What A-list copywriters gossip about behind your back
Published: Sun, 02/21/21
Here we go:
elBENBO: When I was doing those interviews for my Copywriting Grab Bag that you contributed to, I talked to David Deutsch and Doug D’Anna.
And I specifically asked them both:
”What do you A-List copywriters talk about when you get together about copywriting?"
They both said,
"We don't talk about writing techniques. We just talk about the market.”
Such as where the people in the market are at and how they're different. And now what words they're using. Now, what problems they are facing today they weren’t yesterday. It's all about them. It has nothing to do with the tricks and tips. And David said, it kind of disappointed him when he found out these guys never talk about the writing side.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: It's interesting you bring this up.
Because it looks like we're writing copy and what we're really doing is molding minds. And that's why this AI software is absurd because the AI software is completely focused on writing copy. Putting words on the paper. Well, yes, we are putting words on the paper, but we're molding minds.. And that'd be like a musician saying:
"Well, my job is to press these keys in a certain order."
No, your job is to create this experience for your audience.
And of course you have to know the 12 scales and you have to know the major and minor triads, and you have to know the chord progressions. You've just got to know that stuff, it's the cost of admission, but that's not your job. And is the plumber paid because he has the knowledge of this pipe fits into that pipe and this and that? No, he's paid because when you turn the water on, it comes out the faucet and it's not leaking all over the house.
The AI software is the guy who thinks:
"Well, I'll trust something that a software guy wrote as opposed to a guy that's laid pipe in a thousand houses."
It's just dumb.
elBENBO: I want to round this out with a very important question.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Yeah.
elBENBO: What is your advice to businesses who are going through challenges right now. Or they're scared there's going to be some challenges because there's all these lock downs and with the economy being savaged and CNN telling people to wear 3 masks and probably a bra on their head while they’re at it.
What advice do you have for that person?
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: I would say, do what I've been teaching people since the beginning of time to do, be in the information and/or entertainment, business, digital.
People in those businesses have not suffered.
We have not suffered. We have thrived.
I have a colleague. He asked me not to tell people. He didn't just get a little bump in his business. He tripled his business. His business was already substantial, and it was already a business everybody would be very happy to own. And it's a business that deals with psychological problems.
That's as far as I'll go on that, I don't want to out him.
It’s a positive thing that he does.
He's all digital. He's all virtual. Not only did he not suffer, he's prospering wildly. And I'm sure there's case after case, after case of that. This idea of selling information, this idea of selling entertainment, this idea of selling good times and selling them virtually, was a business that made sense before this. And now it's a business that totally makes sense because that's where we're at for now, until humanity regains its sanity. And which, I don't know, maybe we'll have a break in this thing. I don't know.
It doesn't look good, unfortunately.
By the way, when I say this thing, I'm not talking about a disease.
I'm talking about the biggest pile of bullshit ever jumped on humanity.
elBENBO: The biggest & most successful sales letter ever written.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Yeah, exactly. And you know what?
I've been harping with my brass check subscribers, which is my alternative news channel, that this is literally point by point. The HIV equals AIDS scam they ran in the mid-eighties and they're still running now. But what I realized just this week is, you know what, this is really the cancer Inc scam, which is that yes, there are diseases and people do die, but the reality is there's a whole group of people that make a fortune off these diseases. Do everything they can to suppress alternative treatments, even when they are proven to work. Drive the good guys completely out of business. I used to think, well, this is just AIDS playbook two, but I realized, no they've been doing this since cancer.
And you know what?
This is probably a witch doctor thing that goes back to the beginning of humanity. People that would take advantage of others, ignorance and fear create a narrative that they had the answer, and then use that narrative to control people.
It's not a side show.
It's just right up there with marching into the city with tanks and troops.
It's psychological... It's war.
elBENBO: I've got to say, I mean, if there's an antidote to this for a business, it's your course. If they want to get into info publishing and learn copywriting simultaneously together in a way that completely connects intuitively.
I can vouch for it, obviously. And I am biased since I am an affiliate.
But that’s it.
Can you talk a little bit more about the course.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: I'm going to say that if you want to go into info-marketing, you have to be knowledgeable about copywriting either as a super smart buyer of copy, like someone like Brian Kurtz or writing your own copy. Somebody like you, somebody like me, somebody like Dan Kennedy, somebody like a thousand people that are making this work, they write their own copy.
This is a learnable skill.
It looks like magic and it should look like magic, but in reality, it's not magic.
It's building blocks.
And the only way to learn this thing is to know what those building blocks are. And the copywriting part of my course is as good as it gets in terms of documenting all the key building blocks and making them completely... My section on bullets, you still can't find anybody that teaches bullets after all these years. And that I'm telling you, if you can write bullets, you're 90% of the way to being a copywriter and nobody teaches it.
The copywriting thing is solid.
And then there's this wonderful world of info marketing, which everybody will tell you about.
They will tell you how great it is.
They'll tell you about price elasticity.
They'll tell you about this, they'll tell you about that, but they won't actually tell you the mechanics and the dynamics of how these things are built. And yes, they're built by creating content and they're built by creating educational material and they're built by selling that stuff. But the real dynamics is the social dynamics. This inborn need to follow a leader and to be in a community and to be an exclusive member of something.
These things are not trivial.
And I guess, the other thing that I teach in this and that just ties it all together is every bit of copy that you write for your own purposes, for your own business, should be written in the mind of creating this alternate universe, this alternate world of which you are the leader and the King who everybody follows.
It's not a matter of one letter after another, after another.
Yes, you're selling A today.
Tomorrow, you're selling B the next day you're selling C.
But you're always building the universe. You're always building and thickening and expanding and growing and tightening your universe. And very few copywriters think that way. They think in terms of selling today's product and putting some money in the bank for this product. And they don't think about what impact is the marketing that I'm doing today to sell this product, going to have when I come out to sell a product next week, next month, next year.
If you do it intelligently, it's cumulative. And it can be exponentially cumulative.
If you're not thinking with that vision in mind, you're just forever going to be, you roll the rock up the hill, you make a little bit of money. The rock rolls right down, you're starting from scratch. That's what you want to avoid. What you really want is to roll the snowball down the Hill. And every time you have a new product launch... This is exactly what you're doing, Ben. Every time something new comes out, the snowball gets bigger. You've got today's sales, which are awesome, but now you have an even bigger institution. And it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
That may be a great analogy.
You can be Sisyphus, rolling the rock up the hill, or you can be as smart guy and roll a snowball down a hill.
And I'm teaching how to roll the snowball down the hill.
Now, there's always, and you pointed it out the early part of the call, there's more to learn. There're more sources, there're more people, there's more inspiration. And it's like music, I'm not going to listen to Mozart and never listen to 10,000 other great musicians.
I'd be a lunatic not to do that.
However, if you want to to launch yourself into this new world... I can say this conclusively, if you want to launch yourself into this new world of info marketing, selling digital entertainment and digital information, and putting yourself at the center of a raving fandom, this is the product that will be your launch pad and your platform for it. And it will also give you those kinds of boring plumbing tools that you absolutely have to have.
I started writing copy when I was 14 or 15, somewhere around there.
Trying to get girls to come to our high school, our all boys Catholic high school dances.
And I was copywriting. I didn't know it.
And I continued to write copy from then on, so what was I 40?
I don't know how old I was then I was like 45, minus... That was 30 years.
That was 30 years of copywriting experience in one course.
# # #
And so concludes my interview with Ken McCarthy
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Ben Settle