Spitballing with a marketing genius part 4

Onwards and upwards and even sidewards with my backroom talk with Ken McCarthy: === KEN MCCARTHY: Well, these kids who've discovered YouTube, some of them are slicker than slick. And it's them, it's their personality that is the hook, that is the magnet that holds the whole thing together. BEN SETTLE: Imagine if they knew marketing. KEN MCCARTHY: Who's that guy, Mr. Beast? He's as smart and it gets. He's as smart as it gets. And you see that in his results. The next thing that I went into, which was not totally unique, but I made sure it was in there, was the idea of cult marketing. And it's a double-edged sword. It can be used for harm, it can be used for good, but people are basically cult members. I was explaining this to Bettina the other day. It's a long story why she wanted to know, but I said: ”Look, Bettina, every human group, even if it's just two people, is a cult." For a group to be together, you have to share a set of beliefs and you have to be protective against negative outsiders that want to harm you. That's the essence of every social group. So, yeah, some people abuse this and use it as a psychological mechanism. BEN SETTLE: I'm going to give you another real-life story of how I used your course. Because it's not like you teach this as a how-to thing with a checklist. It's like you give these set of principles and you go out there and hopefully do good with it. I mean, that's what I remember from it. KEN MCCARTHY: Yeah, that's exactly, yep. BEN SETTLE: So in 2016, for about a year, I ran what I really do believe was one of the most engaged Facebook groups in our industry at the time. It was a very notorious place. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And it's because I specifically distinctly remember thinking about what I learned from your course and then I just started filling it in with my own stuff. But you gave me the way of thinking about this. Not like a checklist or even outright saying it. It was a state of mind. And so I was taking people out. I wasn't even letting people in. KEN MCCARTHY: Well, that's actually a cult trick. Very publicly throw certain people out. BEN SETTLE: And I was doing that. And it turned into this thing that took a life of its own. And I wrote about this in my book, Social Lair, about this whole adventure, but when people would ask me, I'd say: ”Look, I didn't even think about this stuff until I went through Ken McCarthy's copywriting course 10 years earlier.” So I'm telling you, this course, people will go through it and they say: "Well, this is just meat and potatoes.” Yeah. But you have to understand, this is the foundation for everything that's going on right now, whether people realize it or not. I see it all over the place. You were methodizing things that I think people take for granted now, in my opinion. KEN MCCARTHY: And it's a theme in my life because there was no direct response model for internet marketing until we put the system together. And I say we, it was me. Until I put the system together. I don't know why I do that all the time. It's like I have this vast team of people somehow that's more impressive. It was me. So I am a guy that takes forever to figure it out because I don't get it, but then I dig really deep to get it. When I first started in the internet industry, I felt like I was the dumbest guy in the industry by far, I was the clueless guy. But I was able to solve the problem that nobody else could solve because I knew nothing and I knew I knew nothing. So I dug deeper than anybody and the rest is history. So the other one thing that I spent a lot of time on, and I think I got this from Gary Halbert, but I don't think anybody else has ever talked about it at the time, how important bullets are and that bullets are actually the bricks of the wall. You need to be a good bullet writer. And if you're a good bullet writer, you'll have good bullets, but you'll also have great headlines, you'll have great PSs, you'll have great this, you'll have great that. And I gave a pretty good methodology for how to go about creating bullets and why bullets are not just seven items that you bury in the middle of your sales page. They're essential to the whole game of copywriting. So I think I did a good deed by making sure people who took the course knew that. BEN SETTLE: Well, the bullet part ... I had been in the industry for about three years before I went through it. And I'm studying my ass off like everybody else. And I study bullets a lot like everybody else, especially Gary Halbert's bullets, I still do to this day. I mean, him and Mel Martin to me are just like the cream of the crop at this. KEN MCCARTHY: Yeah. BEN SETTLE: But you gave me a nice foundation very early there because I've been doing this 22 years now and that was my third year in. So that tells people something. When you said, and I quote: ”What is your headline if not your best bullet?" It's like whoa. And that really gave context to a lot of stuff. Now, every line is a bullet, but not like a bullet "point." In the January 2024 Email Players issue, I talk in detail about something David Ogilvy invented. And I define it a little bit differently than him, but I think he would agree. I'm going to just say he would agree with it. The Holy Spook himself, as he used to call himself. He would agree with this that every sentence, if all someone did was read that one sentence, it would get their interest enough where they would read upwards. They have no choice but to go to the beginning, their brain won’t let them not do so if done right. And I show some ways to do that. When I went through your course and learned bullets, that was the skill. It wasn't the bullets necessarily, but it's the forward intent behind them. If nothing else existed but this one sentence on page 10, would it make them say: "Oh, I got to go up and read this?" And that's what that does when you take your approach, I believe. KEN MCCARTHY: And that's great copywriting. In creating this course, I wanted to take the beginner, give them some mechanical things to get their feet wet, how to generate headlines…but my goal was to create great copywriters who thought deeply. That was my goal. Like you say, I couldn't say, "Ben, do it exactly like" When it gets to the level of principle, I couldn't say: "Well, Ben, you should do it exactly like this." But what I could do is lay out the principle, the aspiration of what you're actually shooting for, and why it's so important. And now you go and do it your way. BEN SETTLE: And I think that that reflects in the course when they were reading their work out loud. I don't know how else to put it. It's a thinking person's course. KEN MCCARTHY: Oh, yeah. BEN SETTLE: And maybe it's not the sexiest thing to people. It's not supposed to be. There's nothing sexy about thinking. It's hard work. KEN MCCARTHY: Yup, yup. There you go. BEN SETTLE: Thinking literally burns calories! It’s exercise. But a good sales letter will make you so much money and you do it once and mostly don’t have to think much about it. I have the same sales letters up for Email Players since 2011, only a few words here or there changed over the years. It just chugs along, the emails do most of the heavy lifting, it does the closing. KEN MCCARTHY: It's a beautiful thing. BEN SETTLE: Yeah. KEN MCCARTHY: There's Labor Day, then there's Halloween, then there's Thanksgiving, and it's the same thing with you. It's like the earth goes around the sun and like, well, here's the thing again, here it comes again, and it works again. BEN SETTLE: Yes. I hope people take that away from it. KEN MCCARTHY: Yeah. Yeah. And this is what was going on in 2005. A lot of people were focused on just eBooks or just their course, their homestead course. And I'm like: "No, you need to be firing on as many cylinders as you can manage or want to." You need the introductory product. You need the free newsletter. You need book or books. You need courses. You need courses that escalate. There's a beginner, the middle, the master course. You need the seminars. You need the teleseminars. And I said this in the course, I said: ”You don't have to do it all, but you want to do as many of these things as possible because they all are mutually reinforcing and you will end up making a lot more money." BEN SETTLE: And that's the structure I've been following since 2005. I can say without any hesitation I owe you a check the way Google owes you one, the same way, because of that. So I give you all the credit for that, I really do, because there wasn't anyone who articulated it in a way that made sense to me. They always want to complicate everything. KEN MCCARTHY: Yeah, that's the interesting thing. I even was writing about this yesterday. I said: ”On the one hand, they want you to think that business is easy and, of course, it's not. Then on the other hand, when it comes to giving you the how to, they make it so freaking complicated you can't even put one foot in front of the other." It's like such a scam. BEN SETTLE: Yeah, it's only gotten worse. This is such an interesting talk because I don't go back as far as you do to the '90s with this, but just going back to 2002, we're in that cycle again right now, I think, where there's a glut of so much horse shit out there that people don't really know what works and doesn't. And you're seeing it ... People get kicked off or maybe they have to leave, whatever, a platform like YouTube or Twitch or something. I just saw this chick complaining about it with Twitch. I don't even know what half these platforms are, but they get kicked off and they realize: ”Holy shit, I don't know how to duplicate what I just did!” Because they didn't actually have any fundamentals. They just had a personality. And that's good. I mean, sure, that's awesome, but that only gets you so far. KEN MCCARTHY: Yeah, if you're lucky. And that is a really interesting phenomenon. In the new media environment, it is personality driven, but they don't know how to do the other stuff. Whereas our generation was all about good copy and there were serious students of copy. I'm not saying everybody was bad. But they were a little shy about being the person, the front-end person. That wasn't natural. But now that is natural. But these guys are missing the other side of it, which is you got to convert that into a following, you got to convert that into a following you control, not one that Twitch or Twitter. BEN SETTLE: Like YouTube or something, they're dead. They're dead in the water if they don't own it. If they can't export it, they don't own it. KEN MCCARTHY: And they seem never to learn that lesson. It's every day a new one, which is tragic, but I guess life is a comedy and a tragedy, and that's just what it is. And then the last thing was ... Oh, this was big. And I think this had an influence on you. And I didn't know you existed at the time that I was creating this course, but you were the kind of person I was thinking about. And what the last point is, is, look, if you can write good copy and you can manage it, do it for yourself. Don't be a hired hand your whole life. If you can manage all the things and somehow make it work, write copy for your own account, you'll make way more money. And now, that may not be true ... Maybe if you work for Agora, some of these guys are making rockstar money, but in general, but they could lose their job. Something else that is interesting to think about is I used to do the system seminar, I used to sit down with the faculty before every seminar because we would do ... It was ridiculous, all the stuff I did that nobody even thinks to do. The faculty would have many meetings before the seminar because I wanted to know, what are you going to talk about? How does it interface with other speakers? Let's come out as a comprehensible team that we're not all just all over the place. But the thing that I always would say to them, I said: “Look, what we're doing is as important as being doctors because there's guys coming to this thing. They've got mortgages to pay. They have children's school to pay. This may be their last shot." You know what I mean? We cannot present half assed, half flaky, bullshit material. And I would say that at the beginning of every time we'd get together and I finally realized none of them were listening to me. They thought I was just talking, which is why ... I had to stop the seminar. One, I was tired of it, but the main reason I stopped was 80% of the guys who I would bring in would start out good. And after they got the leg up and the profile, they go bad. It wasn't an accident when it went well. I can see your Copywriting Grab Bag book across the room. I have the books right by my arm, which are pretty much ... I have obvious Adams and a few books I've written and then some medical books I'm studying. That's it. That's by my arm. And then behind me, I have all my cultural books, but then right across the office is not all my business books, but the business books that I have facing and I can still see yours. That was so amazing to me that that book always amazed me. It's like, I love this guy. He's like ... He's really working. That was what was so impressive. You were really working at it and people don't get it that you have to work at this stuff. # # # And so concludes the 4th part of my interview with Ken McCarthy Speaking of Ken’s course: He’s offering it at a gigantic discount for my Horde only, until tomorrow Friday, 1/12 at midnight EST. Plus, if you use my affiliate link and send me your receipt, the title of the book you want me to send you, & the shipping address by that deadline (not after — to be clear, you must send your receipt, shipping address, and the title you want to me, not just buy the course, BEFORE the deadline to get it), I will send you: 1. Free copy of any ONE book I sell I don’t care if it’s one of the bigger ticket ones or one of the more inexpensive ones. Simply buy Ken’s course by the deadline and then email me your receipt with your shipping address & the book you want me to send you (also by the deadline — if you send me your receipt, the title of the book you want, and your shipping address AFTER the above deadline, I am not sending you the book, let me be very clear about that here) 2. Live call with me and Ken about: The end of the world! I want to grill him about the economy. And the reason why is because Ken “came of age” in finance during the 80’s in Wall Street. I have learned more from him (and I told him this recently) about not just basic economics that is not taught in school than from anyone else, but he genuinely has given me a lot of peace of mind knowing what he does on this topic. Those who read this month’s Email Players issue will know what I mean by that. Not only peace of mind, but he has helped me position and adjust my own finances, what I invest in (it’s not investing advice, just by understanding what’s going on you can make better decisions), what I buy and don’t buy, how I think of money, how I am planning for the fallout of what’s been going on for over a decade and is about to completely unravel probably this year — maybe sooner than the end of the year, maybe later, but it’s inevitable — and the list goes on. This call (day & time TBA) will be live to customers of this promo. All right ‘nuff said about that. The deadline is Friday 1/12 at midnight EST to get Ken’s course at the discount, get any ONE book I sell (if you send me your receipt, shipping address, and the title of the book you want me to send you by the deadline, if you send the above to me after the deadline I will NOT send you the book, many-a-disappointed-customer who couldn’t tell time has learned this hard way…), plus access to the live call above. Hopefully that is all clear. Whatever the case, here is the link: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/secret-course]( Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2024 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA