An 8-figure copywriter's prophecy about the looming economic apocalypse
Published: Sun, 02/09/20
This part goes way beyond just “copywriting”, though.
It may even make some people want to do angry pushups…
Whatever the case, here you be:
elBENBO: You're very outspoken when it comes to the economy. So what can we expect with the economy around the corner. And then second, can all the info we've been talking about here with copywriting and positioning, etc protect someone from any fallout?
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Yes. And let me address that very last question first. If you are a real direct marketer, and not a fly by night guy or a get rich quick guy, but somebody that really embraces the whole direct marketing ethos, one of the foundation points of your practice of your life is value. They give you a dollar and you somehow manage to give them $10 in value back.
Let’s take the System Seminar.
It was an annual event and I would study all year and I'd figure out, okay, where's the internet going? I figured out who the leading people were in each one of those specialties. I somehow by hook or crook, enrolled them into being a speaker, and basically for about 2000 bucks plus whatever their travel expenses were, somebody could get a year's worth of R&D just laid out for them.
If somebody's serious about internet marketing, as they're investing a lot of time and money in it and they maybe have employees. And we would have companies send multiple employees.
We once had a company send 10 of their employees to our conference.
If you were in the business for real, that 2000 bucks was a pittance.
Now it's $2,000, it's a lot of money.
I don't want to burn $2,000 today on nothing. It's not $2. But when you think about what it would cost a company to be on all year thinking, talking, speculating, reading, recruiting the speakers, no one company could do that for less than 50 or a hundred thousand or more a year, assuming they could find somebody who's plugged in enough to even do it.
So there is a case of real value.
So whatever comes with the economy, and we'll talk about where I think the economy is headed, being value driven on behalf of your customers really is job number one. The copy is important. But, but as [direct mail pioneer] Dick Benson would say, you could sell anybody anything, once. He specialized in magazine sales but magazine sales on a huge scale. He helped invent entire magazine industry from scratch.
Like Sports Illustrated.
He helped bring that to life, along with Psychology Today, and Architectural Digest.
And so he knew a lot about the magazine business and he said:
"Look, you know, we can sell anything but it's the editorial quality, the value, that is going to create the business in the long run." Because that's where you get the second signup, and the third signup and the resubscriptions.
So value ... and this is overlooked.
Nobody talks about this or very few people ... everybody's talking about the sell, sell, sell, get the money. Use the trick. Forced continuity. Whatever the scheme of the day is. Everybody's sort of focused on that and nobody's focused on what the core of all this is, is that we have to give people an exponential return on their investment with us. And if we can't, we shouldn't be in the business room. We need to either figure out how to package a truly exponential return on their money or we need to get into another business.
So if you're thinking that way, you'll ride through just about any possible economic situation.
So what about the economic situation?
Years ago, I had a show about this. So we're talking about 2013. My guest and I predicted a spiking of the dollar price, crash of the gold price, continued stagnation in real estate market. None of these things were on anybody's radar then, guaranteed.
Go back, read what was in the financial press back then.
What happened?
Two years later the dollar spiked, gold went down.
Real estate stayed stagnant.
How did we know or how were we able to make such an accurate projection? We know that we're facing something called deflation. There's credit expansion and there's credit contraction. When credit expands, everybody's got money because you can borrow it and it's easy. And when everybody's got money, the price of everything goes up.
Just makes sense, right?
But eventually you reach the end of that rubber band and people stop bit by bit being able to pay back. Oh, we saw that in the real estate market in the mid two thousands. Purchases were going higher and higher and higher. If you go back and watch, this was like the year before the whole thing came unglued and you have all these experts and they're like going, "Real estate's going up another 10%. It's going to go up 10% every year because we're a growing economy. We're a healthy ..."
Like, dude, nothing can go up 10% every year.
Certainly not housing, are people going to be able to pay for it, but a lot of people just can't do arithmetic. There's the salaries that people make and then there's the price of the house and then there's a monthly payment. You can stretch that far for a fairly long time.
You cannot stretch it indefinitely.
At some point it has to snap back to reality.
So anyway, we had a massive credit expansion starting around 1980 and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger and the price of everything just went up and up and up and up and up, and bit by bit was defaults of bonds.
And you might say:
"Well, what does a default of bond in Spain have anything to do with me?"
Well, a credit was extended somewhere on the planet and that money went out and that money instead of coming back, vaporized.
It just disappeared.
And you multiply that over Spain and Italy and all these in a lot of countries, municipalities and companies in the United States. And every kind of loan disappears, that's credit retraction. I don't want to get too technical, but credit is based on the idea that there's money deposited somewhere. And if this money deposited and we can lend against it. Well, when the core money starts vaporizing because of overextension, then the whole credit system has to contract. Well, if there's less borrowed money available, there's less money to bid up the prices of things.
So prices have to come down.
So real estate's a dead dog.
I’ve been begging people for the last 10 years, if you see a house you really love and you love the neighborhood and you loved the community and it's just the house for you, oh my God, buy it. Don't worry about it.
But if you're buying a house because you think it's an investment, forget about it.
And this is where people just sometimes don't have historical perspective. There was a bear market in real estate from this 30s all the way through the 60s, 30 years where owning a home was considered a burden, not a benefit. People were sorry they owned homes, they wished they were renters because the prices weren't going up. In fact, in many localities they were going down and that's the worst thing in the world. You borrow all this money to buy a house and it's not even worth what you borrowed it, but you still have to make the payments.
I mean that's a nightmare and I guarantee when that happens and it's happening to a certain critical mass of a generation, that generation is going to be off real estate for the rest of their lives.
That's why it took 30 years for the real estate market in the United States to recover.
Why?
That one generation that got left holding the bag in the 30s with property, through their adulthood, they never were enthusiastic about property again, and their kids kind of learned not to be enthused ... It took like an entire generation for all that to wash out.
And that is a generational thing.
It's always the same pattern.
People work hard, they accumulate capital, they start making modest investments, investments start making some progress. They get enthusiastic. Credit starts to expand, then it expands and then it's going to expand exponentially.
Everybody thinks it's blue skies forever.
Prices will go up forever.
They get completely overextended and then all of a sudden it's all over, bit by bit. And there's a washout ... And by the way, people that's going to be most affected, unfortunately, anybody that's borrowed a lot of money, anybody that's borrowed a lot of money to buy an asset of depreciating value.
That's not going to be a good position to be in the coming years.
People that will do well, people that are modest, people that believe in delivering value for the money they get. People that have a good work ethic, people that don't believe it's something for nothing. People that are more likely to bootstrap than borrow a ton of money to start something. All these are kind of classic, in my opinion, direct marketing, old school mentalities. So these are good frames of mind to go into the economy we're going into today.
Here's the thing about money and everybody should grasp this.
All loans get paid back.
Either the borrower pays them back or the lender "pays" them back by liquidating them.
It's like something's going to happen with all this borrowed money.
Now, if you just look at the arithmetic, is all this borrowed money going to be paid back or is it more likely that a lot of lenders are going to have to say, "Well, I got to write off that loan because it's never coming back." I mean, they're all to be cleared one way or another. And I think we've reached sort of the point of such maximum extension on credit that the great likelihood is a lot of loans are going to be cleared by writing them off, not by the borrower paying them back.
So anyway, that's my long economic analysis.
And I'm sticking to that.
elBENBO: One of the reasons I asked that is because to me, there's a sense of urgency to really understand direct response and just be able to pay cash for things and pay your stuff off as fast as you can to prepare for what’s coming.
Tell us about your copywriting course, how people can get it and what it is.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: A lot of my clients are people who have internet businesses or direct response oriented businesses. I would just see over and over again that they would just miss certain key parts, elements of copywriting. They just didn't get them. Or they would get involved with copywriters. I don't know if this is still going on, but there's many guys out there that somehow convince people to give them $10,000 or $15,000 for a letter but can't even write letters.
I don't even know how this works, but it's like an epidemic.
And so I thought, well, I know a fair amount about copywriting.
Why don't I just lock myself away for a couple months with stacks and stacks of books, which I literally did. I was just sort of sitting here with all my copywriting books around me and put together two days of everything that I know, not just about copywriting, but also about how to deploy copywriting in the context of an info marketing business. That was sort of the other piece of this course.
So for people that are interested in ... and in a sense all businesses are info marketing businesses, because info is the best lead generator there is.
Using the plumbing example.
If I've got a plumbing issue, I'm way more attracted to the guy that appears to have lots and lots of knowledge, that he's willing to share with me on the front end, than to the guy that just shows up and doesn't explain anything, just wants money. I'm going to spend more time with the guy that's informative than I am with the guy that's not.
So whatever you're selling, becoming a good info-marketer whether you ever sell a book or sell a course or not is irrelevant, but being in that info marketing mindset, trading info for attention, info for leads, info for sales.
This is a thing to master.
Now, if you are in the info marketing business or you aspire to be, you absolutely must become a good copywriter. There's just no way around. I don't know anybody that built a copywriting business that wasn't a good copywriter. And you may get to the point where you can hire good copywriters later down the line, but you need to start out understanding copy. Marty Edelston, not a copywriter, but he knew good copy when he saw it, because he'd been in the publishing world for so long, he was just a sharp guy.
So one way or the other, you're going to have to be a way better than average copywriter if you're going to succeed in info-marketing.
But as we said earlier in the call, I think copywriting is going to assist you in anything that you ever do.
But info-marketing is a very interesting business. You literally are selling hot air, and I don't mean that in a negative sense, but you're selling ideas, you're selling thoughts, you're selling experience, you're selling knowledge, and it's a very intangible thing. It's not like selling cars or selling tires or jet skis or something.
And they are sold by words.
It's the only way.
You can't demonstrate a vast repository of knowledge.
Your demonstration of it is your books, your articles, your sales letters, your talks.
So if you're going to go into the the info marketing business, you have to be way better than the average copywriter.
So this course is for the person that wants to get really good at copy, either for their own accounts or they want to become high level copywriters.
And I really think somebody could take my course and work it and develop themselves, they'd have to work at it, into a copywriter for hire and a very good one because I think you would know way more about writing copy than a lot of people that do write copy for a living. And then if you want to utilize information in your business, either as a lead generator or as the core of your business, this is an amazing ...
I’m just going to say, it's an amazing blueprint for how to do that.
The System Seminar was started with nada.
I mean, I didn't put a penny into it.
I’ve never put money into it.
It was always, I write the letter, we get some people coming in, I make the deposit on the hotel. I roll a letter out to a larger group and then we got to the point where we didn't even need to do that. We could just declare where we were going to be in and put on the event, but I never put a dime into it.
It was driven entirely by copy.
I always say that successful info marketing businesses float on a sea of ink.
If you're going to be in that business, you're going to have to generate a lot of words over the years. And putting no money in, I took, I can say, eight figures out by the time it was all over, gross, and a very healthy seven figure net, no investment.
Now there aren't many businesses on this earth where you can do that other than publishing and info-marketing, where you can take the research and the knowledge and your experience, package it, sell it to the right market in the right way and pull out really good amounts of money.
So the course is about how to write copy, but as a bonus, I guess, there's also a huge portion on how to build an info marketing business from scratch.
I mean every conceivable thing that you need to know to pull that off.
So that's what's in the course. It's basically this interview, but two days worth of it where I'm a little bit more precise and a little bit more methodical. We just go through every single blessed thing that you have to know to write good copy and then deploy that copy in such a way that it builds a strong base for your info business.
So ends the 4-part interview with the great Ken McCarthy.
He’s offering his prestigious “Advanced Copywriting For Serious Info Marketers” course at a gigantic discount for my Horde only, until tonight, Sunday, 2/9 at midnight EST. Plus, if you use my affiliate link and send me your receipt & your shipping address by that deadline (not after — to be clear, you must send it to me, not just buy the course, BEFORE the deadline), I will send you a copy of:
“Crypto Marketing Secrets”
This is the entire 30-issue run of my old “Crypto Marketing Newsletter” in a book.
This print newsletter ran from early 2010 through mid 2012.
It is also not for sale anywhere else, and less than a couple hundred people — give or take — on the planet even possess it at all.
NOTE:
This is a *physical* book that will be sent by mail at my expense.
Retail value: $810.00 (30-issue run, each issue costed $27)
It’s yours when you buy Ken’s copywriting course via my affiliate link during the sale here:
http://www.EmailPlayers.com/secret-course
Ben Settle