thing in the world to that market. It's not like he was talking to people who are into Brazilian jujitsu and all that already. They would love it. But

these were just regular guys, probably you and me, right? We just want to learn how to kick some ass. Like that's basically his market. So I had to write, how do I write? So I'm like, how do I write an ad about grappling to make that interesting? Well, what I did, and this is just an example of one way to do it, is I went and researched grappling because research is really key, not just researching your market,

but researching everything there is about every aspect of your product. And I learned some interesting things about grappling. Like, for example, back in the ancient Roman days when they used to throw people to the lions, there were very few people who actually beat the lions because they knew grappling. That's kind of cool, right? Yeah. Well, shit, now suddenly it's interesting, right? So I told that story. After that story, I talked about how the ancient samurai used to use grappling to take prisoners on the field so they could break their bones and stuff so they wouldn't run away.

So I worked that story to that. And then I found an actual real-life story, for today at least, where there was this 9-year-old kid who was walking home with his little girlfriend, I guess, and they were attacked by this dog, and he choked the dog out using grappling. I guess he knew Brazilian jiu-jitsu or something. So I put all three of those stories in the sales letter, and that thing sold like crazy, not because it was grappling, but because of the stories. And so if you're going to write stories, just make them interesting, inherently interesting. I'll give you another example.

I'm going to be writing an email about this very soon, actually. So for a couple of days, I'm going to be selling a merchant account solution to my list. Because I think people can never have too many merchant accounts for various reasons. I'm not going to talk about merchant accounts. I'm going to talk about my friend Doberman Dan Gallup, who, when he was selling selling supplements and he had the cleanest business, he had no chargebacks, everything was fine. And one day he woke up and all of his recurring orders for supplements were declined. And he's like, holy crap, what happened? We found out his merchant account just shut him down because some banker decided he was too high risk, right, for whatever reason.

So what he did is he turned on his backup merchant account. He was smart enough to have a backup merchant account. Well, a week later, they did the same thing to him. So he had a backup, luckily he had a backup of his backup. And then that was working and they didn't shut that down. But it was an eye-opening story, right? Like it's like, holy crap, you know, like that could happen to anyone in business. And so I'll be telling that story, for example, before I even pitch anything. So it's all about the thing. Stories have to be relevant and interesting to them, to the reader. If you do that right, you can't lose. Yeah. Yeah. I've had some merchant issues myself on my e-commerce stuff. I really am resonating right now thinking about buying data, right? You say partner up with somebody,

finding these people. And I know you don't want to go too far into detail on that. But I mean, so for example, I have a book coming out, and it's all about the home service business. There's a lot of people that have lists that have sold different products and stuff like that, or CRMs have all that information, the big CRM in the home service industry. What's the best way to partner up with somebody? And do you do it as a payment per email or do you say, hey, tens of thousands of dollars, what would you recommend as far as partnering and getting people to just use their list? Well, there's at least two ways to do it. One way is you could go to people who have these lists and say, look, can I pay you to endorse my book to your list?

You know, and unfortunately, most people, they're going to look at you like, what? You know, like, they've never had that concept explained to them. Yeah. Like, it didn't even occur to them they could do it. And that's the challenge with what you're doing. Now, if you were selling internet marketing-related stuff, you'd have people all lining up to, like, be your affiliate, right? And that's another way to do it. You'd say, how about you sell this to your book, and give you like all the sales, right? Or half the sales.

I mean, the more you can offer them, the more incentive they'll do it. Because the real money is on the back end. It's not selling your book. It's whatever you have on, I'm sure you have like coaching and masterminds probably, I'm just guessing, high ticket stuff on the back end. So that's another way to do it is just to say, look, I'll give you half the money or all the money, whatever it is you want to give them. And those are two ways to do it. It's just that in that industry, you may have to talk people into it a little bit.

Cause they probably, I'm just guessing that doesn't happen to them all the time. I could be wrong, but those are two ways you could do it. Or you could just pay for advertising. It's probably the best way to do it. So yeah. So like a Facebook goes to a leads funnel you know yeah what is your honest opinion of books like uh launch by jeff walker and stuff like that as far as building the funnels and trip wires and trust me i'm a fan of it and i think he's very well you know he's got a track record but i just curious your take on that well i mean i have nothing respect for the guy from what i know of him

but his stuff is way too many moving parts and kind of like to me it's over complicated for me maybe for most people it's not i'm not judging it my methods are way simpler when i'm watching something in fact i'm helping someone launch her product or her list tomorrow. I mean, I've been helping her through the process. It's very simple. And it's based on your own email list and there's nothing to do with social media or blogs or affiliates or any of that stuff. I'm not saying all that stuff doesn't work. It probably works very well. It's just more moving parts than I want to deal with. I want to be free from having to deal with all these moving parts and just have a simple, very simple business.

So my launch strategy is just very easy. It's just like literally as soon as I find out I'm going to sell something, I go to my main email list and I say, look, I'm going to be launching this product. If you want to be notified when I launch it, sign into this other list I set up. Opt into this other list. That's the notification list. And I'll know how many people have any interest right away. If nobody goes to that, you know, nobody probably cares. If it hits a nerve, people will go to it. And at least I know there's some people interested in it. And then I just

spend the next however long weeks, whatever it is, sending people to that opt-in list every day, every chance I get. And then when I'm ready to launch, I send several emails to that list and I send several emails to my main list over a weekend. And it's always resulted in really big results for me. But it's always just to my own list. I don't try to enlist joint venture partners or any of that stuff. Okay, awesome. I only got a couple more and I appreciate,

I just, I can't get enough of this stuff. So, you know, we talk about behavioral data that you're collecting on these people. And you could really use email marketing to send different messages. You know, I think Infusionsoft is really great because it could take different paths based on reactions. And it's got a lot of ways to communicate. Tell me a little bit about do you use a lot of those behavioral patterns to send letters, different letters at different times? Or are you just like, boom, I send the same email to the same list every time?

They're not the same email. I don't do that. And I'm not saying it doesn't work. I just haven't played with it. And I'm probably never going to because I'm just an old school thinking guy. I just look at the old school direct mail world. They buy a product. They go on a buyer's list for that product. I just look at the old school direct mail world. They buy a product, they go on a buyer's

list for that product. You know, like I understand it, but I just don't think it's, it makes any sense in a lot of ways to tag people and all this when you could just, they buy a product, a, they now go on a buyer's list that bought product a, now I can sell them product B. You know what I mean? Like I keep it real simple. Now, there are companies that have very complex product lines and all that. For them, I would understand it, like big e-commerce sites and all that. I think they would have to do that. I mean, I think it would – but for, like, if you don't have a huge number of products, I just don't see the point. I'd say just – like, in fact, here's my way, and here's what I'm teaching this girl right now to do it.

She has a membership site she's selling, and then people she's going to upsell what she calls her A-list option, which is like $1,000 a month, and you get a lot of personal attention and all that. And then to those people, she'll sell one-on-one coaching days. Now, that's a very simple, small product. I mean it's not a lot of moving parts, but you don't need all the tags and all that for you. It's like you take the same email you wrote to sell product, this membership site, and then you send the same email to the people who are in the membership site, but you tweak the ending of it to sell the A-list thing. And the people who are in the A-list thing will get the same email the other two got, but tweak the ending so that it sells a one-on-one intensive

coaching day with her. That's how I would do it. Like you can take the same email and just tweak. email the other two got, but tweak the ending so that it sells a one-on-one intensive coaching day with her. That's how I would do it. Like you can take the same email and just tweak it. I did this when I was selling in the prostate market. I used to sell an ebook and then I back and sold some supplements. I would take the same email I wrote to sell an ebook to the buyers of the ebook and just tweak it and change the ending to selling supplements. Most of the time, it can be the same email. So again, is this ideal? Is this going to, you know,

I don't know. I mean, it is for me. I like simple. I don't want to spend all day writing five emails to five different segments of a list.

I'm just not going to do it. For some people, they might want to do it. If they have a staff in place and they have four great copywriters on staff, maybe they should do all that. You know,

but that's not the kind of business I have. So I can't really advise a bigger business on that either way. Yeah. It's crazy when you're talking to email experts how complicated it could get so quick. You know, it's like. Yeah.

And they'll waste their whole lives on that stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's nuts. And, you know, this happens, if this happens, if this happens, if this happens. We need an API for Twilio. We need to do this, that. And it's like, I think getting the ball started.

These are the guys, these guys, and the ones I know, I'm not saying they all do this, but the ones I know who do this have a lot of overhead, you know, and I'm not even sure it's worth it. Like, if you get them talking about it, I'll tell you this. I'll just say that. I'm going to name names, but there's some pretty big guys out there in internet marketing and when i mentioned that ryan levec and i used to do a mastermind together it was called oceans four and we did with these two other friends of ours and you'd be surprised how many people in the

room doing like eight figures a year we're like man i'm kind of in awe at how simple your business is i don't like all this mean, it sounds great for some people because some people love that kind of stuff, but most people, I don't want to say most, but a lot of people don't. A lot of people want to have, are in business,

not so the business owns them, but so that they can enjoy their lives. That's the one I teach. I teach that. I teach people how to like take their current business and take it down to make it simple. And so you're still making good money,

but you got your time back. And it appeals to some, it doesn't to others, but that's the way I look at it. I love your attitude. It's like take it or leave it. I am what I am. If you don't like it, you're probably not for me. It's a very good attitude because it's more focused.

It's a rifle, not a shotgun, and I can appreciate that. And you've got this email players, you know, this newsletter. And what do you have, like 400 or 500 subscribers on that? It fluctuates, but it's over 500, well over 500. And you get $100 a month for that, right? Yeah. So you got, let's see, if you have 500. I mean, that's not the only thing I sell either.

Like I have upsells and all that, and I sell stuff to subscribers. I have a high-ticket product that another company sells for me. They license it for me. So I have other stuff too. That's just like – that's my main thing, but it's not the only thing I have. Yeah, I love it. I just love the fact that you found a passion and you give people what tell me a little bit. And like I said, I'm almost done. I want to tell people how to get more of you and ask you about some books and stuff.

But my mom right now, for example, she's coming up with like she's always on Pinterest talking about how cooking with Gina. And she's trying to like get people to like really get involved with her different recipes and stuff. And how do you start? I'm always wondering and I always ask people because they've got these great ideas, but I say, what is the how do you get to the minimum viable product of starting? How do you start to get that going? I mean, how do you get some momentum behind it? And where do you start?

What kind of information do you deliver? And how do you monet behind it? And where do you start? What kind of information do you deliver? And how do you monetize it? I mean, if somebody listening right now goes, man, I'm busting my ass 80 hours a week. And I don't think it's easy. I think you've worked your ass off to get where you are. And you understand a lot of things more than a lot of most people listening in the email marketing industry. But if someone who's listening right now, and you told them, look, this is where you get started. This is your passion. And here's how you monetize it, what does that look like? Well, I mean, first you've got to find a market you want to sell to. Most people do it backwards.

They find a product first and then they try to sell it. What you want to do is find a market of people who are passionate about something. They're already buying it and they're spending their money on it. Find them, build a list of them, and then find or create an offer that you can sell them and then start mailing them every day i mean it's really as simple as that i love it i love the simplicity yeah i'm gonna ask this will be my last question and then we'll just find out some books and really where to go to really subscribe to all this stuff so right now I created a product for my company. It's a simulator. I can show people what their door looks like on their home. A lot of companies

have them like the manufacturers have them. But the cool thing is you can load up all the manufacturers, anything custom you do. And we made it. It's on iPhone. It's on Android. It's a pretty cool concept. I've got a full-time guy coming on. We've worked out all the bugs. It's amazing. And it really helps show people. A lot of people are visual. They love it.

And you can show them 50 different doors. You can show them windows on their home. You can show entry doors. You can show fireplaces. If you took a software product like this and you just said, hey, I want to take the low-hanging fruit. I'm just going to, you know, it solves a problem. It increases sales. It's a great visual aid.

It helps with upsells because they want something nicer. Where would you get started? I mean, I'm just curious your train of thought. Would it be email marketing? Would it be phone calls? Would it be a sales letter in the mail? I mean, what would you do to just get started? And you said, this is low-hanging fruit.

I'll get this thing cooking quickly with this method. I mean, to me, direct mail is probably the best way. I don't know where you'd find a good list for that, but, um, you know, that sounds like something you could actually advertise in a magazine or newspaper or something, and then get people to look at your demonstration and let that do the sales job. You may not even need email for something like that. That's interesting. Okay. So is there any other books or any other training that you would just say, look, you know, you're interested in this stuff. This is, here's where I get started. I mean, I want to tell people where to go to get more of you, where to sign up to the email players. Can we go over how to get more of you, where to sign up to the email players. Can we go over how to get more of you?

Yeah. I mean, the best way to find me is just go to bensettle.com. And if you give me your email address, if you opt in, I'll send you the first issue of email players as a PDF. It's a print newsletter, but I'll send a PDF of the first issue. And that issue has 24 ways of making more sales with your emails, like starting right away. I've had people tell me they've made like tens of thousands of dollars just with that. I'm not saying that'll happen to everyone listening to this, but that's the potential.

And, you know, it's free to sign up. And I'll send you daily emails until you opt out. And if you want to buy, that's great. If you don't, just stick around, eat the popcorn, and read the emails. I don't care. On my website, I have probably 2,000 blog posts. You don't even have to get on the list. You just go to benfettle.com.

You can actually not even get on the list and just go to the blog. There's a lot of content there. I have a podcast up there. My current podcast, I have probably like 90 hours of content, of total podcasts on my site. So there's a lot of free stuff there where you can see if this is for you, if I'm for you or not. And if I am, you know, feel free to join the list and you'll hear from me every day. Yeah, man, I'm going to read these books. I'm going to sign up for it.

I got your site up right now. Double your sales with email. And I've done, trust me, before we do these, I do research and I've gone through all this stuff. But I talk to a lot of people on the podcast. The thing I love the most about this is the simplicity of it. Hey, it's simple. Don't complicate it. Get the ball rolling and get started. So I really appreciate you being on. Maybe after I join up and everything and buy a couple of your products and experiment with them, maybe we could jump on another one and we could really hop into what's working and what maybe is not working.

So I appreciate your time today. And thanks so much for everything and being on the show today. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right, Ben. Take it easy. Bye bye.

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