Carl_G_Interview

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Carl Gallette Interview

You can't hire Carl today to write copy for you. Why? because any smart copywriter knows you can make a whole lot more writing copy for your own products then you can for clients. It's been said if you can hire a copywriter, they probably aren't that good. Carl Galletti has risen to the top of the world of direct-response advertising and is now considered by many to be one of the best freelance copywriters and marketing experts in the world. I had the pleasure of interviewing Carl and I can attest that he is unique as a copywriter because of his vast marketing skills.

Many of the top direct response advertisers used Carl to write advertising copy for them including Gary Halbert, author of The Gary Halbert Letter. Here is what Gary says about Carl..

"Carl Galletti is, perhaps, the most serious student of the masters of marketing I've ever encountered. "How good is he? Well, to give you a clue, Carl has written several direct mail sales letters for Jay Abraham. Jay Abraham is considered to be the top marketing consultant in the country. Jay charges $5000 per hour for his telephone consultations and his seminars cost as much as $20,000 for five days.

Carl's client list is diverse. He has worked with authors, professional speakers, publishers, computer companies, contractors, executive search firms, printers, training organizations, jewelry manufacturers, schools, health technology firms, and the American Red Cross.

Anyone who is serious about learning copywriting and marketing can benefit from Carl's advice. This interview will take you on a guided tour from the days when Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert were just getting started. You'll hear stories about the great Robert Alan, John Childers, Gary Halbert, Jay Abraham, Brian Keith Voiles, Ted Thomas and many others. Carl knew them all because he was there from the start. This is a fast paced jam-packed intensive 111 minute interview. It's split into three easy to listen to parts. You can gain 25 years of copywriting and marketing experience in less time then watching two episodes of Survivor. If you truly want to learn how to sell more, sell faster, write better copy (that brings in the money), and market your product smarter, you need to listen to every word in this exclusive interview with Carl Galletti. Please note that in part one of this recording it's a bit hard to hear. But it clears up in part's two and three.

		PDF transcripts	download part 1 mp3
			download part 2 mp3
			download part 3 mp3

Michael: Tell me, what are you finding from your experience today that people really want to know how to do that you can give them some ideas that will help them?

Carl: I think people want to make money and be independent. They want to be independently wealthy -- meaning that they have the freedom to work on their own without having a boss over them who knows less than they do. If they want to go to a movie in the afternoon or to their child’s play in the afternoon that they can do that. If they want to spend time with their family during the afternoon when it’s nice as opposed to only seeing them in the evening when it’s dark and no time left to do any real thing like that. They want to have freedom, the freedom of choice and they want to be able to make good money at the same time.

[Music]

Carl Galletti has risen to the top of the world of direct-response advertising and is now considered by many to be one of the best freelance copywriters and marketing experts in the world. I had the pleasure of interviewing Carl and I can attest that he is unique as a copywriter because of his vast marketing skills.

Many of the top people in direct response advertising use Carl to write advertising copy for them including Gary Halbert, author of The Gary Halbert Letter. Here is what Gary says about Carl.

"Carl Galletti is, perhaps, the most serious student of the masters of marketing I've ever encountered. "How good is he? Well, to give you a clue, Carl has written several direct mail sales letters for Jay Abraham. Jay Abraham is considered to be the top marketing consultant in the country. Jay charges $5000 per hour for his telephone consultations and his seminars cost as much as $20,000 for five days.

Carl's client list is diverse. He has worked with authors, professional speakers, publishers, computer companies, contractors, executive search firms, printers, training organizations, jewelry manufacturers, schools, health technology firms, and the American Red Cross.

Anyone who is serious about learning copywriting and marketing can benefit from Carl's advice. This intensive 111 minute interview is split into three easy to listen to parts. Now you can gain 25 years of copywriting and marketing experience in only 111 minutes. If you want to learn how to sell more faster, write copy that brings in the money and market your product by the truckloads, you need to devour every word in this exclusive interview with Carl Galletti. Only found here at Michael Senoff's http://www.hardtofindseminars.com Enjoy

Michael: Where were you born?

Carl: I was born in Trenton, New Jersey.

Michael: Do you have brothers and sisters?

Carl: No. I’m an only child.

Michael: What did your parents do?

Carl: My father was a truck driver and my mother worked in a factory, General Motors factory. They were basically uneducated. I think my father went up sixth grade or something. He didn’t even go to junior high school. I think my mother might have even gone to ninth grade or something.

Michael: Was he on the road at lot?

Carl: No, he mostly did local stuff. So, he was very seldom gone for more than a day.

Michael: Were you entrepreneurial as a kid?

Carl: As far as I can remember, I was. I loved technical stuff and electronics when I was about 12 years old; I got my ham radio license. This was odd because at school I’d failed English twice and was getting “Bs” in most of my other subjects and here I was passing a Federal Communications examination that I personally knew people who were 21 and older who were failing it. And it had trigonometry and advanced electronics. That’s because I’m oriented toward things that interest me and I kind of let everything else go by the wayside so to speak. So, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about my teachers in that particular grade, but the very next year I go straight “As,” so it depends on whether I’m interested in it or not. I built my own transmitters and receivers and antennas and all sorts of other…

Michael: So, what the real appeal with that?

Carl: The real appeal is the fact that here you are, you can communicate all around the world either by voice or Morse Code. So, here I was in my little room here in Trenton, New Jersey communicating all around the world.

Michael: Were you doing Morse code?

Carl: Yes, primarily because I didn’t really have enough room for a really good antenna, but I did have a friend of mine who was about a year younger than me and we both got our licenses about the same time and kind of ran into each other on the air.

Michael: Did you do any other entrepreneurial ventures? Did you ever sell anything?

Carl: Yes, I was always looking for something to do. I got those printing catalogs where you’d go around selling printing. I signed up for selling pots and pans door to door, but I never actually did it. I was too young. My mother said you’re not going around selling door to door.

Michael: Looking back on it, were you influenced by some of the ads in the back of the magazines?

Carl: I used to read magazines primarily for the ads. To me that was the exciting part of the magazines just because you got to find out all the stuff that was going on. And I learned more from reading ads than I did reading the rest of the magazine.

Michael: Did you order stuff through the mail?

Carl: Yes, occasionally I did. I didn’t have a lot of money as a kid, which probably is why I was so entrepreneurial oriented. I always wanted to know, okay, how can I make more money here. At 12 years old, you don’t have much money and I lusted after all of this expensive ham radio equipment that I couldn’t have. To some degree, it was sated by the fact that my friend had this equipment. So, I’d go over his house and use his equipment and stuff. His father was a doctor, so he could buy virtually anything he wanted. We always did things entrepreneurial together and later, in fact, formed the first computer company that I formed.

Michael: Did you have a good time at college? Was it fun for you?

Carl: It was sort of fun. What appealed to me because I love learning, but I just couldn’t stand being in a classroom; just a regimented, spit back to me what I want you to spit back to me on my exam. And then playing this game of guess what we’re going to put on the exam kind of a thing. To me that just seemed to be a waste of time. I actually did want to be an electronics engineer. The real reason why I wanted to be an electronics engineers is because I wanted to design things so that I could them. My thing was entrepreneurial. I can remember going through Popular Electronics magazines, figuring out what the prices I could get these different parts for so that I could build this thing at a wholesale level and then sell it for a profit.

Michael: What happened next and let’s get into your first experience with all this copywriting?

Carl: Way back in 1964, I had read David Ogilvy’s book Confessions of An Advertising Man and got the advertising bug and started this little ad company one summer as a summer job. But what happened is one summer I didn’t have a summer job, so I decided to sell advertising. So, I came up with this idea to sell advertising on book covers, and sent out this letter to universities offering to give them free book covers with advertising on it. I sent out 100 letters and got four universities to sign up with it. So, that was a four percent response. I was ecstatic. And then I was working for a computer company doing programming. So, I was the 13 th employee. It was real small at the time. That branch later became the basis for Exxon office systems. Somewhere along the line there, I started working for another company called Princeton Consultants. About that time I was interested in seminars and I had an idea that there’s a lot of money being spent on seminars and I’d learned a lot from seminars. So, I’d gone to some real estate seminars. I’d gone to some computer seminars. Nothing marketing related, but I said there are a lot of people here spending money; where’s all the money going. I found out what it would cost to rent a place. That’s part of the money, but not the biggest chunk. And then getting speakers, that’s not the biggest chunk either, but it’s part of it. The biggest chunk is in promoting the seminar. So, I decided I needed to know as much about promoting as possible in order to make this doable. So, I began getting interested in that.

Michael: You want to start somewhat of a sales seminar or a seminar business.

Carl: Exactly. I knew that it was a great to learn stuff.

Michael: What year are you at right now?

Carl: We’re in the 80s. We’re about ’87.

Michael: That’s when I first started seeing you in the Gary Halpert seminars, in ’89 and ’88.

Carl: Right, exactly. And so what happened was that I started studying more about copywriting and marketing and stuff. And I had Entrepreneur Magazine, which I’d read religiously. And I always wanted to get these books they had that would tell you how to start all these businesses and stuff. So, I was looking in there and I decided I’m going to get some of these things. I’m going to get the one on seminars. I’m going to get the one -- various other things, I forget what it was. So, I called up to order these things and it turned out that what I wanted to order was almost as much as some special package they had. So, they up sold me to this special package, which is really a good deal because it gave me everything I wanted plus a heck of a lot more for not too much more money. But it was an up sell, and that up sell was designed by Jay Abraham. And as a result of that…

Michael: Do you think that up sell was specifically designed by him for Entrepreneur at that time?

Carl:

Michael: Yes, he did that for Entrepreneur at the time. He was the guy who said take all this information you’ve got in reports and put them into these packages and then up sell them on the telephone. So, I was one of those upsellees and I’m thankful that I was because if I hadn’t done that, I probably wouldn’t have been on the list that Jay Abraham sent out his first promotion for his first newsletter, which was Your Marketing Genius at Work. And I’m sitting there saying $500 for a newsletter. I never spent that much for a newsletter. You paid your $500 up front and got it over 12 months. You go that sales letter in the mail?

Carl: Right, and the reason is because I had bought this entrepreneurial package. And so, in one of the things that I read, I read this really great guy’s letter to his son teaching him about marketing. I said this guy is great. By the way, in the beginning I said if I’m going to pay $500 for this, I want to know everything this guy tells me. If he mentions a book, I’m going out and getting it. I’m going to read it. The thing I was impressed with most about Jay was his getting $2,000 an hour for a consultation on the telephone at time. And I said if he can do that, I want to know everything he knows. So, I said I’m going to find out all the books he reads. Whatever he mentions, I’m going to get them. So, he started mentioning some books and I’d go around and call up all over the country trying to get them. They weren’t in the bookstores, so you kind of special ordered and all this good stuff. Some of them were out of print, etc. So, this one guy I had read, I said I really need to call Jay’s office and ask who this guy is because he didn’t say. And within two or three days I get this letter from him. It’s Gary Halpert and he starting his first newsletter. I called up immediately, I said that’s the guy and I knew it was him because he had mentioned the ___ promotion. The reason it’s called Boron is because it’s written from Boron President. The Boron letters were in edited form in Jay’s American Genius at Work, but he didn’t mention who it was, but the Boron letters mentioned the ___ ad. The promotion I got for Gary’s newsletter mention it right on the first page mention the ___ ad, so I put it together. I called up immediately and ordered and Paulette who was his girlfriend at the time answered the phone and signed me up. And later I found out, she said, you were one of our first people. I said yes, I knew exactly who it was and I wanted that good information. So, whenever Jay or Gary would mention a book, I’d go out and I’d track it down. And one of the books they mentioned was the Robert Collier letter book, which was out of print and you could not get it anywhere. So, I devised a system. I went through inter-library loan. I got to be an expert at getting things from inter-library loan. At the time they had a computer system set up where they could find the book in other libraries and order, get it in, and I could take it out for a couple of weeks. And what I’d do is I’d take it out and I’d Xerox it and give it back them and I’d have a Xerox copy for myself. When I got the Robert Collier letter book, it was so great I said I need to get the reprint rights to this. So, I contacted Prentice Hall, got the reprint rights to it and reprinted it.

Michael: Tell me specifically how that process worked. You wanted to get the reprint rights to it…

Carl: I called the company and I actually got lucky because the person I was put together with was preparing to leave the company. I didn’t know what I was doing and I said how does this work. I don’t know. Can you tell me? So, she kind of took pity on me and she gave me the inside information and she said look, here’s what the normal deal is. And so, we did the thing. I had to give them some money up front.

Michael: How much?

Carl: I think I to give them $500 up front and another $500 when I published the book. This is an advance against royalties. But I didn’t know how much royalty I’d have to pay. I forget, I think it was something like 7 ½-8% or whatever.

Michael: Of whatever you sold?

Carl: Yes, the selling price.

Michael: Is this how it probably still works today?

Carl: I know a lot more about it now. You could probably negotiate something between five and ten percent. It depends on the publisher and the book and stuff like that.

Michael: Give me an example. If I wanted to call a publisher and I was interested in -- let’s say I went on Amazon.com. I found a book that’s out of print. Got the publisher. I’d call him up. What would be the best thing to say? How to approach them?

Carl: First you have to find out whether they have any intentions of publishing it again. If they don’t, then you can negotiate something with them. If they do, then it’s going to be real difficult because they’ve already got plans. You’re going to have a deal that’s so lucrative that they’re going to put their plans on hold, which is not an impossibility because they’re always looking for better ways to use their money. They usually don’t republish backlist stuff. Backlist is stuff that they’ve already promoted. The way book companies work now a days is because of the tax laws -- and I know this guy Don Lancaster who has go like 28 books published says that the IRS is responsible for burning more books than Hitler ever did. Because of the structure of the tax laws, it makes more sense for them to destroy the books at the end of the year than to carry them over and pay taxes on them because they have to pay taxes on the full retail value of them. It only costs them five or ten percent of the retail, so the taxes end up being more than the cost to print the book. What this gal informed me of is at the time, we’re talking about the late 80’s I think, $1,000 was a typical up front royalty fee and you paid half on signing the contract and the other half when you actually printed the book; when it was actually published. And then, of course, you had to make royalty payments if the royalty went above $1,000. So, you do that and then you negotiate what the royalty payment is. And that can be anything from five to ten percent. Sometimes it’s also whether it’s based on the retail price or the wholesale price. But the publishers are not stupid. They do this themselves. They’d rather have it based on the retail price to get as much as they can. And then they negotiate for the author. They have an arrangement with the authors.

Michael: All right. So, you negotiated the Robert Collier letter book?

Carl: Right. And got that printed and start selling that because you couldn’t get it anywhere. And very few people knew to get it through inter-library loan. And if anybody knew about that, then those copies would be in constant circulation.

Michael: Were you the guy really responsible for kind of brining Robert Collier back?

Carl: Yes, definitely because before that people couldn’t get a hold of the book. Jay and Gary would say you got to get the Robert Collier letter book no matter what you do. Go to the Library of Congress and take it out. Well, who is going to go to the Library of Congress in Washington and take it out and read the book? That’s an expensive proposition. So, reprinting the book was a real service.

Michael: That was the first one you got the reprint rights to?

Carl: Yes.

Michael: I know that you were selling them. You had gotten in with Jay or Gary Halpert where you were a source for hard to find books.

Carl: Yes and they’d refer people to me to buy the Robert Collier letter book. And when people would call, I’d say, by the way, are you looking for any of those other books they’re recommending? Most of them weren’t out of print, but they were hard to get. So, I’d contact the distributor and buy them at wholesale and resell them.

Michael: So, you had a little hard to find book business.

Carl: Exactly.

Michael: So, you ___ to devour everything in that Marketing Genius at Work?

Carl: Right.

Michael: So, you devoured that. Now you’re on Gary Halpert’s newsletter. Had you gone to any other seminars yet?

Carl: I had gone to one of Jay’s $5,000 seminars that was in New Jersey for coin dealers.

Michael: The coin dealer boot camp?

Carl: Right. I started doing some copywriting at time and was getting good because I was listening to what Jay and Gary were talking about and I’d been to seminars. I was kind of pretty smart on the subject. I was reading everything in Gary’s newsletter and I’m storing this. I’m reading Claude Hopkins and Robert Collier. So, I was kind of learning the best read copywriters at the time and doing fairly well. So, Gary had this $7,000 college of millionaires, he called it. And it was the first one. He sent it out to his list and I got it and I said gee, I can’t afford $7,000.

Michael: Do you know if that was first seminar that he did?

Carl: Yes, it was the first seminar that he did since starting his newsletter and I think it was the first marketing seminar he ever did. No, I could be wrong about that. He might have done some others before that. He did something in Spokane and I’m not sure what the timing was on that.

Michael: The marketing revolution with Mark Stoddard.

Carl: Yes, he was doing stuff at the Jefferson Institute. He was doing Jay Abraham, Ted Thomas. Ted Thomas used to buy Robert Collier letter books from me all the time. He’d be doing these Jefferson Institute things for $5,000 a piece and he’d give people a Robert Collier letter book with it.

Michael: How many of these books did you sell at the time, hundreds of them?

Carl: No, it was good steady business, but I forget how many years I was selling them. I think I just sold about a couple thousand copies.

Michael: They put you in contact, though.

Carl: That’s the biggest thing because it put me in contact with people and I’d have really good conversation because it got me on the phone and I just never stopped talking. Jay’s people would call me and Gary’s people would call me. I’d get to know all of these people.

Michael: Let’s go back to you got the newsletter from Gary Halpert $7.000 seminar.

Carl: He mentions in this thing that’s he going to have copywriters there. So, I said let me promote myself as a copywriter. So, I wrote him this letter that basically was like a sales letter selling him the idea of using me as one of those copywriters. And lo and behold, he hired me to be one of the copywriters at the seminar and that was in Key West. That’s where I met Ken Kerr and a number of other people. What he had was he did that thing and he had copywriters assigned to different people. He’d do hot seats, which were you’d get one of the attendees who paid $7,000 up and he’d describe what their business was, what he was doing, and then he’d come up with this dynamite headline and concept. And then the copywriter who is assigned to that person would then go off and actually execute the copy for it. It was excellent. Obviously the people that were paying $7,000 were not newbies. These are people who had some money to spend.

Michael: So, that was your first ___. Did he pay you to come down there and do it?

Carl: He paid our expenses. He didn’t pay us beyond that, no, but we kind of got the seminar for free. We got client work out of it because we got to be known amongst the attendees. So, we got some client work out the thing. In fact, one of the things, there was a guy there, he and his wife were doing a how to pick up girls kind of a book. I had also made friends with Paul Hartunian who had a similar type book and the other guy Ross Jeffries who had a seduction book. I was talking to Ross Jeffries on the phone one day and he said he’s going on Donahue, so I quickly called up Paul Hartunian and this other guy and said this guy is going to be on Donahue, maybe you should call and see if you can get on too. So, Paul got on and this other couple got on as well.

Michael: Do you know what happened as a result of being on Donahue as far as sales of their books?

Carl: Ross Jeffries in business. He’s like the number one how to pick up women bookseller today.

Michael: Sells thousands of his books as a result from Donahue -- that one show.

Carl: From the one shot I don’t know what the figures were off of Donahue, but it launched his career. As far as Paul is concerned, he was coming out with his book at the time and I actually did the book design and typesetting on it. Paul was considering coming out with it in a small format like 6 x 9 and I said are you going to sell this through the bookstore or through mail. He said no through mail. I said if I get something through the mail for $14.95, I want it to be big. I don’t want it to be small. First of all, I suggest selling it for $20, like $19.95 and second of all make it 8 ½ x 11 format because when they get it in the mail it’ll be bigger and it doesn’t cost much more because of the form factor. He said it won’t have very many pages then. I said, well I’ll design it for you. It’ll have enough pages in it. It had like 80 when I started and by the time we got finished, we added some things to it, made the type nice and big, proper spacing in there and got it up to about 120 pages or so.

Michael: Do you think it’s important to beef up a book like that when you’re selling it through the mail?

Carl: Yes, it’s better to put more information in, but Paul had good information already and it was sufficient information. But when someone receives something in the mail, they want to see some substance to it especially if they pay some good money for it. So, he made in that form factor and insistently every year since then sells about 15,000 copies of it at $20 a piece.

Michael: So, at this time were you seriously devouring Robert Collier, Claude Hopkins, and anyone else you could find?

Carl: Yes. I picked up this thing called News Track Advertising Classics, which was the only thing I could find on the marketing classics that was on tape and I used to listen to that over and over again.

Michael: That Jay Abraham had the rights to?

Carl: Not at the time -- no. It was put out by a company called News Track.

Michael: Did you buy the rights to that?

Carl: I didn’t buy the rights to that, but I was buying them through News Track until they went out of business and then they sold it to Jay and I was getting them from Jay after that.

Michael: That was one of the first things I got.

Carl: We still sell it.

Michael: What are you doing for a living right now at this time? Are you still working?

Carl: I was writing copy at this time. When I got Jay’s first newsletter, the Marketing Genius at Work, I went in a quit because I was so excited about the possibilities that I could do with this marketing thing and they thought I was lying to them. They thought I had another job and didn’t want to tell them. And I said no. And then they thought, well maybe you just don’t like working for us and I said no I like you guys. Do you not like the work? How about the pay? We can probably give you more in a few months when things get going better. And I said no, the pay is fine. You guys are fine. I like the work, but I’m just really fired up passion about this marketing stuff and I want to give it a shot. They thought I was crazy, of course. My wife had thought I’d gotten fired and just didn’t want to tell her. I made that bold leap. I read about -- who is the guy, Alexander the Great who burned his ships behind him or somebody else -- so I was burning my ships behind me. I quit the job. Didn’t have anything to go to; just going to make this marketing thing work. So, there I was.

Michael: Were you getting some copywriting clients?

Carl: Actually the company I’d worked for hired me a few months later to write copy for them. I wrote a kick-butt Yellow Pages ad for them that like tripled their business.

Michael: Were you using some of the techniques you learned from Jay Abraham as far as asking for…

Carl: Yes, everything I learned from Jay Abraham, Gary Halpert, Claude Hopkins, Robert Collier, John Caples, David Ogilvy, Lester Wunderman, Elmer Wheeler; a whole bunch of those guys. Max Sackheim, Vic Schwab. John Caples knew Ogilvy. They knew each other. Robert Collier pre-dates these guys and post-dates Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins, Albert Lasker and John Kennedy knew each other.

Michael: Out of all these guys, who really impacted you the most -- any one person?

Carl: It’s hard to say. I’d have to mention a few people. Certainly Claude Hopkins was a major factor. He’s one of the big guys. Robert Collier is another one. John Caples, David Ogilvy, John E. Kennedy absolutely. I consider John E. Kennedy, Albert Lasker, and Claude Hopkins to be kind of one guy. They’re almost one guy. I consider them altogether. Robert Collier is by himself. John Caples by himself.

Michael: Was Robert Collier an entrepreneur working for himself or was he a copywriter working for a company?

Carl: He was mostly a copywriter working for a company. He later on did some things. He did do a lot of entrepreneurial stuff especially in publishing, but it was outside of the realm of marketing and copywriting. He actually did a lot of spirituality-based stuff.

Michael: You’re __ in copywriting, you’re studying all the master, you have attended a first Gary Halpert seminar, you’re meeting people who are interested in this type of material, you’re now doing freelance copywriting; what were you charging at that time for your copywriting services?

Carl: I think it was somewhere between $5,000 and $6,500 per a typical direct mail response letter. How I came up with that rate is there was this publication that showed the rates of all these different copywriters and I kind of averaged them all out and they averaged out to $5,500.

Michael: What was the publication? Who’s Charging What?

Carl: It was put out by Denny Hatch. I basically take the median range and that’s based on a typical direct mail response letter, which is typically eight pages.

Michael: Tell me some stories about successes that you’ve had with your clients as a result of your skill as a copywriter and what that could mean for a business? Can you illustrate some stories that really stick out in your head or your copywriting really produced some great results?

Carl: I told you about the Princeton Consultant hiring me back right in the beginning. There was another client, All American Collectibles. We just send out a mailing promoting these collectible lithographs that were hand signed by famous sports figures and things like that. I wrote a letter for T1 for Joe DiMaggio. We sold millions of dollars worth of those things. I think we sold millions of dollars each mailing and I did probably a dozen mailings.

Michael: How did you meet this client?

Carl: We actually had met personally at a Jay Abraham seminar. We had exchanged cards, but nothing happened right away. They contacted me later on and they were interested in doing something. So, we started up something.

Michael: So, they were sold primarily through direct mail?

Carl: Yes. They did some advertising to get leads. They had a whole phone room that would close them once they called in, but they chiefly responded to people through direct mail. They got leads from ads and then they had their mailing list that they would send out to buyers and people who were interested. That was all direct mail.

Michael: Now, at this time was this one of your first clients, as a result of your copy, you made some serious money for them? Was this one of your bigger first earlier clients that you made a lot of money for through your copy?

Carl: I’m not sure how early it was. It took place over a number of years. I can’t even quite say how many years because I’m not sure. It was a bunch of years; three or four for them and then a little while later do some more for them.

Michael: You’re studying this stuff and you’re reading, but actually seeing the results in a letter is something different. At what point did it really click that you said my God this is incredible what words on paper can do. Any one particular project?

Carl: Yes, actually it was one of my own projects. Actually a series of things. Here’s the genesis of this thing. I had -- Ted Thomas got this idea for doing a seminar and it’s called the information marketing super conference as opposed to the Internet marketing, which is my seminar. His would be information marketing super conference in Los Vegas. He tried to get that thing going, but wasn’t successful. I was one of the speakers. It wasn’t successful because the speakers didn’t promote it to their list. So, I was talking to him about it one night and said what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to give them a sales letter to send out and if they want to modify it or write their own that’s fine. But a lot of them are too darn busy to do that. They’re just going to take your sales letter, reproduce it, and send it out. So, he hired me to write the sales letter for that seminar. And we go back to why did I get involved in copywriting and marketing? Why was I interested in the first place? It’s to sell seminars. So, this in essence was my first opportunity to do that. I wrote a letter. He sent it out to all the speakers. We sent it out. We got 550 people to the seminar.

Michael: Was this the first one he did?

Carl: Yes. He doesn’t do information marketing anymore and he did foreclosures and tax lien and tax lien is the primary one that he does now.

Michael: The reason I’m asking is when I interviewed Brian Keith Voiles; he says he wrote a letter…

Carl: He did the second one.

Michael: He did the second one, got you. So, you did the first one and you filled the room with 500 people.

Carl: Yes.

Michael: Was that mainly from the speakers sending out the letter to their customers?

Carl: That was all of it.

Michael: That was all of it. It wasn’t any cold direct mail to any list that had never really heard about information marketing?

Carl: I don’t think so. I’m not sure actually who he gave the thing to, but my understanding was he primarily gave it to the speakers. So, that was one early one thing. Here’s an interesting thing that happened at the seminar. I presenting on stage there and I was talking pretty much about info-preneuring and licensing and things like that. Well, I come off the stage and who comes up to me but Robert Allen and he shakes hands. He says I want to shake your hand. That was the best presentation that I’ve seen today. And I said thank you very much. I noticed his tag and it said Robert Allen and I was almost going to say are you the Robert Allen because I wasn’t sure. It’s a fairly common name. He was the Robert Allen. I was pretty impressed by that. And later on he came up to me and he said I noticed you used a pen on your overhead slides. We were using overhead slides in those days. There weren’t any LCD projectors. And he said do you mind if I borrow that. I said sure. He says now I may use all the ink in it. I say use all the ink in it; how are you going to do that? I said well, I’ve got extra ones; it doesn’t matter. What are you going to do with it? He says to sign these dollar bills. He had a stack of dollar bills and he’s signing his name on each one of them. And I said why are you doing that? HeCarl: Yes. inglliance -- he was t hn Childers on a lot of this stuff and other people that John Childers was one of the people who works for him.

Michael: John Childers did a lot of training for him. Has John Childers been around that long?

Carl: He worked with him in creating these presentations. And he still does today. He speaks at round robin events. I really didn’t know who John Childers was at the time anyway. So, I watched it and I was totally amazed because by the end of his talk, he had people running up to him, like hoards of people running up to sign up for this $2,000 wealth retreat program. The long and short of it is he’s holding these regularly and we’re talking on the phone and he invites me to come out and do part of the presentation. Actually Ken Kerr and I. I went out there and I did a presentation on copywriting and marketing and info-preneuring and licensing and things like that. And I did this one segment. He lets you do a pitch at the end of one of your segments. So, I did this one hour talk and at the end of the hour talk, it was about licensing, the day before I’d given him two letters and I said read these two because we’re going to use this tomorrow when we talk about licensing. I’m going to show you how this works. So, I did at the end of my presentation, I said if you’re interested in this deal, I’ve got a special deal for you today. I’ll give you two years of license for free if you buy my copywriter protégé program, which we didn’t talk about how that started, but we’ll backtrack that. So, at the end of this thing, I’ll go over to the table. There were about 30 buying units in the room. By buying units I mean if a husband and wife are together is one

buying unit, speakers, and stuff like that in audience, so probably maybe about 50 or 60 people, but about 30 buying units. I sold about 18 right then and there. And it added up to about $15,900 in order that I booked after an hour talk.

Michael: Did you use some of the stuff you heard from Robert Allen or you just did your own thing?

Carl: What I used was my copy. See, what I had given them was I had given them the sales letters to read the day before. And I just used my copy as an example of explaining licensing to them because one of the sales letters sold a license to my marketing made easy workshop, which is a product I had created. So, that was something that I said wow, yes, this copy really does work. The other thing was I copywriter a protégé program.

Michael: When did you develop that?

Carl: 1992. And what it was, there was this guy by the named Lawrence Tabak. Did you know Lawrence?

Michael: I didn’t know him personally. I know the name, his book.

Carl: He had a book called How to Fatten Your Wallet.

Michael: Yes, I’ve got it.

Carl: And basically it was a knock off of Gary Halpert’s How to Make __ in Minimum Time, but in Lawrence’s own style. It wasn’t any plagiarism or anything. He just did a similar kind of book on marketing and copywriting, but in his own style. He sold it through magazines and he sold a ton of thee things. And at the back of the book he had an offer. It was a consulting thing and he said unlimited consulting. Call me whenever you want to, $695. Well, I’m saying to myself how could he possible make that thing work?

Michael: Unlimited…say it again.

Carl: Unlimited consulting is a program. I forget what he called the program. When you sign up for it for $695 you got to call him up. He had some control on it. He had a secretary, so you couldn’t just call him up and spend all your time on the phone with him. But he had a secretary that was screening calls and would set up a time and you had a few minutes with him, but you had no limit on how much you could do this.

Michael: And this offer is in the back of the book?

Carl: Right. And I said you must be tied down and doing a lot of that stuff. And I got to thinking I’d like to do something like that for copywriting because I was thinking about creating a program. I said people would call me, Jay Abraham’s people and Gary Halpert’s people and, of course, now Lawrence Tabak’s people would be calling me because one of the things he did in his book he listed three books they had to get and he said here’s the easiest way to get them, call Carl Galletti and my phone number. So, I was thinking of coming up with my own product, I need to be making some money here. I’m spending a lot of time on the phone talking to people and that’s wasted time. I don’t make any money on that. I need to figure a way to get paid for it. Well, Jay had had this protégé program and that wasn’t what I was going to do, but I like to the name copywriter protégé program, but the reason I came up with copywriting is whenever someone would call for the Robert Collier letter book or one of the other books, sometimes they’d say, what book do you recommend first. I always thought it was a silly question because in my experience of all the people that I’ve every dealt with, the people who are most successful didn’t call up and ask for which one book would you recommend; they got them all. They got as many as they could, at least. And they owned a lot of them. So, if they asked for one that shows me you’re probably not going to be successful. You’re going to give it a try, but eventually you’re going to have to wake and smell the coffee. When someone would say what book or books do you recommend, I’d say well it all depends on what you’re doing. So, what is it you want to know how to do? Well, the number one answer was they wanted to write copy. So, I decided, well what really helped me kind of jump start my copywriting ability is when I got good enough to be able to work another copywriter; we’d critique each other’s stuff. That’s when I found most of the jump to light speed so to speak.

Michael: Who did you do that with?

Carl: Loretta Duffy, another one of Gary’s ex-girlfriends. We met each other at his seminar. She was a copywriter at that point and still is. So, we’d trade off and she’d critique my stuff and I’d critique hers. I worked with some other people like Ken Kerr and Brad Peterson. So, I just said this is valuable. I’m going to set up a protégé coaching program. Now, the reason coaching is because I’d worked with Rob Gilbert who is also a friend and introduced me to Paul Hartunian. And Rob coached me for about a year without me

Here's a quick and easy way you can get into the marketing consulting business. Work part time from home. Help businesses make more money. Listen to hours of free interviews, case studies and how to consultant training at http://www.hardtofindseminars.com/consulting.htm even knowing it. He was on sabbatical and what he used to do --he’s a university professor and he did paid speaking, but what he’d do is he’d call me every day and we’d talk. And I thought we were just chatting and I later on realized that he was coaching me.

Michael: His name is Rob Gilbert.

Carl: From that I learned what coaching was all about and how to do it. So, I figured why not a coaching program around copywriting because the thing that accelerated my progress most is working with another copywriter. But most copywriters are too busy to give newbies the time of day and help them out. So, I said I’ll be one of those people who is willing to do that. So, I created the copywriter protégé program and I wrote this sales letter. It was about 30 pages long. I sent it to Loretta and I asked for her critique on it. And she sent it back to be and said this is really a great idea. Oh one thing, I’ve got to connect Lawrence Tabak with this thing. I knew that Lawrence Tabak was charging $695 at the time. I also knew because he had called me up. I wasn’t in the first book. He asked if he could put my name in the second book to refer people to buy books from me. I said yes, sure. Then I started talking to him about how can you do this for $695 and he said I’m raising it to $1,995. He raised it to $1,995. But before that, I knew he was doing it successfully because when I was at the Gary Halpert seminar and I met Loretta Duffy, she had been to a previous seminar with Lawrence and she had asked him about that. And I said how does he do that and she says he says that most of the calls he gets is in the first two or three months because he offered a yearlong program.

Michael: Right. I’m only in it for a year.

Carl: So, I said okay. So, I was going to offer mine for $1,000. This is before I think I found out he raised it to $1,995.

Michael: Your letter was initially just for coaching. Did you have the videotapes of your copywriting seminar?

Carl: No.

Michael: This is just a coach program on copywriting.

Carl: Right. They had to call me up once or twice a week, give them stuff to do. I didn’t even send them anything in the mail, but I put together a little package of things because I felt this is the start of something and I’ll add it to it as I went along. I sent the letter to Loretta. She said it’s a great letter. She said but I think you’re not charging enough for it. What do you mean, isn’t $1,000 enough? She said no. You’ll be able to get at least $2,000 for this. I put the price at $1,995 and I sent the letter. I had 300 copies of the letter printed up. I distributed them in various different ways. I sent some to people who bought books from me. I handed out some at a seminar. After I got done distributing the first 300 copies, I had 18 people sign up.

Michael:That’s incredible.

Carl: And do you know what the number one comment was?

Michael:What?

Carl: Why is it so cheap?

Michael:Unbelievable.

Carl: It was really because here I am for $2,000 training you to write a sales letter that you go out and now get $6,500 each.

Michael: Yes, absolutely. Is that letter anywhere on your site?

Carl: On my website. What happened is, two years after I started the program I pretty much knew what people needed to know. So, what I did is I sent out a promotion to my list -- at the time you had to do it with mail, of course and got 25 people to the seminar. It was a four-day seminar. I had it video taped and audiotaped. So, we recorded the whole thing and that became the bulk of the product. After that when people would buy the program, I’d say, listen, what you do is you go through the videos because all of the questions I think you’re going to need answered are on there and then at the end we’ll do critiques and follow ups and stuff. And if you ask any questions, I’d give a yearlong thing; the same thing, call me up any time you want for a yearlong. And it worked like a charm. Actually I put more printed material in there. I had audios. Altogether the package weight 35 pounds and when it would land on their doorstep, they’d say wow this is really something. Now, remember how we got the page count up for Paul Hartunian? You have to give people bulk so that they know that they’ve got something there. So, what they had was 25 hours of video. They had 25 hours of it on audiotape so they could listen to it in the car. And then they had another 25 hours of audio, which was not the protégé program, but t was other things; my marketing ___ workshop, which is a 12 hour workshop with hot seats and another 12 hour program, which was Paul Hartunian and Rob Gilbert and I did something called a wealth retreat roundtable and a couple of other tapes. So, we had 50 audiotapes, 25 videotapes an hour long each, and over a thousand pages of printed material.

Michael: Do you still sell this package?

Carl: Yes. It’s no longer $2,000 because my time is involved and it’s now $5,000. It’s still a bargain when you consider that nothing’s for sure and we want to do our FTC disclaimers and say nothing is for sure, but it’s probably the best way to get up to speed on being a copywriter where people pay you $6,500 and up. Even a rank, beginning copywriter charges no less than $2,000-$3,000 for a typical sales letter.

Michael: So, it not only teaches you the business of how to get clients.

Carl: Yes, there’s some of that in there and I used to do some of it by phone, anything that needed to be customized. The attitude I took is I tell them anything they needed to know, which included how to pick a product to sell, how to create the product, how to pick the mailing list, how to go about doing the mailing list. I’d cover the whole avenue, it wouldn’t be just copywriting. It depends on what they needed.

Michael: With the $5,000 package today, does that offer consulting where they can call you up?

Carl: Yes, exactly.

Michael: For a year?

Carl: Yes.

Michael: That’s exciting. Let’s talk about that. You have 18 buyers, so what happened out of those 18 people, how much time did it take on the phone with these? What was the experience with those 18 people?

Carl: I didn’t keep good track of how much time on a person, but some people would call and they would call for probably the first two or three months. Some people never called. They didn’t have any printed material to speak of. In the beginning, I had a little packet. Maybe it was about two inches worth of stuff just sample letters and things like that. A couple of people never called at all. But most people usually spent the first two or three months and I’d get them up to speed. They’d be happy with that. I’d critique their stuff. What I found is where the real high experience occurs is in the critique because that kind of customizes all the things they’ve learned and makes it concrete in their real life application. So, I’d always try to get people to have a real life application to write copy for. That was always the best thing if they had something like that. If they didn’t, then we’d create something.

Michael: This is your first major product.

Carl: It was my second one. The first one was my marketing made easy workshop. We’ll have to backtrack on that because one of my first things when I got all the Jay Abraham stuff and Gary Halpert and went to a Jay Abraham seminar, all that stuff linked up with this guy who had an ad agency on Madison Avenue; small little ad agency. He actually hired me as the Vice President of his ad agency and we did some projects together. One of the things that we did is a weekend retreat in Woodstock house up there and he kind of built a base of people he knew up there and had held one of the like learning annex type called Woodstock University. We did a class on marketing and I said why don’t we do it like a workshop on marketing. We’ll charge like $295 for a weekend. It actually was 12 hours. So, he said yes, we’ll do that. So, we did that and we had small workshops with 12 people or so from diverse businesses and industries -- everything from local to regional to national and international businesses. It covered product, businesses that sold products, businesses that sold services. Well represented in a full gamut. We did a hot seat with each one of them and did a make over. First we did a basic marketing, teach the marketing and then we did hot seats where they participated and found that it really worked because they came up with some really good ideas for people in the hot seat.

Michael: Did you tape that one?

Carl: Yes, that’s the marketing made easy, but only audio taped it. What I did was 12 hours there and then I put it together with about seven to nine manuals. It depends on how you count them. Some of them I wrote and some of them were classics like John E. Kennedy’s Reason Why Advertising, Robert Collier Million Dollar Sales Letters. It’s a collection of 15 sales letters. Those two are actually public domain things. I bought the John E. Kennedy stuff out of public domain. I was doing public domain back in 1989. I did one

call how to write million dollar sales letters where I took the sales letter that I did for my copywriter protégé program. I basically explained who the letter was put together and why it worked. So, the tapes were done before I had a copywriter protégé program, but the manuals were added to later and it was after I started the protégé program.

Michael: Give me another story about another client you wrote copy for because you started just doing copy for yourself that really did well.

Carl: They’re sort of all intermixed anyway.

Michael: Did you like writing for clients?

Carl: No, I hate writing for clients. They never want to do what you tell them to do. I remember this one guy; it was an interim client kind of a deal where he had a client that was a car dealer. He wanted me to write a letter for him. So, he really hyped me up and everything and I wrote this letter that was really pretty good, but from a car dealer’s point of view. This guy thought it stank. It was a piece of crap. He was giving me all this stuff and I said I don’t need this. Forget it. Don’t write him a letter. Don’t pay me. Don’t do anything. I don’t need this. It was a letter that probably would have worked real well for him, but it was beneath him to send out the letter.

Michael: Can you give me some names of some students that I may know of that you trained?

Carl: Well, I can tell you people who have my course. We can drop a few names there. Of course, Brian Keith Voiles, Kurt Christiansen.

Michael: Now, when Brian Keith Voiles came to you was he pretty new in the copywriting do you think?

Carl: Yes. When he came to me before that Ted Thomas seminar. He already knew me at that time. So, it was before then. And that was 1992 or 1994. It had to be after 1992 and before 1994. He was one of those first people. There’s Craig Hanes who owns TWI Press.

Michael: Craig Hanes is the owner?

Carl: Craig Hanes, yes. Bret Ridgeway runs the TWI Press portion. Recent guys that have gotten it are Brad Herman, the Affiliate Review; Yanik Silver has a version of it, Armand Morin, Alex Mandossian. Alex just wrote me a very nice testimonial.

Michael: And these are all guys who seriously want to learn copywriting?

Carl: Oh yes.

Michael: Bring me to the Internet.

Carl: Obviously I have a computer background, so it kind of made sense and I’d known about the Internet early on, too. It wasn’t called the Internet. It was called ___. I sort of knew about that, but I hadn’t really been turned on to the thing yet. Then Gary Halpert had something called The Atom Bomb seminar and I was one of the speakers there. And that’s where I introduced my marketing workshop. And in the audience looking at Mike Enlo talk about the Internet and saying to myself why am I not involved in this. I’ve got this huge computer background and marketing. It’s an absolute marriage, right? This is like 1995, I think. That’s when I started I’d better look into this thing. I got email and then started doing something with that. I finally got an Internet account. So, by 1996, I was kind of doing some stuff and I saw the Web was there, but not everybody was using it yet. So, I had to kind of grow into these things. But I’ll tell you about my first experience with a website. That’s interesting. People calling up regularly and asking for my catalog. People are starting to use the Internet. Enough people who called me are on the Internet. I’m going to put up my catalog. So, I thought of this and then some guy wanted to do this for me. So, I hired him to do it and he put up my catalog on the Internet. I remember the first time when it was active I said wow, this is great because people used to call me up, order the catalog, I have to print a copy, staple it, put it in an envelope, send it out to them. It would take about a few days to get there. It cost me about $1.50, maybe a little more with postage and takes a while to get there. I really wasn’t good at getting them out promptly. It could be a week or two before they got it. I said this Internet is fantastic because all I have to do now is give them a web address and they got it instantly. I said my sales are going to double. The next person who called I said do you have Web access? They said yes. I said well my catalog is up on the web and I gave him the web address. I saved some money. I instantly responded to them. They have my full catalog accessible on the Internet. I could expand it really well. This is great stuff. Well, a month later I tabulated all my results and discovered that my sales dropped by half.

Michael: Really?

Carl: Yes. I said what the heck. Why is this? I finally analyzed it and found the answer. The answer was that when you go to a website, you may bookmark it or not. I used to bookmark it. After a while, you don’t bookmark them anymore. It’s a losing proposition. There’s so many of them. But even when you bookmark it, you rarely came back. What was happening was they’d go on and they maybe wouldn’t have time to go through the whole catalog so they bookmark it and say I’ll come back to it, but never did because how are they going to get reminded of it. If they have a physical catalog there, every time they see the catalog on their desk, they’re reminded of it. They pick it up. They take it to the living room with them, to the bathroom, read through it, start filling out the order form with what books they want. When they get finished, they call up or fax in their order and I got an order. They didn’t do that with the Internet.

Michael: That makes sense.

Carl: The reason is because the Internet was reactive as opposed to proactive. And that’s why now a days what you have to do is you have to get their email address because you have to remind them to take a look at that catalog or whatever product you’ve got to offer. Now, I don’t sell the books like I did anymore in the catalog. I gave it over to TWI Press and they sell it, but the same principle applies that if someone isn’t reminded of it and how are you going to remind them of it is the question.

Michael: Tell me, what are you finding from your experience today that people really want to know how to do that you can give them some ideas that will help them?

Carl: I think people want to make money and be independent. They want to be independently wealthy meaning that they have the freedom to work on their own without having a boss over them who knows less than they do. If they want to go to a movie in the afternoon or to their child’s play in the afternoon that they can do that. If they want to spend time with their family during the afternoon when it’s nice as opposed to only seeing them in the evening when it’s dark and no time left to do any real thing like that. They want to have freedom, the freedom of choice and they want to be able to make good money at the same time. The Internet actually came along just in time, companies taking over other companies and then laying off -- just say firing half of the workforce because they duplicated the jobs. Computers actually created less of a need for as many people. So, that got rid of a lot of jobs and what are all

these people doing. Their companies are down sizing. Computers are replacing people. What are all these excess people doing? They’re learning about computers. They’re getting on the Internet and they’re starting businesses. And some of them are doing really well. For example, this guy, the son of a guy who worked with a friend of mine and they worked in timeshare and his son lived in New York City and was essentially out of work. He was kind of referred to his son as a bum because he didn’t work at all and he just mooched off his parents. He’s probably a creative guy sitting back and looking at the world and after 9/11 he got this idea for putting He got this idea for putting Osama Bin Laden’s picture on a t-shirt with some irreverent saying or whatever. I don’t even know the exact genesis of that. But he starts doing irreverent t-shirts; I mean just real raunchy, no holds barred t-shirts. And he starts selling them by the bushel full. In fact, he was selling so many that he was running out of money or running out of t-shirts. He’s getting more orders for t-shirts than he had capital to be able to buy them in advance to make them and then be able to deliver them promptly. So, he had to actual borrow some money and he had his dad go around and borrow about $30,000-$40,000 for him so he could have some sort of a buffer and get those things done. How he started this thing was he put up a website called T-Shirt Hell. The last I heard, he had moved from New York City to Malibu Beach. He had a three-story beach house on Malibu Beach. Had someone else running his company for him and they were looking for the first six figure week. That’s week not month. That was long enough ago to where I’m sure he’s exceeded that.

Michael: And that was all made through the Internet.

Carl: All through the Internet. He didn’t sell it any other way than the Internet.

Michael: And he had a product that hit an emotional cord with the market.

Carl: Yes, it’s a product that probably you or I would take a look at and say I wouldn’t wear that anywhere. It’s like really embarrassing stuff on the t-shirt. The Internet is great because you can reach those people and especially even if it’s the weird, the far out the better because those people have no way they can get what they want through normal means because no body would sell it. So, that’s even better. So, that’s one example. Another example of a client of mine is this 21-year-old high school dropout from the U.K. He’s not even English. He’s German. English is a second language for him. He put up this website, a standard $30 a month website. It was a membership website and he never sold it on the Internet. He sold it

Here's a quick and easy way you can get into the marketing consulting business. Work part time from home. Help businesses make more money. Listen to hours of free interviews, case studies and how to consultant training at http://www.hardtofindseminars.com/consulting.htm through direct mail in a joint venture with another guy who is in the financial services business. He had 300 paying members who were paying $160 a month. And then he had some other ancillary things. He had actually a hardcopy newsletter of the thing, but he was making over $670,000 annualized from that little thing.

Michael: What was it? What was he selling?

Carl: Stock charting program.

Michael: A stock market type program.

Carl: It was a stock charting service actually. He did stock charting. In fact, when I talked to him I said one of thing you ought to do is auction off a day of your time to someone. I think you’ll probably get like $10,000. He said I don’t want to do that. He had tried this before. Somebody paid him $1,000 for a few hours of his time and he was embarrassed because he’s only 21 and this guy is like much older. He felt strange.

Michael: He didn’t have the confidence.

Carl: Yes, exactly. Whereas this guy knew that he did and it’s kind of strange.

Michael: And so he took your copywriting course and helped hone his sales letter for the Internet or for offline.

Carl: Right, for offline. He also did another project showing people how to do memberships like his.

Michael: All right. Tell me another story. These are great stories.

Carl: There’s another guy that I did a joint venture, this is my product, though, but he had done some work for Jay Abraham concerning computers; installing computers in his office and buying them at the right prices and stuff. He does this all basically gratis and Jay owed him some favor. Jay let him talk for an hour at one of his seminars; this is a $5,000 seminar.

Michael: What was his name?

Carl: Adam Bush. So, Adam calls me up and he says Jay’s given me an hour to talk at his seminar, but I don’t have anything to sell. I need someway to monetized this. Do you have any ideas? I said okay let’s put something together. So, what we did is we took my copywriter protégé program letter -- pretty much the same one that’s on www.copycoach.com -- we took my marketing made easy workshop license, the letter for that. I said look, here’s the biggest problem anybody has in marketing is getting someone to read their sales letter. So, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to offer these people an incentive to read these sales letters. So, what kind of incentive could we use? Well, it turned out that earlier, probably a year or so earlier, one of Jay’s assistants, Jeff Taylor chatted me up and said we’re having one of these $5,000 seminars, would you like to come. I said sure. He said you pay your own expenses, but you don’t have to pay $5,000 to get in. I said that’s very nice. He called back the next day and he said by the way, would you mind while you’re here to give our staff a little workshop on copywriting? I said, no I’d be pleased. I’m saying I’m going to be doing this two-hour consultation. I’m going to bring a tape recorder. So, I brought a tape recorder with me and I taped the two hours. And basically, if someone sat down and said teach me the most important things you know about copywriting or advertising -- pretty much copywriting, but advertising in general -- this is the two hours I’d give them. Obviously, it gave the most important stuff to Jay’s staff.

Michael: You have this on audio?

Carl: I don’t yet have something up on my site selling it. I have that in the process.

Michael: It was just one of those situations that you really gave them your all and it just came out a really good presentation.

Carl: Right. At the time, I was charging $250 an hour for my consultation and I reasoned that this was worth $500. And what I did is I said this is worth $500 and I only charge $100, but special $49.95; that’s basically all I sold it for. And we sold a bunch of those. So, what I did was they were on two, one-hour audiocassettes. By the way, later I’d reasoned that I’d really undercut myself because if you really consider this, what did I do is if these weren’t worth $500, $250 an hour, they were worth $5,000 because I’d bartered a $5,000 seminar for these. So, two hours of my time was bartered for $5,000. The perceived value went up, but I hadn’t realized it at this time, so we figured it on being worth $500. We had a bunch of these cassettes made up -- two cassettes. Here’s the deal. Adam presented this. By the way, I wasn’t even in the seminar room when he presented this. I was outside the seminar room, but I wasn’t inside. It took him about 15 minutes and he says here’s the deal.

Carl Galletti wants you to take a look at his sales letters. He’s just recently changed them, which was true. And he wants a critique from you because he knows you guys are up to speed on the marketing techniques and everything. He wants your opinion of each sales letter. So, read them tonight. Give them back to me and if you do, if you’ll just fill out this brief survey for him, we’ll give you this tape set that he’s done for Jay Abraham’s staff where he’s taught the staff about copywriting for two hours. It’s worth $500 and you’ll get this for free if you hand in the survey form.

Michael: Let me just understand. The sales letters that they were going to read that night was what?

Carl: Two sales letters, one was from my copywriter protégé program and the other one was from my marketing made easy workshop license, reprint license.

Michael: So, what happened?

Carl: Part of the deal was you had in the survey form, we’ll give you the tapes, and by the way, if you’re interested in this deal, you’re probably not on his list, but if you’d like to take advantage of it, we have a special. If you buy the copywriter protégé program, we’ll throw in the license to the marketing made easy workshop for free. We collected, I don’t know how many; there were about a couple hundred people there. I think we collected about a hundred and some forms and we took orders for $35,900.

Michael: That’s incredible. It would never have happened unless you bribed them to get them to read the letter through that bonus.

Carl: Exactly. These are people at a $5,000 seminar that have more important things to do than read somebody’s sales letter. They had to do it in their off time, which wasn’t very much because Jay kept them going from morning to evening.

Michael: You had to pay them to read this sales letter.

Carl: Exactly and then hit them with a $500 tape set that basically cost us a couple of dollars.

Michael: But a $5,000 value. Do you still use that technique in your marketing? It seems to really work to get people to read.

Carl: I don’t use it as much as I should. The funny thing about both of these things, I used a similar technique at Robert Allen’s seminar. I use a technique. It works and then I just don’t use it again. And every once in a while I say to myself, what don’t I use that anymore. I’ve got a guy, Ken McArthur, who runs the Affiliate Showcase. Ken has this site, which sells a book on how to make money doing surveys for companies. In fact, he was one of the first people who go into that market. He’s got a list of about 160,000 people on there. These are people who are interested in doing surveys and making money from doing surveys. There are legitimate ones out there that will pay you money for answering their survey, but a lot of them now on the Internet are just cover-ups for getting your email address and stuff like that. It’s a minefield out there. You’ve got to know where you’re walking. So, what we’re going to do is I made up this survey, read the copy on the website, answer these questions, and when you answer the questions, you get a free book -- a free e-book. The book is called Secrets from the Internet Marketing Super Conference. And basically what it is, is a couple super conferences back, we had Cory Rudl and Jonathan Mizel and Robert Allen and Marlin Sanders and Terry Dean and other people. What I did is I took maybe about 10 or 12 of them, I think about 10, and them transcribed and then edited heavily so that we took out all of the extraneous stuff and whatever. I put them into a book that I sell for $27.97. And so, that’s the book that they get for free when they answer this survey. It’s basically the same technique moved over into the Internet.

Michael: What else are people out there really having a hard time with when your students call you?

Carl: The most difficult thing new people writing copy has is they speak too much from their own point of view rather than the reader’s point of view. We like to call it we-we-ing all over your copy; like we do this. You want to speak to the person and generally if you use the work you or your, it kind of forces the issues. When you’re critiquing your copy, if you see something that says we or I, try to transmute that into you or your. So, just to take an example let’s say, I’m the best there is selling widgets, you can transmute that into doing like you can find out how to be the best person at selling widgets by just taking this course.

Michael: Just substitute all the “I’s” and the “we’s” with you and your.

Carl: It’s not exactly a substitution, but it forces the transmutation into changing the other words around to fit. It does work initiating that

action. So, that’s one of the first things. Also, most people don’t spend nearly enough time on headlines, myself included. I have to catch myself. When I did the Internet marketing super conference thing, I showed it to Armand Morin and he said so where’s the headline. Here’s the headline, testing, traffic testing and tools is the theme to the thing. So, I said I think I need a headline. So, what happened is this one 22-year-old kid who went to my first conference last year calls me up and says when is this year’s conference. I said coming up. I gave him the date and he said last month we had our first $60,000 month and we made over $100,000 so far this year.

Michael: There’s your headline.

Carl: I said wow here we go. My headline is 22-year-old has first $60,000 month after attending Internet Marketing Secrets conference.

Michael: Yes, it’s great. The real life situation is where the gold is instead of trying to dream them up. They’re right there. Can you take me through a little process? Let’s say you were going to take on a client again and they had a product. Can you take me through your process of how you deal with that client and how you create a piece of copy?

Carl: The first thing I want to do is I want to learn everything I can about the product and how he sells it and what’s worked and what hasn’t.

Michael: Let me even take you back a little more. What criteria must you have in place before you even consider taking a client on?

Carl: Let me precede this all by saying I don’t take clients on anymore because I’m my own client now. I still teach people copywriting with my copywriter protégé program.

Michael: They can get you virtually basically.

Carl: Yes, but that’s about as close as I come to writing copy for people. There are some friends that I will critique their stuff or in some cases even write some stuff for them, but I don’t hire myself out anymore as a copywriter. So, this for getting some copywriting business.

Michael: The main reason is why?

Carl: Because you can make a heck of a lot more money writing for yourself. I’ve known that since I started writing copy. Why write for somebody else when the bulk of the money is made by the person who owns the company and is the entrepreneur? I’m the entrepreneur. I’m interested in making money. To me copy is not a glamour job. At first it sounds glamorous. You’re a writer, but after a while you get over that. I don’t really care about copy. I care about making money. I’m an entrepreneur. That’s what’s important to me. I’m excited about new and different ways of making money not by writing copy. Writing copy, quite frankly, is not that glamorous. What’s glamorous is sending out a sales letter that makes you a ton of money. But most people can’t afford to be hiring copywriters at $6,500, $10,000, $15,000 and up. They’ve got to be pretty successful before that and learning to write copy is an integral thing. It’s about as important to you as knowing how to make your own product. There are three things that I think integral to any business: the product, the promotion, and the people. The people or the market you’re selling to. On the Internet that’s traffic -- getting traffic to your site. That’s integral. The next thing is converting the traffic; that’s the promotion, the sales letter, the copy on your site. And then the third thing is the product that you’re selling. And those three things have to play together. So, you could do a business, especially on the Internet, by only knowing how to do one of those three things, but doesn’t it make sense to know how to do all three of them. Aren’t they all as important for the whole process because if you’re just doing any one of them, then it’s not going to work? I’m known as a copywriter, but quite frankly given my choice I’d like to get away from that stigma. It is kind of like being type cast as an actor. The reason is because I never approach copy as being just writing words.

Michael: It’s just part of the system of selling something.

Carl: Exactly.

Michael: But it’s been integral. It’s the main part. It’s the word that gets people to buy things and without that, you’re dead in the water.

Carl: Exactly and it’s used all over even in the other three parts because if you know how to write copy really well, you can produce better products. If you know how to write copy really well, then it’s going to be a lot easier to generate traffic to your website because a lot of the things that generate traffic to your website are word related. We use words, whether they’re Google ad words or whether it’s the title in your search engine result page that people see on the search.