Copywriters Podcast

You may know Nathan as the producer and my confabulation partner on Copywriters Podcast, and some of you know he’s an accomplished and profitable copywriter himself. But not everyone knows another aspect of Nathan’s public face, and that is as a very provocative Facebook poster. His posts trigger people in a way I’ve never seen before. A lot of them are funny and nearly all of his posts are though...

We’re back with another episode in the Old Masters Series. Today we’re going to talk about Robert Collier. Most people know of him as the author of The Robert Collier Letter Book, which we’ll talk about in this show. But it’s important to know that besides being one of the best copywriters of the first half of the 20th Century, Collier was also a prolific and highly successful author. One of his o...

The online marketing world has gone crazy with targeting. It’s great for all the media buyers and traffic managers, since they can get paid work out of it. Targeting… like Chicken Man of old-time radio, targeting — It’s everywhere! But what good does all this targeting do copywriters… and the marketers they work for? Today I’d like to look at targeting from a copywriter’s point of view. Not how to...

Today we have one of the world’s great teachers and practitioners of direct-response copywriting on the show — Don Hauptman. You’ll see what I mean about teaching in a moment, when Don shares the most successful copywriting techniques he’s learned in 45 years — techniques you may not be using, or not using as well as you could, yourself. As a copywriter, Don’s accomplishments are legendary. He’s a...

We’re back with another show in the Old Masters series today. First I need to tell you about something you probably never knew about before: The RCA principle. I end up telling even some of my advanced mentoring clients about the RCA principle, which I learned about from Joe Karbo in his book “The Lazy Man’s Way To Riches.” The RCA principle is a copywriting concept that goes like this: “Build the...

Our guest today was featured on the National Geographic channel last week for something no one would want to be seen for: The show “Locked Up Abroad.” The episode is about the time Jesse spent in prison in Thailand, and how copywriting helped him cut, oh, 20 years off his sentence. And he turned his life around after he came back to the USA. Actually, that’s not the most important thing about copy...

We’ve got another episode today in our Old Masters series. New York City, 1892: An advertising man named George P. Rowell starts a weekly advertising journal called Printer’s Ink. Decades later, another man, George Laflin Miller, started writing a column for Printer’s Inc., under the pen name “Aesop Glim.” In the 1940s and 1950s, Aesop Glim’s column was the Copywriters Podcast of the time, as best...

Our special guest today, Doberman Dan, has been a direct-response copywriter and serial entrepreneur for 33 years. He’s started four of his own nutritional supplement business, and sold three of them. As a copywriter, he specializes in the health, fitness and bodybuilding markets. But he’s written in many other markets as well. Our special guest today, Doberman Dan, has been a direct-response copy...

One of my best-performing sales letters took three months to write. A big part of the time it took to write it had little to do with the headline or the rest of the copy. The letter crushed it. Literally. We broke the server the first day. This was for a small company and total sales were over $1 million on their mentoring program I had written the sales letter for. To prepare for that letter, I s...

In the offices of the most successful direct marketers in the world, when a promo isn’t making the money it should, you’ll hear most people speak these three words: “Call David Deutsch.” Because he’s the guy who can fix it. And, he’s our guest today. David’s promo’s have come close to pulling in $1 billion in sales. He’s written for Agora and the company formerly known as Boardroom (it’s now calle...

John Caples is best known as a pioneer and master practitioner of testing copy, but he was also a brilliant copywriter. His first year writing copy, he wrote an ad with the headline “They Laughed When I Sat Down At The Piano… But When I Began To Play…” which is famous to this day. He taught copywriting at Columbia Business School in New York. Caples is truly an old master, and that’s why we’re inc...

When I first started learning how to write copy, everybody told me “read Scientific Advertising.” It’s a book written at the beginning of the 20th century, over 100 years ago, by Claude Hopkins, who many consider the father of direct-response copywriting. I did read the book. I read it again. In fact, I read it 15 times. For today’s show, I reviewed it. This is part of our Old Masters series. I pu...

Today we return to our new series called “Old Masters,” and we’re going to look at another list from Maxwell Sackheim’s book, “My First 65 Years In Advertising.” Sackheim started in direct mail in 1906. In 1927 he was a co-founder of a highly successful direct-mail business, The Book-of-the-Month Club. He wrote a very famous ad with the headline, “Do You Make These Mistakes In English?”, which ran...

Today we’re starting a new series called “Old Masters,” where we find wisdom from some of the Founding Fathers of copywriting and see how we can apply them today. On this show, we’re going to look at a list from Maxwell Sackheim’s book, “My First 65 Years In Advertising.” Sackheim started in direct mail in 1906. In 1927 he was a co-founder of a highly successful direct-mail business, The Book-of-t...

Sara’s dad was a lawyer. After she finished college, she wanted to go law school, but her Legal SAT scores weren’t good enough. So she tried stand-up comedy, but that didn’t catch fire. So, she became a billionaire instead. The youngest woman billionaire ever, according to Forbes magazine in 2009. A few weeks ago, I saw that Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, had a class on entrepreneurship up on Mas...

Our guest today really gets around. Richard Miller is founder of Mission Control Studios in Phoenix. Have you ever heard of David DeAngelo and a product called Double Your Dating? David’s real name is Eben Pagan, and Richard helped him with every seminar and info-product. In the copywriting space, Richard’s worked with me and helped John Carlton with all the video in version 2.0 of the Simple Writ...

In the opening of the movie “Echo In the Canyon,” the late Tom Petty is showing Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob, a Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar. He plays about six chords, stops, and says, “You can’t afford the rest.” And laughs. What’s underneath the joke is: They’re making a movie, and if he went much further, under music industry rules, the movie-makers would have to pay a large royalty for wh...

Our guest today comes to us through the magic of the Internet from Galicia, Spain — and he knows a lot about mastermind groups. Whether you know what a mastermind group is or not, you’ll know more about that today. And I think you’ll quickly see why they’re important for direct response copywriters and direct response business owners. Stan is the organizer and co-host of the Platinum Mastermind Gr...

On the podcast Masters of Scale, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman interviewed Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. Chesky tells of advice he got 10 years ago, when the company barely had any customers at all. He got the advice from one of the wisest men in Silicon Valley, Paul Graham of Y Combinator. The advice was simple, but powerful: “Get to know your customers by one.” Brian Chesky and his Airbnb co-foun...

Our guest today Adam Bensman is both state-of-the-art and very old-school. Let’s start with the old-school part: Adam started out as a door-to-door salesman. I call that “old school” because, well, first, I did that once. So did Gary Halbert. And nearly every experienced, successful copywriter I know says that the best possible training you can get for direct-response copywriting is face-to-face s...

The famous investor Warren Buffett is famous for saying that when it comes to investing, he has two rules: 1) Never lose money. 2) See rule #1 To be sure, Warren Buffett hasn’t ALWAYS been able to follow these rules. Because, of course, he is an investor and some things are beyond his control. His insurance company General Re lost $2.4 billion after the attacks on 9-11. Even so, his overall compan...

Direct response copywriter Matt Rizvi has worked with famous people known for being strong independent thinkers who focus on the power of the individual. People like Dr. Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas; best-selling author and financial guru Pamela Yellen; and investment analyst Porter Stansberry. Matt’s sold millions with his copy. He’s the founder of DailyCopywriter.com and the DailyCopywri...

Legendary copywriter and teacher John Carlton returns from last week. Thousands of copywriters and entrepreneurs have learned from Carlton. He still gets royalty checks every month for ads he wrote decades ago. And if you pull him away from writing copy, he plays a mean electric guitar. Carlton agreed to come back because he had more to tell us than we could fit into one show. I’m proud to call hi...

Our guest today is John Carlton. In case you don’t know who he is, maybe you haven’t been paying attention. But you definitely should. John has been a force of nature in copywriting and copywriting education for decades. He was Gary Halbert’s business partner. He worked in Jay Abraham’s office. He’s one of the few people allowed to speak on Dan Kennedy’s stage. I met Carlton at the Gary Halbert Hu...

When I was but a wee lad, not even 40 years old yet, I worked in the Chicago News Bureau of McGraw-Hill as a correspondent for a number of niche business magazines. One of my most important clients was Engineering News Record, or ENR for short. Now this was an interesting challenge, since I had trouble screwing a nut on a bolt. And I’d never taken an engineering course in my life. I had to get up...