I began my career in straight commission sales, out of necessity. Back in the eighties, it was the only work I could find. And I was a miserable failure at first. I must have gone through half a dozen jobs where I hardly made a cent.

But there’s something about having to sell, or you don’t eat that has a way of motivating you to figure things out. And I can still remember getting my hands on this videotape of Mark Victor Hansen’s, I think it was called “38 Ways to Close the Sale” and watching it over and over again until I had virtually memorized the lines. And then I would go back into the field and use them, and low and behold, I immediately began making sales.

Watching Mark Victor Hansen, and mirroring what he did on that video tape took me from zero to hero, literally over night, and I was lucky, because at the time I had also landed in an industry that was hot. Telecommunications.

It was at the dawn of deregulation, and businesses were very eager to find ways to reduce their exorbitant phone bills, so there was this huge demand for more reps to go out and sell these services, and I was promoted to hire them on and train them so things were really looking up.

Long story short I built a sales force, and then got lured away to another company that was doing data communications where you could make much more money selling high ticket stuff, several hundred thousand dollar contracts, sometimes over a million at a shot.

And I basically rode the telecom and high tech gravy train until Y2k and then the bottom fell out, and it got really tough to make the kind of money I had gotten used to. And that’s really when I began experimenting with direct mail.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that was my first exposure to copywriting. Lead generation letters. Instead of using the telephone to initiate the sales cycle, I began using direct mail, and in 2003 I started using the Internet as well.

I started a little skunkworks project with google adwords and a little renegade website, and things were cool, but shortly afterward the company I was working for crashed and burned. And I was sick of the whole suit and tie thing anyway, and having to cow tow to bone headed managers, and hassle my way to work everyday in traffic, I said the heck with this. I’m going to hang a shingle of my own, and basically I went cold turkey in Nov. 2004.

And here I am today, making a comfortable living in my underwear most days, writing copy, doing consulting, and selling information products online and basically having a blast with guys like you.

I went to school in a tiny little town of about 3,500 people in a place called Shelburne, Ontario, Canada, and I was a complete renegade in my teenage years, actually. School to me was a colossal waste of time. So, like you, I hold the dubious honor of being able to brag about being “an elementary school graduate.”

And you know, looking back, I don’t have a single regret. I mean, going out into the real world and kicking and scratching and clawing my way, taught me all kinds of valuable lessons I don’t think I would have ever learned in school.

Actually, an entrepreneurial liability, I mean, think about it; the whole system’s designed to produce an army of drones; it conditions kids to believe that all they need to do to succeed is fit neatly into some employee role.

But it’s patterned after a world that simply doesn’t exist anymore; where businesses were highly integrated and it made sense for a company to do things in-house, because of the inherent transactional friction that existed.

But now, with the Internet and other advancements, that transactional friction just isn’t there anymore. There’s every incentive now, for a company to outsource almost everything to independents.

The result is a massive disintegration of the economy; and a tidal wave of employees being downsized, outsourced and basically thrown out on their ear. And because of their reliance on an outmoded, outdated education system, many people are completely unprepared for it.

I think that’s one of the great drivers of the economy right now. Anybody who can help these people make that transition from employee to entrepreneur stands to do very well.

So millions of folks are making that transition. But a lot of times they don’t have the marketing skills required to grow their new companies. They may know the technical side or the engineering side, or some other fragmented part of the business. But they don’t understand how to get new customers and how to sell more stuff to those customers.

I’d always wanted a business of my own, but I just couldn’t see myself forking out 100 grand or whatever on some kind of brick and mortar business and going into the red for years trying to replace my income.

It just didn’t make any sense when I could make an easy six figure income in corporate sales. And I was continuing to do that, not at the same levels of income as before the bust, but I was still doing quite well even after 2000; using the new lead generation techniques that I’d developed.

But when the Internet came along and I began experimenting with it heavily, it opened up whole new vistas of possibility for me.

I had bought a few information products online, and I joined every email list that looked halfway intelligent about Internet marketing. And before long, God I must have been on 50 or more lists. And I would read everything. And I would watch how the offers worked, and the joint venture deals, where one list owner would endorse another list owner’s product. And I thought hmmm, what a cool business. I can do this.

So I started writing editorial style emails loaded with useful content about how to sell, and put some google ads out, and started building an opt-in list of my own. And I started promoting the affiliate programs of the products that I had found useful, and put together some information products of my own. And I can still remember the first sales I made. I was ecstatic.

And without ever once actively looking for work as a copywriter, beyond all of the promotions I was doing for myself, people from inside my list started approaching me to do copywriting and consulting for them.

Come to think of it, that’s how we met right?

I am so thankful that I found you and that we’re together through Response Ink., for Weiss Research and other clients. And also, that you’ve agreed to come onboard at The Profit Center with your own e-zine on internet marketing, Daniel Levis’ Web Marketing Advisor™.

I’m really excited about what you’re going to do to help those 25 million new small businesses really create the quantum growth they’re looking for.

There’s something that I’ve always been curious about though. The title of your book is “The Masters of Copywriting” but your website is www.sellingtohumannature.com.

I could never quite put the two together. What’s the significance of your URL?

I believe the biggest key to selling is understanding, and leveraging human nature. It’s a paradox really. Writing great copy is like schizophrenia. On the one hand, you need to be very in tune with your own human nature, and on the other, you need to step out of your own ego to write successful copy.

If you remain true to our own human nature when you write you’ll miss the mark entirely. And you see this happening all the time when you see product centric, or company centric advertising.

Naturally prospects want to know the achievements and the credentials of the people they buy from, and yes they want to know what products are available to them.

But it’s not what they’re primarily interested in. They don’t give a darn who you are until they know what you can do for them. And even then, I think they need some kind of a personal bond to be established before they’ll open their minds fully to accepting your credibility, no matter how strong. That’s why it’s so important to write in a very conversational tone, and display understanding for the prospect’s point of view early on in your copy.

And that’s not always easy. As a business owner, you can be too close to things. And as a copywriter, there’s a tremendous amount of skull sweat that goes into understanding a business, and its product, and its market all over again for each different project you become involved with. But at the end of the day, the more you can understand and discover about human psychology and motivation, the better.

When a prospect is exposed to your copy, they’ve already got a conversation going on inside their head concerning the problem you’re trying to solve for them. They’re already a bundle of preconceived notions, beliefs, prejudices, and emotions. And all of these things circle around the ego.

That’s human nature. So you have to sell to that nature by entering the conversation, and appealing to the prospect’s ego, not yours, before drawing attention to your company, or your product.

You’re like a judo master, who harnesses the immense natural power of human nature to your advantage.

And I’ve been lucky, because I think sellingtohumannature as a trade name has resonated nicely with the market.

It’s amazing: Long before you and I got together, you’d already cued into this whole thing; that’s it not about your product. It’s not about your company. It’s about the resident desires and emotions your prospect already has, and entering that conversation he’s already having with himself.

And that’s why, from Day One, the very first copy you submitted just blew me away.

I quite often tell new clients, “Just tell me what your prospects fear, what they desire and what frustrates them and I’ll give you a four percent control. But if you can’t tell me that, then it’s gonna be a long, hard row to hoe.”

Advertorials are especially effective on the web, because people are used to receiving free information on the web. They think information should be free.

If you begin with a promotion that says, “Hey, here’s my product. Isn’t it beautiful?” you’re really saying, “Hey, you know, if you read this I’m gonna try to sell you something.”

Whereas, on the other hand, if you go in with an advertorial appeal and you talk to the person about fulfilling their desires, or assuaging their fears or eliminating their frustrations, by the time you get around to the sales copy, you’re their friend and advocate instead of a salesman trying to get them to sign the dotted line.

The difference between straight benefit leads and advertorial leads is very clear to you and me. But to a lot of marketers, they don’t quite get it. Especially business owners.

They’ve put their lives into this product and they honestly believe this is the best product there ever was. So they want to put the product up front and talk about how unique it is and have a unique selling proposition in the headline and all that kind of stuff.

Then, they wonder why people aren’t coming to them and buying their product in droves. It’s just because the copy’s about the product – not about the prospect and how your ad is going to bring value to his life.

People come to me because they want to increase their online sales, or because they want more leads that they can follow up on via the phone or in person. They’re paying for traffic, and they’re not seeing a positive return on their investment. By far the biggest mistake I see is a lack of clarity of purpose.

These folks are spending big money to get a top placement on Google, or wherever, and their ad might say something like “Award-Winning Sales Force Automation Solution Combines Customer Relationship Management and Accounting. Free Trial”…

Well the fact that they offer a free trial means people are going to click through…

But when I click on their ad, I land on a page that’s a veritable sea of links. Links across the top, links on the left, links on the right, links in the middle. What happened to the free trial? Oh there it is somewhere on the right with all of the other stuff. And what am I supposed to get out of taking the free trial again?

And the page has no center of gravity. No one thing captures my attention. The closest thing to a headline says “Online CRM+”. This page is nothing but a dead cat bounce for the sale cycle. It dies right there.

All too often I see marketers displaying their own human nature, instead of sublimating it, and catering to the human nature of their prospects. It’s only natural to be fixated on our own interests, and so these poor misguided folks write landing pages that are about them and their products, instead of their prospects.

They don’t seem to understand their prospects don’t give a rat’s ass, and won’t invest the time to “navigate” the page to find what was promised in the classified ad that got them there. They just click away in a heartbeat.

And I see this mistake made in varying degrees, even by more sophisticated marketers who kill response with extraneous links and busy top banners that compete with their headlines, stuff moving around the screen, or with pages that try to do too much at once.

My advice is to be single minded, keep things as simple as you possibly can, and for god’s sake give your prospects a clearly defined plot to follow when they arrive at your landing pages. If you make a promise in your classified advertising, follow through on that promise with a big ass headline that grabs your prospects attention as soon as they arrive on your landing page, and then go from there.

Make it brain dead simple for them to follow the plot. Sell them on what it is you want them to do. Anything that fails to support that single-minded mission, get rid of it.

Imagine your prospects are all walking around with invisible antennae protruding from the top of their skulls, and they’re all tuned into the same radio station WIIFM. They’re all whistling that sweet little ditty, “What’s in it for me?”

Another big mistake I see is confusing the reader through omission. Expecting people to fill in the blanks of your sales story on their own. And this is an easy trap to fall into.

I’m a big believer in guided imagery. In my view, nobody contemplates a purchase without using their imagination. We mentally fill in the blanks about what we expect will happen when we buy a product, or take some kind of an action on a webpage, before we take that action.

Because people are inherently skeptical and negative, if you leave it up to them to run their own imagination and picture those outcomes, you can almost bet they’ll find all kinds of things wrong with the picture. I don’t want that to happen. I want to be a tour guide for my prospects. I want to be the architect of their new life, with my product playing a starring role.

And for most products that I’m trying to sell, the only way to do that is with long copy that paints vivid mental pictures in the mind of the reader, thus guiding their imagination. Pictures and so forth can be useful too, but at the end of the day you want to create mental imagery that’s as rich and detailed and satisfying as possible between your prospects own ears, and crowd out any negativity concerning the action you’re asking them to take. Because ultimately, the subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between what’s real and Imaginary.

Many websites completely ignore this little facet of human nature.

One day I was reviewing a lead generation campaign a client sent me for critique. And he sent me some of his competitor’s stuff as well.

I swear you could have switched the company names and it wouldn’t have made a darn bit of difference. Both pieces began, as most corporate advertisements do, with a lifeless litany of meaningless platitudes, and carried on about as flat and dull as warmed over oatmeal.

“Suppose you were the customer”, I said. “Be him for a minute. Realize that he faces stacks of these things every day. They’re piling up to the ceiling in his office, these dry institutional marketing pieces he must read on his employer’s time. No wonder he hates sales people and marketers. He’s drowning in their paper excrement. Can you see him? He wants to burn the piles up.

Suddenly something snaps!

He goes mad. He grabs the brochure on the top of the pile, rips off the top sheet, lights a match to it and now, laughing, slobbering all over himself, he feeds the little fire, a page at a time.

He drops the burning marketing package to the floor, and adds others to it until he has a large roaring fire in the center of his office. You can see him madly feeding the flames with sales letter after sales letter until he comes to yours. He picks it up. It’s the last one left. By this time the drapes have caught fire and the place is turning into a towering inferno. He stops for a moment to read the last sales copy he will ever see. And what does he read?

XYZ Company is a leading communication solutions provider with a world-class portfolio of connectivity, infrastructure and management services blah blah blah…

"Can’t you see that poor sod?", I said. "With your sales letter in his hands he lets out one last horrible scream, throws your stuff into the fire, and is about to jump in after it when, just in time, he’s rescued by a big burly fireman who smashes down the door to his office and rushes in… Why not save the poor man’s life in the first place by putting some personality and story into your copy?"

And it’s the same online. You’ve got to keep people engaged, or they’re not going to read your copy. And if they don’t read your copy, they’re not going to take that all-important action that you want them to take to move the sales process forward.

I think there are many more similarities than there are differences. But one of the biggest differences that I perceive is the speed at which things happen.

I do a lot of stuff with information products and there’s a lot that can be done to leverage the speed of the internet to create impulse sales, in a way that I think is quite difficult to do with traditional offline direct response, media, like mail and space ads and what not.

And the same thing, I think is true of add-ons. There’s a tremendous opportunity to dramatically shrink the whole product lifecycle by putting all of your thank-you pages and your fulfillment pages to highest and best use with tasteful up sells and cross sells, taking advantage of that “yes” momentum that exists. There’s no better time to ask for another sale, then after you’ve just made one. And the speed of the Internet adds an impulse element to that I don’t see existing in other media.

I see too many marketers spend good money to drive leads to a landing page to get an opt-in to an e-zine, for example – and then, no sale is attempted until the lead gets his or her first issue.

Others go one step farther; attempting to make a sale while the prospect is opting in – at that moment when the prospect IS most receptive to making a purchase. You’ve just given something of value, free. He’s indicated an interest in your area of topicality, you know, whether it’s politics or economics or investment or health or whatever.

One client you and I have worked with takes new ezine subscribers through three or four steps – to a final $6,000 sale. And if the prospect doesn’t make the purchase while online, there’s a 12-step autoresponder campaign driving him to the phone to make the purchase.

Offering something of value, that’ll bring value to their lives for a reasonable fee, when they’re on your opt-in page, is a positive thing to people.

I’m amazed when I see marketing people and sales people, who seem to think that selling is bad.

Okay, so tell me about who your early influences were.

One of the most valuable things I think anybody studying copywriting can do, who perhaps doesn’t have any background in sales, is to study some of the work of these masters of personal selling, just as much as you would the masters of copywriting.

Once you’ve got a prospect at your website, it doesn’t make a bit of difference to your cost, if you use one word or 1,000. Test things that you could never afford to try offline.

One of the things you’ll discover is that copy is just as much king online as it is offline. And I don’t care if you’re talking about text on a screen or audio or video; whatever it is, no matter what, it’s the words that ultimately do the selling. Not the technology or the wow factor of your graphics and your video or whatever media you choose to use.

All of these things may be useful and they may help, but at the end of the day, it’s the words. So don’t skimp. Take the time to learn how to write the very best copy that you can or hire a professional to do it for you. That would be my advice.

One of the things I always kept firmly implanted in my mind when I was selling was a very simple mnemonic. And it goes like this, “Like, listen, believe, buy.” Whether in a live selling situation or in the printed words that appear on a landing page, that’s what has to happen.

And it won’t happen if you fail to talk to the prospects self-interest or if you blast these kinds of credibility-killing superlatives all over the pages; or if your copy is dull. There are literally hundreds of parallels that you can make, between the live selling situation and the web.

In personal selling, once you’ve elicited your clients buying criteria, what you do then, is you start to build a stream of acceptances through questions.

If a prospect says something to you like, “Do you have it in blue?” the skillful salesperson responds with, “Would you like it in blue?” That’s not the natural comeback. The natural comeback is, “Yes, we have it in blue.” But you say, “Would you like it in blue?” What’s a customer going to say? “No?”

What you’ve got is a yes. And you can use that as momentum to engineer another affirmative response and build on that momentum. You could follow-on by saying something like, “I could have it delivered in blue this Friday. Does that work for you, or would the following Monday be better?”

Do you see what’s happening? It’s human nature in action. We’re preprogrammed to remain consistent with our prior commitments as a race. It’s very difficult to contradict yourself, once you’ve taken a stand. It’s like admitting you’re wrong. And persuasive copy does the same thing. It gradually builds a series of acceptances, from opening to close. Naturally, there are fewer questions in copy, but the same effect is necessary.

When you open your copy, one of the most powerful ways you can begin is by making an assertion that your prospect has to agree with you. For example, in one of your control letters, you open up with, “Just when you thought it was safe to get back into stocks, the ghosts of all the financial crisis of the past 30 years are returning to shock Wall Street again.”

Well, when you wrote that, that was what was in the news. And that’s what was on people’s minds. And your prospect is reading this and he’s thinking, “Yep.”

And that’s exactly what you want to happen when somebody lands on your landing page; you want them to start mentally nodding their head and getting into a sort of hypnotic acceptance and agreement and rapport. That’s how you build trust.

I hired Gary to work on a project with me and his copy immediately made a friend out of the prospect.

His deck copy might as well have said, “Look: This is not an adversarial communication. I’m not a salesman. You are not a prospect. I’m an advocate for you. I’m your friend. I have the same frustrations you do. The difference between us is, I’ve found a solution.”

Gary did that consistently throughout his career in every package he did. Make a friend first, then make the sale.

Exactly.

Jim Rutz’s “Read This or Die” promotion, for Healthy Directions, began by getting the prospect’s head nodding with a compelling proposition: “For every disease you can name, there is a country where it simply doesn’t exist.”

That proposition got peoples’ heads nodding and they say, “You know, I’ve heard that. I’ve heard people don’t get prostate cancer in Japan. I’ve heard that people in such and such a country don’t die of heart attacks.”

By getting his prospects’ heads nodding, they instantly became receptive to his entire sales message.

All right – last question for this interview – we’ve been going for nearly an hour now.

We’ve talked about a lot of great marketing principles that have worked like gangbusters for both of us over the years. But if you could name the one thing, that’s really put you over the top – that has made you the solid, six-figure writer, web consultant, web strategist, and direct mail guy you are – what would it be?

But you also need to earn while you learn and just go out there and do things, rather than waiting for that time when you’re convinced you’re good enough. You have to have a strong enough ego to go out there and face rejection.

I think you said it best when you covered this point indirectly in a recent issue of “The Total Package,” You said “Be like a bumble bee. The laws of physics say, it’s impossible for an insect that big and with tiny, little delicate wings, to be able to fly. Except for one thing, the bumble bee doesn’t know it.”

I’ve trained myself to be dumb as a bumblebee, so I can stay focused on what I want and oblivious to what I don’t want. That way I can see setbacks as feedback and never failure, and I’m not afraid to go out there and risk rejection. I’m not afraid to risk failure.

That, in my mind, is the ultimate secret to success, and for anybody who’s an aspiring copywriter, I say, “Yeah, burn all the midnight oil you can, to learn. But you’re never going to really internalize these things, until you actually get out there and do them in the real world and get some real experience.” That’s what I’ve done, and so far it hasn’t failed me.