Posted by: Clayton Makepeace
December 4, 2006
Issue #72

Whats Good for The Goose

GuruKnowledge.Org founder DALE KING grills Clayton and discovers …

• How I generated $5 million in sales in six weeks by combining my client’s most effective media …
• What’s smarter? Launching a new business in a crowded field, or pioneering a new marketing space?
• The five essential components of every entrepreneurial success …
• 8 steps to SEO bliss …
• The only kind of goal I ever set for myself …
• Two mental images that drive me to produce more profitable sales copy …
• Three books that every Internet marketer must read NOW …
• How to make Google eager to pay YOU one-point-three billion dollars …
• And Much, MUCH MORE!

Dear Business-Builder,

Over the last 18 months, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a ton of top experts for The Total Package – including Gary Bencivenga … Arthur Johnson … Carline Anglade-Cole … Parris Lampropoulos … and Kent Komae.

Today, I’m letting Dale King turn the tables – and interview me!

Dale is an ex-advertising salesman, copywriter and owner of an excellent new Internet marketing website, GuruKnowledge.org.

You may want to spend some time on Dale’s site. Especially if you’re looking for lots of ideas and opinions on improving your online and offline marketing and copywriting.

_________

Dale King: Hello Clayton, how are you?

Clayton Makepeace: Great, Dale!

Dale: Clayton, tell us how and when you got started marketing on the Internet.

Clayton: I did it out of necessity – not desire. In 2001 or 2002, my #1 client asked me to help him launch a new premium service – a mutual fund trading advisory selling for $1,000 per year.

Since he had more than 100,000 subscribers to his print newsletter, it was a slam dunk that I’d design a campaign to include a personalized First-Class letter, several inserts for his newsletter and a 24-page special report self-mailer.

But he also had well over 100,000 e-mail names – some were paid subscribers and some freebie e-zine subs – so it was clear that I also needed to integrate an online component into my strategy.

So I launched our promotion with a long-copy (about 20 pages) HTML blast to his e-mail names … and followed with a series of thrice-weekly e-mails for six weeks, each one leading with a current news story that illustrated the necessity of having a service like his.

Plus, while all of this was going on, we included our 12-page insert into his print newsletter, then followed two weeks later with a highly personalized first-class letter, and then sent the 24-page special report self-mailer two weeks after that.

We sold more than $5 million in subscriptions to his advisory in about six weeks – and since I was in for 10% of revenues, even a high-school drop-out like me could figure out I needed to learn more about this online thing.

Dale: What’s a typical day like for Clayton Makepeace?

Clayton: There really is no such thing as a “typical day” for me. I tend to get up between 4:00 and 5:00 AM and go straight to the little cabin on my property I’ve set up as an office. I generally go through a pot of coffee while I’m checking the news and reading my e-mail. Then, after a quick shower, I head off to our main office downtown.

At this point in my career, all I do is write. Wendy (The Redhead) does everything else for The Total Package and for our agency, Response Ink. That includes overseeing all the receivables and payables with our CPA and bookkeeper, scheduling and supervising our in-house web designers, managing our customer care people, supervising our SEO, PPC and media buyers and approximately one gazillion other things.

Nevertheless, most of my days are pretty fragmented; an hour or two on a project for one client, a half-hour conference call with another client, a couple more hours creating headline test panels for another and maybe five or six hours writing for The Total Package.

My best days are when I can go to work, shut off the phone and just concentrate on one copywriting project.

Dale: Some Internet Marketing experts advise newbies to steer clear of certain areas of Internet Marketing, like selling e-books on how to make money, advertising services, SEO services, copywriting, etc., because it's too competitive. Do you agree with that assessment?

Clayton: Nope. Saying any area is “too competitive” seems silly to me. It just means lots of other guys and gals are making a bundle in that space – that’s a good thing in my book!

No matter what area you decide to work in, the secret to success is developing a product and an appeal that’s fresh, intriguing and enticing – and then putting your offer in front of your best prospects.

More specifically, to be a successful entrepreneur, you need five things:

1. A product that delivers a benefit that people already want at a price they’re willing to pay …
2. A strategy that puts your sales copy in front of your best prospects …
3. Great headlines and lead copy that compel them to read your message …
4. Sales copy that convincingly presents the reasons why the prospect should buy and overcomes any objections he might have, and …
5. A quick, easy way for the prospect to order.

Now, you can do all that in a space that has already been proven to appeal to prospects, and where you’ll go head to head with well-established competitors, or you can attempt to reinvent the wheel by pioneering a completely new area.

If you decide to become a pioneer, you can do items two through five brilliantly and still fail miserably if your product misses the mark – if it doesn’t deliver a benefit your prospects intensely desire at a price they’re willing to pay. And when you pioneer a new area, your chances of missing the mark are substantial. It’s a crapshoot.

Pioneers are famous for winding up with arrows in their keesters. Given the choice, I’d rather compete in an established area.

Dale: How is Internet marketing different now, as opposed to when you first got started online?

Clayton: Remember, Dale – you’re not talking to Ken McCarthy here. I created my first direct mail promotion in 1972 – but my first web promo was only five or six years ago.

Today, I read that open, click-thru and conversion rates have declined – but ours are off the charts. I read that rich media banner ads aren’t working as well today – but ours are generating new customers at profits of up to 450%.

So a lot of the changes people talk about don’t really resonate with me.

As far as real changes go, I think the whole SEO thing has become much more simplified. With every passing day, Google’s technology is better at directing surfers to sites that deliver the content they’re really looking for and making all the complex keyword and invisible type trickery obsolete.

Our SEO philosophy – which is heavily influenced by conversations I’ve had with Ken Evoy – is quite simple:

1. Have a sitemap …
2. Register with the spiders …
3. Select keywords you have a good chance of winning on …
4. Assign page titles and URLs with those keywords in mind …
5. Fill your site with proprietary, keyword-rich content – the more, the better …
6. Use forums and blogs to add even more keyword-rich content …
7. Look for ways to keep visitors on your site longer – free videos, archives of back issues and of course blogs and forums are great in this regard …
8. Use every e-mail contact with subscribers and customers to drive them to your site.

We’re doing a lot more, of course … but that’s the backbone of our approach.

Dale: How important has goal-setting been to your overall success?

Clayton: Very. But I don’t set goals the way a lot of other folks do.

Unlike Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk, I was born a poor white child. My dad never earned more than $500 a month in his life. So I spent a lot of years yearning for things – for better clothes in grade school … a new bicycle in middle school … a better car in high school.

Sure – I realized early on that to get what I wanted, I had to learn certain things; do certain things. And I understood that they should be done by a date certain – i.e. as soon as humanly possible.

But that’s just scheduling. My personal goals never had anything to do with the process of succeeding – only achieving the end result.

Whatever I was doing – whether it was learning my craft, finding the courage to make a sales call or actually writing sales copy, – I always kept the vision of the thing I wanted most before me. And I kept reminding myself that whatever I was doing at any given time was just “what a guy has to do” to succeed.

Even today, when I begin creating a promotion, I hold two motivating visions in my mind.

The first is a vision of my client being absolutely blown away by the power of my copy …

The second is of my accountant calling to say that client just wired $100,000, $250,000 or more in royalties into my bank account. To me, getting that call is the most fun you can have with your clothes on!

Now, don’t get me wrong; the validation and thrill of winning is addictive, too. But the money’s better.

I’m amazed that so many folks have a hard time admitting they like money. I love money. In fact, I believe the guy who first translated I Timothy 6:10 needed glasses: I’m sure it should have read, “The LACK of money is the root of all evil.”

If money is evil, time is evil … freedom is evil … your very life is evil. Because all money is, is a physical manifestation of time.

You’ve got two choices of how to spend each day. You can spend it doing what you want to do, or doing what someone else – a client, for example – wants you to do.

So when you work, you’re selling your scarcest resource: Chunks of your life. You only have so many minutes on this planet and you’ve agreed to trade some of them in return for money.

Now, you can sell your life for peanuts if you want. Me? I’m looking for the highest bidder. That means making sure every minute I spend working brings me the maximum number of simoleans possible.

That lets me provide a great life for my wife, kids and grandkids. It lets me donate to charity. It lets me BUY BACK chunks of my life later on and have the freedom to do whatever I please. It means when I’m 96 years old and pooping in a diaper, I won’t be a burden to anyone.

So my goal list has only one item on it: Make more money. So long as I’m not violating a personal ethic, or a law, or a regulation, or hurting someone else, I’m going for the moolah.

Dale: How important has reading been to your overall success?

Clayton: Reading is crucial. But “doing” is even more important.

Early on, I read The Masters – John E. Kennedy … Albert Lasker … Claude Hopkins … John Caples … Vic Schwab … Robert Collier … Rosser Reeves … David Ogilvy and a handful of others. Their books – plus studying every direct mail control I could lay my hands on – gave me everything I needed to begin earning a living in this business.

But my most valuable education came as I began applying what I learned in the real world. It’s trite but true: You learn more from your failures than from your successes. And boy, did I learn a LOT in those early days!

It was pretty sobering when promo after promo failed. But each time, I got an education that you can’t get anywhere else – and I even got paid for going to school!

So I urge my copy cubs and all my Total Package readers: Study The Masters. Read them every year.

And then get out there and compete! And when you bomb – and you WILL bomb – be thankful. Learn everything you can from the failure and then move on.

Dale: If you could recommend one book that all Internet marketers should read, what would it be?

Clayton: Just one? I guess it would be either John Caples’ Tested Advertising Methods or Claude Hopkins’ My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising.

See, selling isn’t about technology. Selling is about people: What gets their attention, what they want, and how to move them to action.

If you decided to market a product on television, would you begin by learning how to build a TV from scratch? No, you’d just need to know what the medium allows you to do. You can have sound. You can have moving pictures. You can have a toll-free number. The rest of the technical stuff can be better handled by functionaries.

Everything else you need to know to be successful isn’t about the medium you’re using; it’s about selling. But for some reason, a lot of folks today believe they need to know all about the technical aspects of the Web to be successful on the Web.

So they spend a fortune on books and courses and wind up being able to do their own HTML coding and SEO & PPC work – but they don’t know one damned thing about how to approach, engage or sell to a prospect.

Sorry if this sounds like I’m on a rant – but frankly, this whole Internet Guru thing is getting a little loopy for me. I spoke at a marketing conference last year. Each attendee had spent at least $7,500 to be there. Each had spent thousands on other conferences and courses over the years. And each one could talk for hours about SEO, PPC, RSS feeds, the “Long Tail” – all that geek stuff.

… But when I asked the crowd how many had read Hopkins, Caples, Ogilvy and the rest of the masters – how many understood how to USE the Web to actually convince people to buy – maybe three hands went up. Amazing!

For me, the less I have to know about the web, the better. The more I can learn about my prospects, the better.

When I plan a web-based campaign strategy, I sketch out what I think will most effectively involve my prospects. I show it to my web guys and ask them if any of this is impossible or if there’s a better way. They usually say “No” – and I begin writing copy.

Dale: In your opinion, what technology has changed Internet Marketing the most over the last 5 years?

Clayton: Spam laws, spam filters and that kind of stuff completely redefined how we communicate with prospects and customers. They’ve made the entire e-mail marketing process far more difficult than it was five years ago.

Imagine what would happen if those kinds of obstacles were presented to direct mail marketers!

What would the direct mail industry be like if the U.S. government made it a crime to mail a promotion to anyone who hadn’t asked for it …

… or if every Post Office had a gadget that re-routed everything that looked like an ad into a “Junk” file …

… or if everyone in America had mailboxes that automatically detected and incinerated direct mail advertising before you saw it?

It would kill the entire direct mail industry!

Well, that’s exactly what’s happened to e-mail marketing. And frankly, if e-mailing wasn’t so cheap, all these rules and regulations would have long ago killed e-mail as a viable marketing tool. Instead, they just placed massive limits on how quickly e-mail marketers can grow.

On the upside though, the advent of rich media – flash animation, streaming audio and video and new compression technology – have been a godsend for web marketers.

Flash banners still out-pull static banner ads by an astounding percentage. And the use of audio and video is revolutionizing how we promote and deliver our products.

Dale: What new technology do you see changing Internet Marketing over the next 5 years?

Clayton: If anyone tells you they know, they’re full of beans. The technology that drives the Internet changes so quickly and breakthroughs appear so abruptly, there’s simply no way to predict what’s going to happen 36 months from now – let alone five years.

However, I do believe the continued growth in the number of broadband Web users, combined with new audio and video compression technology, will be a biggie for many years to come.

Jump on iTunes and you’ll see what’s possible. I can download an entire album in high-quality stereo sound or an entire feature-length movie and load them onto my iPod Video in no time flat. Drop the old iPod into a cradle on my Harley and I’ve got 3,500 songs. Drop it in a cradle in my home theater and I have any movie I want any time I want.

We’re looking at using that kind of compression technology to deliver all kinds of innovative information and instructional products online in 2007 and beyond – and I’ll bet you a BUNCH of other online information publishers are doing the same.

As far as web sites are concerned, I believe all the spiders will increasingly follow the Google model, emphasizing content over meta tags. That means content will be king – and the folks who create that content – especially writers – stand to make a good living doing it.

It’s also clear that “WWW” really does stand for the “World-Wide Waste” of time – and that people love wasting time together – in communities.

Youtube.Com taught us that offering mindless, silly content and allowing visitors to interact can make you a billionaire.

I mean – have you ever been to YouTube? My god! I could feel my brain cells dying! No redeeming intellectual or social value whatsoever – just online exhibitionists doing the dumbest stuff imaginable. And frankly, when I visited some of the pages on MySpace.Com, they were every bit as vacuous.

To the bright marketer, there’s a huge lesson there: Want to throw a site together and sell it to Google in a year or so for one-point-three BILLION dollars?

It’s simple: Just recognize just how freaking bored and lonely Internet users are – and build your site around that!

Dale: What person has influenced you the most in your lifetime, and how?

Clayton: My mom, who taught me that the only way to get anything from Dad was to show him how it would make his life better … My dad, who introduced me to Austrian economics when I was 12 … Mike Engler, who dumped a stack of The Masters’ books on my desk and nagged me until I had read every one of them …

… Gary Bencivenga, whose timeless direct mail promotions were my continuing education in the ‘70s, ‘80s and 90s’ – and whose friendship and selflessness in teaching inspire me today … Bob King, former president of Phillips Publishing, who taught me that the only successful salespeople are those who bring real value to their customers’ lives … Martin Weiss, who taught me that honesty, integrity and hard work are the only real keys to success …

… and of course Wendy, my wife, who taught me that every day is a new beginning and that anything’s possible when someone believes in you.

Dale: If you could give my readers one piece of advice, what would it be?

Clayton: Never give up. Success is going from one failure to the next without loss of enthusiasm.

Learn everything you can from each failure, adapt, and press on. And when success is yours, never forget the bad times. Remembering them keeps you thankful and humble.

Dale: Thank you very much, Clayton. I appreciate you taking the time to do this interview.

Clayton: It’s been fun, Dale – hope it helps.

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

Looking for resources related to this article? Try some of these.

Looking for more of Clayton's articles? Check these out.

Looking for past issues of The Total Package? Click here for our archives.

---

No Comments »

No comments yet.