In this discussion, David Deutsch interviews Jay Abraham, a renowned business strategist, about his approaches to growth, copywriting, and strategic thinking. Jay emphasizes the importance of leveraging existing assets within a business to maximize results before innovating with new methods. He highlights the power of optimization and strategic thinking, drawing on decades of experience across various industries to help businesses achieve exponential growth. Jay also shares examples of how he has helped companies create new revenue streams by tapping into underutilized assets, forming strategic partnerships, and optimizing current operations. His unique non-linear thinking allows him to find opportunities where others might overlook them.
Jay also introduces his philosophy of the “strategy of pre-eminence,” which focuses on being a trusted advisor and creating long-term value for clients. He stresses the importance of empathy, understanding customer needs, and delivering solutions that enrich lives. Jay encourages copywriters and business builders to think beyond traditional tactics, focusing instead on creating value, solving problems, and nurturing relationships. His approach emphasizes not just driving sales but improving the lives of clients and customers, creating a mutually beneficial relationship rooted in trust and strategic thinking.
[player id=’51952′]
Blank line here
Million Dollar Marketing Tips from David and Jay:Blank line here
- Start with Optimization: Focus on optimizing what’s already working in a business before trying to innovate. This is often the quickest way to achieve growth.
- Leverage Existing Assets: Look for hidden or underutilized assets like old marketing materials, customer lists, or intellectual property that can be repurposed for profit.
- Ask Strategic Questions: Always ask what a business is not doing with its leads, customers, and existing assets. Identifying gaps can lead to quick wins.
- Empathy is Key: Approach your work by understanding the human condition. Think of your customers as real people with dreams, fears, and goals, and relate to them on that level.
- Focus on Value Creation: Shift your mindset from merely selling products to solving problems and creating value for customers. This will differentiate you in the market.
- Embrace Risk Reversal: Don’t just offer a guarantee; make the process of doing business with you risk-free for the client. This builds trust and increases conversions.
- Specialize in Strategic Thinking: As a beginner, start by focusing on simple but powerful strategies that help businesses grow, such as improving customer retention or expanding into new markets.
- Think Beyond Copywriting: Instead of just focusing on writing, think of yourself as a business strategist who generates revenue and solves problems for clients.
- Find Untapped Opportunities: Seek out business niches or client needs that are underserved. Avoid competing directly with experts in saturated areas when you can explore gaps in the market.
- Build Relationships: Establish long-term relationships with clients by being a trusted advisor. Position yourself as someone who cares about their success, not just about completing the project.
Blank line here
[Please-comment-on-this-post_1]
Interview Transcript:
David: Hello Jay!
Jay: Hi David, how are you?
David: I’m great, how are you doing?
Jay: I am almost impeccable. It’s a very nice evening in California.
David: I’m jealous of the California weather.
Jay: Where are you, David?
David: I’m in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Jay: It’s nice there. You get a little humidity.
David: You get a little humidity and really good basketball.
Jay: That’s right, that’s good. What are we going to talk about tonight, David?
David: Oh, we’re going to talk about all sorts of things, from copywriting to marketing and how to leverage people’s assets and the strategy of pre- eminence and all the things that I think people need to hear about from you. I’m really excited!
I’m going to do a little introduction, so you might want to not listen because you might blush or something.
Jay: Alright, I’ll go get some water and come back when you say, “I’m ready, Jay.”
David: This is probably the hardest introduction I’ve ever had to do, because you can’t really put Jay into any category. His accomplishments are so outsized and include so much. It would be like calling Leonardo da Vinci a mere painter.
I can’t call him a great copywriter — he doesn’t even really consider himself a copywriter anymore – or a great marketing strategist, but he’s legendary in both those areas.
Basically, Jay is just in a class by himself when it comes to helping large and small businesses explode their growth and profits. His results have been so extraordinary he’s been featured twice in Investor’s Business Daily, once on the front page and once in the Leaders in Success section, where they said, “Jay knows how to maximize results with minimum effort.”
In Forbes magazine they listed Jay as one of the top five executive coaches in the country, saying that Jay’s specialty is turning under- performers into marketing and sales whizzes.
He’s been written up in USA Today, The New York Times, Los AngelesTimes, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Entrepreneur magazine, Success magazine, Inc magazine, and many other places.
He has over 10,000 individual business success stories from around the world.
Jay, you still there?
Jay: I’m here, David.
David: I wanted you to hear this one, because one of those 10,000 individual success stories is kind of mine. About 20 years ago I was working at an ad agency, leafing through Success magazine, and came upon this four-page ad by this guy named Jay Abraham, for Your Marketing Genius At Work.
I was so blown away. Here I was this ad agency guy. I was so blown away by these techniques that you had for leveraging assets and the things that you wrote about writing and about the psychology and about optimizing business.
I was so intrigued. I sent away for the program, which was hundreds of dollars, which was a lot for me in those days and a rather inexpensive program for you.
I got that program and wound up getting your $5,000 Home Study Protégé program. I wound up quitting the ad agency world and going out on my own, I was so inspired and excited by your ideas and by your techniques.
Jay: David, first of all that’s very gratifying. Secondly, just so we can mutually acknowledge each other, I’ve been very impressed with you since I first met you with your integrity, with your focus, your dedication, and your very high ethical standards.
If I had a little influence on shaping that, that’s wonderful, but I suspect that you had all the elements there from the beginning.
Now that we’ve established that I’ve been around a long time and done a bunch of stuff, let’s talk about what will help your listeners, okay?
David: Okay, great. The first thing I want to talk about is if you could tell us a little bit about your philosophy of helping businesses grow, things like leveraging assets. What’s the basis of what you teach people to do?
Jay: It’s a meaningful thing, but I think the first thing that I basically believe in is optimization. Years ago one of my clients was Edward Deming’s’ organization and I learned both optimization and innovation, and they’re polar opposites.
Optimization is maximizing everything you’re currently doing. Innovation is adding new ways to do it – new markets, new spins, new approaches.
So what I do is try to maximize the effort, the effect, the current and residual outcome, and the performance strategically, not tactically, because it can be totally different.
When I look at a business I break it into two parts: maximizing what they’re already doing, even if I think it’s not the most effective and efficient thing to do, and then multiplying how they could be reaching the market more effectively.
Then I try to figure all the money they’ve spent, all the effort they’ve expended, all the contact, all the good will, and I try almost like a turbo or a super charger – I’m not much into engines – and I reclaim every group of people in the most strategic and high-yielding way I can, congruent with what they are.
I don’t know if that’s too esoteric of an answer.
David: I think that’s a great basis or great explanation of what you do. Can you give us some examples of how you’ve done that?
Jay: Sure. Let me go back in time. I ran Entrepreneur magazine when it was first starting. When it was first starting, it was not really a magazine. It was a magazine-formatted exclusive newsletter for a cadre of very elite thinkers because nobody knew what an entrepreneur even was in the late 70’s.
Every month, the format of this magazine-based newsletter was one primary 20-page report right in the center that would chronicle an emerging small business opportunity, like tune-up shops or salad bars or yogurt stands or whatever they were.
It was very comprehensive for what it was. It would show the risk factor, it would show the investment, it would show the good franchisors or if you ought to do it yourself. It was a great foundational primer.
At the end of every month that article would be basically archived, because the next month would come out, and they did nothing with it. I went there and I took all the old archives.
I added to them what I’ll call boilerplate general stuff – I’m talking about just what you need to know to start a business, to hire an attorney, to employ people, to get permits, to do your own advertising, a cursory little course in marketing, and add another 30 pages.
Now we had a 50-page start-up manual and I created 200 start-up manuals and we sold $7 million internally for no marketing costs in the first nine months to the same people that were subscribers because they didn’t have access to the old issues.
Then when we had so many of them, I assembled them by category. We had low investment ones, service ones, and food ones. Then I created the Entrepreneur’s Institute and we recycled them as $200 courses.
I did lots of things. We had a magazine that we never could sell ad pages because it was too expensive, so I traded it for books and tape sets and we used all that to sell out all the seminars we did.
We made a fortune because we had a page that had a rate of $15,000 and an incremental cost of $500. So if I could get $15,000 worth of books or tape sets that I could sell at full retail in the seminars and I paid $500, it was a lot better than buying it from the manufacturer.
I mean I did all kinds of things. Is that what you wanted to know?
David: Yeah. I think that’s a great example of leveraging assets.
Jay: Yes, and not to sound arrogant, but I’ve done 460-470 industries and my great skill is looking at the unique differences and strategic thinking, marketing, selling, and business model, so that you can find universal principles that can be used in other applications.
I have a knowledge base that I can draw on that’s almost automatic at this point in my life, David. I can look at something and spin it and twist it.
One of my proudest things — and it’s like Logic 101; I think I’m just a super logical thinker – in the early 80’s all the financial newsletters were hard copy. You know that. They were sent out in a physical form.
They were $100 to $500 and there were probably 30 or 40 newsletter publishers and 20 of them were partners or clients or colleagues of mine. Not one of them ever did anything meaningful in inserts, because their model – which was rigid thinking – was that you could only put a 1-page, 1-sided offer in there.
Everybody in that industry was renting each other’s list. It was very incestuous, not unlike today. Howard Ruff would rent Gary North’s list, and Gary North would rent Personal Finances. Personal Finances would rent Tax Avoidance Digest, and Tax Avoidance Digest would rent World Market Perspective.
I realized that if you could rent a list, and the full load of mailing costs, list rental, postage – if you spent 70 or 80 cents in the mail back then and it
broke even, what would happen if you took the same offer and it cost a nickel to just print it up and you stuck it inside somebody else’s magazine, it told me it ought to make 65 cents if it just did the same, but because it was in somebody else’s newsletter, even if it wasn’t explicitly endorsed, it would be implicitly endorsed.
So I thought, “Hmm, that looks interesting,” so I went out and I bought the rights to do inserts in like 20 newsletters. All I did is I went to other newsletters and I showed them that the back end was where they made money, so I got them to give me all the front-end revenue sans just the hard costs of fulfilling. Even a $500 newsletter costs like $20 to fulfill, so I got $480 incremental dollars as my profit.
I took their mailing piece — and this is what I think I’m pretty damn good at, conceptual strategy – and I’d make the headline stronger, I’d make the offer better, I’d make the bonuses more enriching and enticing, and I’d make the risk reversal much more liberal, and I’d stick it in somebody else’s newsletter.
The first month I did it – and this was very impressive because I’m talking about 25+ years ago – I made $500,000 on it just sitting in my home. They used to bring great big canvas bags and I had two clerks. We didn’t have a computer or anything. We just processed it manually.
But yeah, I’ve done a lot of stuff in my illustrious career, David, but that’s sort of the kind of stuff that I do.
David: And the kind of stuff you teach others to do, too.
Jay: It’s a non-linear way of thinking.
David: And it’s eminently logical to look at a business and say, “Okay, what are the assets that this business has? Well, they have these products. How do we make more use of them? They have this list, these customers. They have this mailing that goes out every month sending their newsletter. How do we make more use of that?”
Jay: David, I was just thinking and I’ll give another illustration of this same thing. One of the things that really tickled me that I did long ago was I had a client who sold expensive enterprise-type software for medium-sized entrepreneurs. It was like $200,000.
They were running ads in 30-40 trade magazines and they were getting about 1,000 leads a month and they were converting like 3% because it was so expensive, but the bulk of their investment was really stuck dead and dormant and not income producing in the 97% of the leads that they were throwing away.
We sat down and I said, “Look guys, these business owners don’t have the time or the interest to inquire about enterprise software unless they need it or want it. They just either can’t afford it, the terms are too rigid, or it’s got too many bells and whistles.”
“Let’s go out and find somebody who’s got a lower-priced, a more basic one, and let’s offer that to all the people who didn’t buy.”
We did and we just got a royalty deal. I know how to negotiate pretty well. We got like 95% of the profit on it. We made more money from the people we originally didn’t sell than we did from the ones that we originally did.
That’s a little confusing, but I think of myself as more of a strategic thinker than anything else at this point in my life. That’s why I said to you, I shudder. I want to give really good answers or commentary or advice to your listeners, but I don’t really consider myself primarily a copywriter anymore.
I was at one point in my life a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but I’ll try my best to answer your questions.
David: Okay. Before we leave that part of it – the leveraging of assets – I want to put you on the spot a little and say we’ve got an audience here of copywriters. Some are experienced, some are just starting out, some write for themselves, and some write for clients.
How can they use these concepts? I know you’re very big on questions. What questions do they need to ask themselves and ask their clients?
Jay: Let me ask you a little calibrating question. Would you imagine most of these to be fee based or performance based?
David: I think most are probably fee based, but would like to move to performance based.
Jay: Start where the highest probability of success is.
That’s going to sound silly, but going to an outside market in media you’re not really good at and competing against somebody who’s better than you is really hard to do. Why don’t you find the gaps that nobody’s going after?
First of all, I look at a business and we’ve got matrixes and everything we’ve created after all the things I’ve done, but we look at what are they not doing? What are they not doing with the leads? What are they not doing with the old buyers? What are they not doing beyond the first sale? What are they not doing with the successful copy that no longer works for them but could be used for something else?
I look for all kinds of things like that first, because those are almost set- ups, if that makes sense, David. You can impress people with your performance that way a lot safer.
In other words, when I started out I never wanted to do the front end. I wanted the lucrative part. I wanted to figure out what to do when Howard Ruff had 150,000 subscribers, so I did renewals, I did early renewals, I did lifetime renewals, I did additional high-end services, I did endorsed deals to five other kinds of complementary products and services, and I made millions.
I don’t know of any copywriter that was making millions when I was. I looked at the easiest set-up. Does that make sense?
David: Absolutely. I remember in the Protégé program that you had, your first advice was, “Go out and make deals with people. Most people have lists that they haven’t mailed to in awhile, lists of customers that are just waiting to be worked.”
Jay: I’ll tell you a very funny related story, and it’s a relatively recent one. Just for the clarification of your listeners, my experience arc goes back to the 70’s. I’m pushing 60. I’m not quite 60, but I got started when I was 18 so I’ve been doing it for a long time.
I was asked by a former client of mine to do a two-hour session on how somebody with no money, no skill, no product, no service, and no time could make $1 million in less than a year online.
This was Bob Allen, who’s a friend of mine and I helped him when he started with the real estate challenges.
David: No Money Down Real Estate.
Jay: So what I tell people is, “All you’ve got to do is go to the highest interest subject matters on a website and search not the first four or ten pages. Look at the last parts, because you’re going to find all the people who spent a lifetime creating quality products and services. They can’t market their way out of a paper bag, and you get control of their products and services.”
“Then all you’ve got to do is figure out whether their products or services are front ends or back ends to somebody else’s list, and just put them together. “
In other words, let’s say half the people who sell e-books, that’s all they sell. So they sell 5,000 at $19 and they grossed $100,000. If they did pay per click or did a joint venture they made a few thousand dollars, but if it’s a non-fiction, the statistical probability that amongst those 5,000 people there are some finite number of people who would pay for a $500 course or a $5,000 mentoring or a $10,000 one-on-one coaching. Do you understand that?
David: Yeah, absolutely.
Jay: If you look at the concentric circles and the geometric back-end, it’s many times more than the front end, because the cost of selling them is nothing more than a communication.
David: Especially nowadays with email.
Jay: Yeah, so there’s a concept for you. When I started out doing seminars, it was hilarious. I did $5,000 to $25,000 seminars and I went to Nightingale- Conant, who back then stopped at $39. The first thing I did, we made $4 million.
I went to Tony Robbins, who had a $10,000 mastery program that I helped him create, and that was it. He gave me all the mastery names and I went to them.
I went to people who sold training programs for being a utility auditor and they gave me all their non-converted leads with a cover letter that I wrote, and I made $1 million there.
I always looked for the gaps. Does that make sense? This isn’t copywriting, but when you have the gaps, you’re taking advantage of the jet stream, so good journeyman or journeywoman copy will work there, where it may not work when you’re trying to sell a health newsletter and competing against Rodale or Boardroom.
If you’re in a safe harbor, you can knock a home run with decent copy, as long as it’s got a good concept to it. Does that make sense?
David: Yeah. One thing I’m trying to emphasize on a lot of these calls is for people not to think of themselves so much as copywriters as generators of revenue for their clients.
Jay: I’d also give you a counter-perspective, and that’s to think of yourselves as generators of value and solvers of problems and deliverers or achievers of opportunities and goals for the marketplace.
You asked me a question and I was going to answer it. I’m not trying to usurp you, but if I’m going to have the forum I’d like to impart some interesting perspective.
One of the things that I’ve always done when I’ve worked for any client was that that client wasn’t really the person that I was worried about.
My real client was always the consumer, the recipient. The client was almost like a conduit, and there’s a better word that I’ll think of before this is over, but I always was the advocate or champion of the marketplace.
I wasn’t there to make my client money. I was there to enrich my client after he or she provided greater benefit, value, advantage, experience, enjoyment, protection – whatever the outcome was – to the end user.
David: That leads into something that I wanted to talk about, which is your strategy of pre-eminence. I think it’s one of the most powerful things you teach. I’ve read the transcript and I’ve listened to the tape over and over again. Every time I get something out of it, and it sinks in on a deeper level.
Jay: It’s very powerful, and I can say that with great humility because it’s a hybrid that evolved from a trade I did with Phillips years ago when they were at their absolute peak. You did some work for them, too, I know.
They were a client and joint venture partner and I traded them one time a bunch of my time for the privilege of interviewing their top executives and trying to figure out what their philosophical strategy or their strategic philosophy was that let them be so much more successful, profitable, prestigious and everything else.
I had like 2,000 pages of interviews, because I asked the same questions repetitively of Bob King, of every publisher, of every marketing manager, of every product manager, and then I would overlay it and see how much variation I had. Then I would summarize it. It was a lot of work.
There’s a lesson here. I’m a poster boy for adult attention deficit so I apologize, but one of the lessons is there’s no shortcuts. You go back to Claude Hopkins. “The greatest lesson I’ve learned is you’ve got to go through a lot of data to find the nugget, but when you find that nugget, no one else has probably gone to the work, so you’re going to be enriched for it.”
I took what I learned from them and then I embellished and I evolved it and I refined it and I modified it for my purposes. It has as its origin or the seminal foundation goes back to stuff that probably Phillips did, just so we acknowledge origin.
I’ve taken it to a different path, so what would you like to know about it?
David: This is a very difficult question, but can you sum it up in a couple of minutes?
Jay: The answer is no, but will I try to do a short course, like a high point overview? Yes. I haven’t done it for a long time in a formalized organized way, so it’s going to be fragmented.
The strategy for pre-eminence is a strategic philosophy or philosophical strategy that overlays and drives everything I do for clients, every marketing piece, advertising promotional, online, offline, sales script – it’s everything.
It’s based on some foundational premises, and I don’t know if I’m even going to do this in the right order.
The first is you want to be seen as the absolute most trusted advisor for life to the market that you’re serving, to the individual. As the most trusted advisor, you have a moral obligation to never allow them to purchase less than they should in less quantity/quality combinations or frequency than they should, and you have a moral obligation to advocate your company’s product or service if in fact you do more, care more, and give them a better outcome.
It’s all about them. It isn’t about you. You have to give them the best advice, and the best advice may be not to buy from you in a certain situation, and to either not buy at all or buy from a different kind of a generic competitor.
As someone who practices the strategy of pre-eminence, you have to shift dramatically the way you look at the relationship with the marketplace.
You do not refer to them as a customer. You must refer to them as a client. The reason you want to refer to them as a client is partially psychological, partially relational.
If you look at the world today, there are two or three or four vicious factors that are trying to keep most companies — most people you would either be employed by or businesses you’d own – from being successful.
- The consumer is trying to marginalize everybody. They don’t
- want anyone to be unique. They want to hammer them down to low price and they want to turn them into basically marginalized commodities.
- The competition doesn’t want you to be better. They want to bring you down.
- Inertia, doing nothing. That’s working against you.
- Alternative means to the same solution. The problem that you solve, or the opportunity you fill may be singular, but the means of achieving it can be very multitudinous with lots of alternatives, and there’s more coming up every day.
If you play into that, you’re waving the white flag and you’re basically succumbing and submitting to all these factors. I believe you’ve got to draw a figurative line in the sand and you’ve got to be very decisive.
If you look at the Webster’s dictionary definition of the word “customer,” it’s someone who buys a commodity or service. If you refer to them as that, implicitly or explicitly, it means that you’ve resigned yourself to the fact that you’re selling nothing more than a commodity. It’s nothing special, nothing more unique, nothing more valuable, nothing more purposeful in what you do and what you sell than anything else.
The word “patient” is not a lot better. It’s someone who gets treated. It’s a little bit more sophisticated, but it’s not that good.
A “client” is someone who’s under the care, the protection, and the well-being. It connotes more the fiduciary responsibility. It lofts you to a stature of relevance, connection, importance, and guidance. You take on a different attitudinal light and a different communicational — almost not mystical, but a magnificence of connectivity when you see that.
The next part of the strategy of pre- eminence is very critical. It’s that you want to put into words for the first time feelings, desires, frustrations, fears, goals, hopes, and dreams that the target market has but that no one else has ever articulated in a way, because once you do that it will resonate instantly that you empathically and absolutely and truthfully do understand what they’re struggling with.
You do feel what they feel. You do have the capability of a seeing a better life or a better outcome or whatever the goal is, so you’ve got to put in words what no one else ever asked. It’s very liberating to them.
If you’re their liberator, most liberators, if you look at world history, get thrust up on the shoulders of people and put into power and they get riches. That’s what happens with the client that you represent if you do that.
Another part of the strategy of pre-eminence – and I’ve got so many different principles and clusters of belief systems that I almost have to have the talking units to really do them justice – but another one is that you want to shift dramatically your focus, or that of your clients, or at least your advocacy of the client, because you are their voice, you are their heart, their soul, their hopefulness.
Hopefulness, by the way, is a very key part. You have to have hopefulness for the client, for the consumer, for the prospect for a better tomorrow.
That depends on what you’re selling. A better tomorrow might be sleep and a great night. It might be having a great sexual life. It might be having the security to retire when you want. It might be to want to know you’re going to have all your hair. It depends on what you’re selling.
The next thing is – and again, this is very important for your client – but you’ve got to advocate it. Either your client doesn’t now because they will be contaminated positively by this. You do not fall in love with the product. You do not fall in love with the company. You do not fall in love with being the fastest company. You do not fall in love with the industry.
You fall in love with the client and you live for the vision of how their life will be transformed.
Speaking of that, you practice future-facing. You live in your copy and your vision of seeing them in the future when they have your client’s product or products, or service or services, at work in their life protecting, enhancing, and transforming.
There’s a lot more, but my brain is sort of not real lucid. I’m afraid if you don’t ask me a lot of questions while I’m semi-lucid I’ll just be babbling and I’ll embarrass you and people will be stoning you, David, and I don’t want that to happen.
David: No, you’re doing fine. I think the important thing about this is this is something that applies, as you said, to writing copy and how you position yourself in the copy and how you talk to the client who’s reading that copy.
Jay: It’s universal, David. It really is something that transcends. When I take on a client, the first thing I do is instill it, help install it, and then I articulate it and then I dimensionalize it and then I personify it in everything we do.
It has served me and my clients exceedingly well. I’ve got to tell you, it’s a great place to live because you operate in a rarified stratospheric place far above the maddening crowds. You’re seen differently, you relate differently, you articulate differently, you connect differently.
You like yourself better because you’re taking the absolute high road, and again it doesn’t matter whether you’re selling ice cream or whether you’re selling nuclear fission equipment. It’s very universal.
What else can I talk about for you, David?
David: I think that leads into copywriting and how you apply this sort of thinking to copywriting. I know for instance a lot of people say, “You have to get to know the prospect. You have to know all about the prospect that you’re writing to and then you can write to him.”
With this, I think you have a very different way of looking at that. Yes, you have to know the prospect, but it’s the relationship that you have to that prospect that’s important, the empathy that you have, how you think about and care about the prospect.
Jay: Again, you’re asking questions I haven’t really thought about, if ever than certainly for a long time, so my answer is maybe a little bit knee jerk and a little bit abstract or a little bit off the wall.
I start by thinking of everybody reading, hearing, seeing, or visiting as a man or a woman, a son or a daughter, a father or a mother, a lover, a human being. I do a lot of things because I want to learn about human beings.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling the corporation or whether you’re selling an illiterate farm worker. They’re men and women with hopes and dreams. Human nature is pretty immutable. It has been from the moment, whether you believe in Adam and Eve or whether you believer in Darwin – from the moment that we’re eradicated by either Armageddon or nuclear holocaust, human beings have been human beings have been human beings.
You’ve got to change some of the verbiage because today’s attention span is different and there are a lot more graphic impacts, but human nature is pretty basic. We’re human beings. A lot of people take copywriting courses and a lot of people online think it’s a bunch of bullets and a bunch of screaming hyperbole.
It’s really connecting with a human being on a basis that they see that you sense what they’re trying to do and you have a solution and you see how much better their life can be and you demonstrate and prove it through the process.
You don’t really want me to give you my formula. I’ve become such an automated copywriter at this point in my life that I don’t know that I really have good formulaic stuff in the template manner, but I can certainly address other issues that might help fill gaps that any of your other more structured copywriters that you interviewed didn’t share.
David: Well, I think you did just fill a big gap right there in terms of getting away from the formulaic. All you need is the demographics and to know what the hot buttons are. You’re talking about something very different, which is relating to them as people and human beings with hopes and dreams.
Jay: I’ll tell you something I’m very proud of, and this is from the days when I wrote lots of copy, because I don’t write much anymore. When I write about myself, I know every flaw, every embarrassing weakness, and every frailty, so my copy tends to be more of a breach of good copywriting rules than a demonstration.
But what I always did, which I think really works best – and I could write copy, although I’m not saying you should or the people listening – but I could do it in the first draft because it was always about them.
I always wrote from the heart to them. I always put myself out and thought, “What would I be impressed with? What would I care to hear? What would I want someone to worry about?”
I always preemptively tried to talk to me as if I were in their situation as a human being and demonstrate respect for their intelligence, respect for their plight, and empathic appreciation – maybe not full understanding, but appreciation for where they were and where they wanted to go, and a keen understanding that they had a life and they were going through it.
I was going to say one other thing, David. I’m sorry for maybe aberrating your question. I don’t ever think my copy was great, but I think my strategic concepts and focus was masterful. It was masterful because it was all about them. It wasn’t about me or my client. That’s a pretty simplistic formula or template, but it’s a pretty infallible one.
I think in my early days as a copywriter, my copy pulled – and I mean this very proudly – like 5%, not because it was great copy, because it was strategically and conceptually predicated on the right focus, if that makes sense.
And I always wrote the way people talked. I don’t believe most people talk grammatically correctly. I don’t think most people complete sentences. I don’t think most people like a lot of high falutin’ words, so I always tried in write in a very humanized language.
I always interviewed people, and the best copy I ever wrote, they wrote for me. I would ask a myriad of questions, the same question from many vantage points.
I’d only take clients who were passionate about what they did, and I would move their focus to who they were doing it for instead of what they did.
I would translate that passion into a series of probative questions that released the stored heart-felt feelings they had about the product, what it did, and I would just ask them a myriad of questions, record it, transcribe it, and then edit, and they would write better copy than I ever could. I would edit it, transition it, and bridge it.
David: That’s a great way to get great copy.
Jay: It worked for me in the early days.
David: You’ve got another “trick” for writing copy which I really like, which is the Amazon.com technique.
Jay: It gives anybody listening and anybody who ever wants to access it to probably a $10 billion 24/7 resource that’s infallible if they use it right. Is there a question there, David?
David: Oh, yes. I got all excited about it after that build up.
Jay: I’m teasing. I know that you want to know about it, right?
David: Yes, absolutely.
Jay: Okay, I’ll give you a short little insight. Years and years ago I realized that one of the keys to copywriting is your ability to really know the most important desires, fears, hopes, and outcomes that people have, to know the disappointments they’ve suffered, the frustrations, the angst, and the embarrassment.
The old way was either interview a bunch of people, or to model or emulate or clone somebody else’s ads.
What I started doing was going to Amazon.com and taking the category of book that represented what I was doing – investing, money making, business opps, health – and I’d first of all get every derivative. If it’s health, it might be alternative health, it might be chiropractic, it might be back ache.
I’d get every kind of category I could and I would look up the top 25 or 50 best sellers in the category. I would write down the title and the subtitle, because oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes in books – not dissimilar to headlines – the best titles and sub-titles that denominate the problem or the outcome or the desire are the bestsellers.
So I had copy, sub-copy, headline, and sub-headlines there.
Then I would go to all the reviews – first the Amazon review, and it had a little bit of usefulness, but usually the reader’s reviews. Back then I’d look for the 9’s and 10’s and the 2’s, 1’s, and 0’s.
The 9’s and 10’s are passionate articulations from the unbridled heart and mind of a very happy person, extolling automatically, unhedgingly, and in the most efficient and clearly expressed manner, almost subconsciously, what they got out of it, what it was going to do, what they liked, all kinds of benefits.
The negatives – the 2’s, the 1’s, and 0’s – were equally as passionately frustrated and they extolled what they didn’t get, what their disappointments were.
Between those three elements – the headline and sub-headline, the verbiage of what people wanted in their own language, and what they didn’t want – remember I told you part of the strategy of pre-eminence is putting into words what people sense, want, hope, and have never had expressed to them in a clear-cut manner. Well, that’s it.
I’ll spend a few thousand dollars now having somebody do it for me, then I organize them. I’ve got a formula for how I cut and paste it and put it together it and manipulate it, and I can tell you not 100% but probably 90% of the time when I build something that way – and then I transition it to humanized copy – it works remarkably.
It stimulates your mind in ways, because you’re plugged into reality. It’s not conjecture. It’s the ultimate empirical guidance you can ever get, if that makes sense. Does that answer it?
David: Yes, it sure does.
Jay: Okay, what else can I talk to you and your group about tonight, David?
David: I’d like you to talk about risk reversal. It’s something we all know about and we all know that’s really important, but one of the things about your copy is you’ve always taken risk reversal to a whole other level, and I’d like you to talk about how you do that.
Jay: I will if you’ll let me back up and talk about not the psychology, but the basis.
David: Okay, sure.
Jay: I think one of the problems with copywriting is sometimes you start too late in the cycle and you don’t see your role completely.
You’ve got to really empathically appreciate what’s going on, what this transaction is trying to do, and what factors and forces are working for and against you.
I don’t want to get into a long expression of things I haven’t thought about for years, but the first thing I believe is you’re never going to start a relationship if you don’t really understand what’s keeping people from moving forward.
I try to figure out where they are in their life, what they want that they may not know they want, and what would keep them from getting it – action time, uncertainty, fear of looking, whatever it is. That’s the first thing.
Second, I believe that if I want to have a relationship with you and I want it worse than you because I know how much better I can make your life than it is now, or your circumstances or your health or your body or whatever it is, but you don’t, I have the moral obligation to be the one who’s going to invest first.
In any kind of transaction, always David, whether it’s business and commerce, fraternal, romance, sexual, one side is always asking the other implicitly or explicitly, specifically or abstractly, knowingly or unknowingly to take the risk. One side is always being asked to take most of the risk, all the risk, or more than all the risk.
Most of the risk is self-explanatory and all of the risk is self-explanatory. More than all the risk means what happens besides just the transaction failing, you look bad, you lose all your computer data, or there’s all kinds of other sort of collateral damage that’s tangible and intangible.
I try to understand all of that so I can pre-emptorily deal with that up front and put it to bed and assuage their fear of it, but my belief stems from the fact that it’s only a matter of time before you and I will have a compensated relationship, so I want to accelerate that for your best interest, not mine.
In my heart of heart and soul of souls, I know and believe that you actually in your life, your family, whatever it is, you’re going to be so enriched and better for having my product or service in your life, that I have this obligation to get in there. I’ve got to make it so easy for you to experience the benefit or the outcome.
That’s the first thing. I want you to know that I’m mindful of fears that you’ve never even acknowledged. I want you to know that I’m sensitive of your need to be protected. I want you to know that I have a very clear vision of what your life can but most likely will become if you avail yourself of my product and when you use it intelligently, so I want to paint a picture of that.
Then I want to make it so generously and trustingly irresistible, but there’s a caveat. In many of the things I do, I want to make sure that I impose mutual performance, because we’re talking to intelligent people in the reality-based world.
If I do all I’m going to and you do nothing, it can’t work. So I ask and extract a concession. I’ll do all these things, and I’ve got regular risk reversal, better than risk reversal, all kinds of variations. I’ve got probably 1,000 different ways I’ve done risk reversal, but it worked and enhanced results.
In most cases today I’ll say, “Is there any catch? Yeah, there’s one or two. First of all, you’ve got to do your part. You’ve got to promise yourself and me that for you to lose these 30 pounds, for you to get your sex life back, for you to get your fortune on track to retire at 50, that you’re going to first of all read or listen or watch what I send you in the first week.”
“Secondly, you’re going to identify the activities you’ve got to do. You’re going to allocate the time and you’re going to do it for the 30 or 60 days it will take for you to see impressive meaningful growth or results or validation. If you don’t do your part, you know that you don’t really get an outcome.”
I respect them, but I hold them to a higher performance standard, David. Does that make sense?
David: Yeah.
Jay: Then that’s my answer. [laughing] You’re asking me good questions. I just haven’t thought about them for years.
David: I’m always amazed when you’re asked what seems to be a simple question at the depth of the thinking that’s behind it.
Jay: I spend more time than about anybody I know thinking deeper about what’s going on here. One of the reasons why I’m very delighted, I’ve learned about almost 500 different industries and how they work, is I see connections, correlations, aberrations, or gaps in the whole dynamic of the process, the transactions, the interaction, the relevancy or irrelevancy that most people don’t, because they don’t do that.
When I was writing the best copy in the world, I wrote for two hours and I went out for eight hours. I went to grocery stores and talked to women. I drove and looked at signages that worked, and I went to clothing stores and furniture stores and car dealers and let people sell me.
I’m the only person you know who can’t wait to get called by telemarketers, because I’m listening to the ones that are impressive and I’m hurting empathically for the ones who are working so hard and doing a disservice.
We also have a belief, David, that nobody in their right mind goes through their life with a lesser outcome, result, satisfaction, or happiness than they want. They just don’t have anyone as their advocate to guide them. Guiding somebody is acknowledging sometimes the obvious.
“Look, a lot of people have made promises that may have seemed absolutely impossible. You might feel chagrined that you can’t make a new life and build a new career, but that’s not true. You may not have been asked to hold yourself accountable. You may not have been given a higher success probability approach, but it exists and I’m the one that wants to do it for you if you want to be in this together.”
You see what I’m saying?
David: Yes.
Jay: Again, I don’t know how you describe what I just did and whether it even has any worth in trying to define it, but I do things probably differently than a lot of the people you’ve interviewed.
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. It’s just sort of my make-up. I’ve never thought of myself for the last 8 or 10 years as a copywriter. I’ve always thought of myself as a master strategist and a conceptualist who has enormous respect, regard, empathy, and appreciation for the human condition.
David: I think that’s what makes what you do different, and that’s what makes your copy different even. As you say, it’s more strategic than it is textbook good copy.
Jay: I’m doing this just to help you. I’m not trying to step on you, because you’re sort of dredging up filaments of interesting commentary that transcends about 30 years of people asking me questions.
When I write copy, just like when I do a seminar – one time I was being interviewed by a real nasty email reporter. She said, “Are you like most of these speakers? You think about what all the people out in the audience would look like naked?”
And I said, “Truthfully when I go on stage or when I sit down to write, I think about the intended recipient or the audience as a young 4- to 6-year-old boy or girl, an innocent child, possibility based, trusting, hopeful, vulnerable, and I want to guide them to a greater outcome.”
What I’m saying is I think I have been blessed to invest more humanness than a lot of copywriters think they should. It’s not really a mechanical process. It’s an empathic process, the way I do it.
I’m not saying it has to be, or it’s how the other people on this call do it, but it’s the way that I do it and it has served me and my clients and partners well indeed. But I think it’s served the people that they have served much better, and that’s always been my focus.
It wasn’t always that way. I had a big shift in my life 20 or so years ago for a lot of reasons that would take too long to explain, but when that happened, everything that I did became predicated on sort of the ideals and foundations and the factors that I’m, in a very fragmented way, talking about tonight, David.
David: Let me ask you one last thing. The people who are on the call who are copywriters starting out, or near to starting out, looking at them – not after you look at them as a copywriter yourself, but to look at them as a business builder, what do you say to them? What’s the best advice you could give them in terms of building a copywriting business?
Jay: First of all, don’t take a client whose market you can’t really enthusiastically and passionately get excited about.
Second, if you can do this, and you can if you discriminate, don’t take a client who’s got a product that doesn’t add greater value to the marketplace. Sometimes you’ve got to work hard to see what the value is and to dimensionalize it so the client will revere it and then really sort of thrust it to the forefront.
Next is don’t rush through. You have a chance to transform the lives of the clients that your client company serves. That’s incredible!
Because of the leverage of what you’re doing, whether you write emails or you do websites or you do direct mail, catalogs, radio, TV, long or short, you have the ability to positively alter the life, the fate, the happiness, the health, the wealth, the relationships of not just a few, but thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or, if you’re really good, millions of people. Take that opportunity, responsibility, and obligation seriously, if that makes sense.
You’re putting me on the spot because I haven’t thought about this for a long time in this context. I feel a little bit not intimidated, but over- shadowed by some of the other people I think you’ve talked to, because you told me some of the very impressive minds that you’ve interviewed who are really formidable copywriters.
If I bring anything to this, it’s a broader context of sort of giving you the backdrop of what’s really going on here, so you can see more than just that one static transaction of writing copy.
You should think about how it’s going to be received and read, the impact, the emotions people are going to have. What’s going to happen when they do it? What’s going to happen if they don’t? Why do you have an obliga- tion to not just encourage but to preemptively not let them drop the ball?
In my opinion, whatever cockamamie philosophical amalgam of a bunch of Gordian knot thinking that I’ve just given you is probably confusing, but it’s a much more satisfying, gratifying, fulfilling, and joyous place to operate from.
I think a lot of people make it a drudgerous, unfulfilling, assignment to assignment thing. It shouldn’t be that. It should be a joyous stair stepping from one level of impacting huge markets to another, and you should be proud. I’m proud of all the entrepreneurs. We started with entrepreneurs.
I’m proud of all the investors who retired early that I helped. I’m proud that there’s like 2,000 marketing consultants out there that I spawned with my own work. I’m proud that I’ve got two clients right now who just were named Inc magazine either Entrepreneur of the Year or fastest-growing business. One is a collection agency for staffing and search firms.
Those are little firms who if they don’t get paid by a client, their families don’t go to college. I’m happy that I’ve helped him bring the money back to them from the clients that engage them and promise, because their kids got a better life.
It’s a way of thinking, David. I’ve got a chiropractic client that’s the fastest growing technology company and they’ve made people who were afraid of conventional chiropractic adjustment now excited about going because it’s not as intimidating.
So thousands and thousands and thousands more patients and clients are being treated and their lives are being enhanced, their relationships are better, and their performance at the job and their performance as husbands and wives – and I’m very proud of that.
I don’t think most copywriters connect at that kind of a level, do you?
David: No, probably not, but they could.
Jay: Well, I think they should. Is there an epilogue question you want to ask me?
David: No, I can’t think of a better way to end it than with something as inspiring as that.
Jay: If I can leave a word of commentary to people, may I?
David: Absolutely, but then I want to tell them….
Jay: You can tell them what you want to tell them now and then I’ll give the commentary. David, this is your interview.
David: It’s my call, darn it. [laughing]
Jay: With a bloodless coup I’ve taken over and I’ve thrown you off the interviewing pole. [laughing]
David: Believe me, I’ve been taken over worse on these calls.
Jay: I’m not purposely trying to. I apologize.
David: No, you’re not at all. You’ve been a gentleman as always.
Click here to return to David Deutsch’s Corner of The Marketing Rebel Insider’s Club.