How to “ethically exploit” customers into buying from you
Published: Sat, 02/20/21
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: And that is why I had the whole hour on psychopathy.
Because I wanted to say:
”Look, whether you guys realize it or not, I just gave you the power to fuck people over horribly."
My thinking was, Okay, now we're going to use this skill to basically exploit in a positive manner, hopefully, a inbred, inborn reality of human beings. They're looking for people to follow. They're looking for people to plug into. They're looking for people to give adulation to.
We're crazy.
We're crazy that way.
We're like children, we want Santa Claus, we want the Easter Bunny.
elBENBO: Which we're witnessing right now.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
elBENBO: I mean, we're watching it. And you can see, you see how people have made being a victim almost like a virtue now.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Oh, it is. And it's all copywriting. It's convinced rational people to self-victimize and actually take pleasure in pain. It's astounding to me. It really is.
You know what's weird?
I don't know whether I am so obscure that they don't care about me, but no one has touched my stuff about all this [to try to de-platform me] at all. I mean, my Twitter channel is, I mean, I basically... I mean, I'm beyond pulling punches.
I'm not even close to pulling punches on Twitter.
I'm out.
I'm like a mad man, and I haven't even been touched.
It's bizarre.
I also said:
"There's a lot of power in what I've just taught you. And here's how human beings go wrong. Don't go this way."
elBENBO: Yeah.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: And when you see people who are behaving this way, don't get involved with them. Don't do business with them. Don't support them. Don't advance them. And I spent a whole hour on that. And I know that had a big impact on you because that's something that you talk about a lot.
elBENBO: It helped steer me away from some pretty bad people.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Yeah.
elBENBO: So it's very powerful stuff.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: And I put that in there because I wish somebody had told me. Because, here's the thing. Relatively normal people, that's you and me, and most people, really can't envision evil. We could imagine telling a white lie, I mean, there's a lot of minor shit maybe we could imagine doing, and even do.
But the idea of this kind of large scale stuff, this is beyond our imagination.
We can't even envision.
elBENBO: And it ties into human trafficking and all kinds of evil things.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Oh yeah.
elBENBO: This stuff runs so deep. But the average person doesn’t see it.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: But initially I burned myself several times by not understanding that there are people that are really bad.
Like, they're bad to the bone.
And they really exist, and it's not your imagination.
And if you even get a sense of that, you better wise up fast.
I didn't know that, I had to learn it. That's why I made sure I spent an hour on it in the course. But I also put it in the course as a sort of disclaimer. Which was like, I've just showed you how to be evil, don't be evil.
Of course, I don't know if that will help.
So anyway, I think one of the keys to this course is that it's an encyclopedia compendium of everything that works in copy. And it shows you that copy is really just a launching pad for building a truly lucrative business that makes you independent. If anything, I've got to be a demonstration of an independent guy. Here I am on the internet all day long fighting this fraud. You would think I'd have to have my head examined. It's scary for people to do this because they have to worry about their jobs, their clients, their careers.
I'm not worried, you know why?
I've got my following.
The people that follow me are going to follow me. The people that are going to be repelled by this, they're going to be gone. I don't care.
elBENBO: If anything, it's like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Strike me down and I become stronger.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Exactly.
elBENBO: It makes you stronger when that kind of stuff happens. It’s almost like saying, “Please Twitter, ban me!” Now you can say "Banned on Twitter", on every sales letter that you write.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: There you go.
elBENBO: “This information's banned on Twitter.”
It's very fascinating.
And when you understand, like you were talking about it, you don't need to know a whole lot of moving parts. It's plumbing. The craftsmanship, you've got to learn it, but even in the Kung Fu system, I learned there's only so many things you really learn. After that it's just combining and going deep in those principles which never ends.
I know that you're not a big fan of these people just doing swipe jobs.
Isn't that one of the reasons you taught this?
Because some copywriter kind of screwed you over?
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Well Yeah. My other thing was that... The other reason I created this class is a lot of people get brutally ripped off when they hire copywriters. And I wanted to make sure people, at least, even if they never wrote their own copy, at least they knew what copy was supposed to be and how it was supposed to be made and all that.
And yeah, people ripping off my copy.
Oh my God.
Word for word just taking whole sections and slamming it into their sales letter. And I had a guy, I kid you not, he was selling a course on how to sell TV ad time. And he pulled multiple paragraphs out of my system sales letter.
I don't like those people, but now the question of a swipe file is a really interesting one.
I think it's really good to be on a lot of lists and to look at a lot of lists.
And I have boxes full of stuff.
I kind of look at it.
I kind of put it in the mental computer, and then I forget about it, but then maybe if I need... I was doing this disastrous project for a nonprofit group, which just is the most crazy... I don't know if I told you the whole story. I begged them to, I think you were one of the guys I sent the letter to...
elBENBO: Yeah. You sent me the letter and you told me about what happened.
Gary Bencivenga's story too.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: You got the Gary Bencivenga part. Can you imagine you've got the legend of the copywriting world and you've got some PR twit… and by the way, that turned out to be the same problem I was facing that I wasn't aware, but there was some PR expert who's on the board who doesn't know shit and couldn't sell gold for pennies.
And she was bad mouthing me.
I'm like, "Really?"
Anyway, when I realized that I was going to be doing some classic fundraising sales letters, I'm on a bunch of those lists. And instead of throwing them out, I just read them and I kept a file on them. And then when it was time to write the letter for this group, I just threw the file on the desk, open it up, just sort of flipped through it just, "Oh, this is kind of interesting. I could twist that. I could do something with it."
But I wasn't like, "Oh, I'm going to copy this guy's letter."
It was more like, “am I leaving something out?”
elBENBO: It's good to see how other copywriters have solved certain problems.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Well, and you know again, plumbing.
When it was time to do the donation card, it's like, I don't know what a donation card should be, so, how about I look at Amnesty International, they've only mailed a billion pieces of mail. They've probably figured it out. That's how I would use a swipe file. I wouldn't use it any other way. I think it's kind of the way Eugene Schwartz talks about swipe files, too. I'm sure he read everybody's mail, but he didn't lean on swipe files. I know its hard work, but I think you really needed to start from zero and build the house up from scratch every time.
That's not to say you're not going to follow similar layouts.
elBENBO: I'm rereading Breakthrough Advertising again now.
I try to do it once a year and he talks about you can't solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions. He says right up front in the beginning of the book that every ad has its own demands, its own thing. You can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions.
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Exactly. And it's a different time in history, too.
We're not writing for the ages we're really writing for right now. That's why when we see ads from a hundred years ago, they look ludicrous. We're like, "Who on Earth would go for this?" And yet it turns out it was the best performing ad in 1920, and you're like, "No one would go for this." You really need to start with a flat clear ground and going back to the plumber analogy and the fact that it's only really a few elements. The fact is if you want to be a plumber, you actually have to go to school and learn and you have to take some classes about plumbing and then you have to be an apprentice. And then when you're an apprentice, the senior guys show you this pipe goes here and this pipe goes there and then you know it, and then you're a plumber.
And so that's how I feel copywriting is.
It's not a magic art.
It's not a, "Hey, I learned this trick."
I tell you, I ran into this problem with piano. Initially over the summer, I was learning a lot of tricks from this, there's a lot of great YouTube channels. And I would go to the piano, I'd play them and they'd sound good. But I was ending up with this sort of big bag of tricks that were not connected. Here's the deal, I couldn't play any songs. I could noodle around and sound like I was doing something. But when it came to time to actually play a song from A to Z, I didn't have the tools to do it. Finally, I ran across an instructor online, who said, "Look, dude, you got to learn the scales. They're not interesting. They're not exciting. They're not fun. They're kind of boring, but if you can't play the 12 scales, you're never going to be able to really play a tune."
It's only a half dozen things, scales, intervals, triads, arpeggios, chord progressions, done.
But if you don't know those things, you'll always be at C.
You'll always be a half piano player who never quite can play a song.
Whereas if you just know these things, which are ultimately plain vanilla, then all of a sudden you can play songs. You're a player. And I'm seeing this now in 2021, but that's how I was thinking about the copywriting course. I wanted to demystify it, systematize it, turn it into a plumber's apprentice course so that you could just learn this stuff.
Just know it, have the tools.
Okay now, what are you going to do with those tools?
Are you going to go hat in hand begging clients to respect your knowledge and give you money? Or are you going to carve out your own world and create your own world through your copy, have a following and be supported by that following in grand means and be an independent person.
elBENBO: Yeah. It reminds me of what I call copywriting sex robots.
Which is the AI where they just put all this stuff in software and a sales letters supposedly spits out perfectly tailored to your market with the best headlines and all that.
Imagine a plumber doing that.
“Well, I'm just going to randomly take what all these other great plumbers did to fix a toilet to fix this hot water heater…”
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: And with the most advanced shit is knowing the mind of your prospect.
elBENBO: Did I tell you the story about that from talking with David Deutsch?
THE GREAT KEN McCARTHY: Tell me.
# # #
That ends part 3 with Ken McCarthy about copywriting & online empire building.
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