How To Dominate A Cutthroat Niche Without Proof With Kevin Rogers

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Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast which delivers cutting edge conversion strategies from the online trenches straight to your earbuds. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at listbuilidnglifestylesshow.com. I also invite you to grab a free copy of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival Guide” at lifebuilidnglifestyleshow.com/survival and now once again it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

Igor: Welcome back to List Building Lifestyle with your host Igor Kheifets. And today I’m hosting Kevin Rogers, direct response copywriter who moved away from freelancing and is now running a community at copychief.com, where he teaches entrepreneurs, business owners, and freelancers how to write high converting copy. Kevin, how you doing?

Kevin: Good, Igor. It’s good to be here man.

Igor: Kevin, I’ll be honest. I invited you here because you’ve got this amazing, amazing book called The 60-Second Sales Hook, and I believe it is, if not the, then one of the best resources I’ve seen that helps people to uniquely position themselves in this marketplace, which is, let’s face it, it’s really, really crowded when it comes to the Internet. Everyone tries to get in. So unique positioning is extremely rare and I know that a lot of my listeners are struggling to come up with a unique angle for how they want to show up. So do you mind talking a little bit about how did you how did you come up with that? And what’s the story behind The 60-Second Sales Hook?

Kevin: Yeah. Sure, man. So I was a stand-up comedian in sort of a former life, back in my twenties, I’m in my forties now, I toured all over the United States performing stand-up comedy work on stages of guys like Chris Rock and Louis C.K., my buddy Billy Gardell, who have all gone on to become household names. And I thought that’s not for me, that’s too easy, to become a famous comedian. I don’t want that. I want to write sales copy. So I ended up here in this amazing business and what’s cool is a lot of the things I learned in a decade of helping drunk strangers have the time of their lives is that there are a lot of parallels to what it takes to make a room of strangers laugh and get visitors to your website to take the actions we want them to take in that circumstance. So that’s how I came up with The 60-Second Sales Hook. It’s essentially a joke formula that I used to use as stand-up and a lot of comics use, especially on TV, when they’re doing Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, shows like that though use this formula in their first joke to quickly establish their persona. And then I just changed it a little to make it into what I call a 60-second sales hook. And what’s great about it is it allows us to very quickly tell our story and bond pretty deeply with our best prospects. And so in just 60 seconds, which as we know the most valuable thing that anybody can pay us up front is their attention, because it’s very hard to win any more. You can tell a story and make a bond and win the right to carry on the conversation in 60 seconds flat.

Igor: Wow, sweet. And you’re actually right with the attention being an ever-decreasing commodity today. It’s critical to get them… Well, basically get people hooked.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: So what’s the formula?

Kevin: So… Well, let me just back it up a little bit. The way it works is 60 seconds; you don’t even really get 60 seconds. You kind of get five seconds first, and then you get, if you do your job there you might win another ten seconds and then like that through 60 seconds. The mistake people make when they try to use this is a think, “Oh, it’s only a minute. I can kind of just babble on or yak.” Every word has to count in this formula. And that’s one another thing that makes it great, that it’s so short. And so, I’ll tell you the formula, first as a joke formula, and then I’ll tell you how it works as a sales hook formula. So as a joke formula, it goes “identity”, “struggle”, “discovery”, and then “surprise”. It’s four parts. And one of my favorite instances of this joke in action as joke formula is woman named Karen Rontowski, when she was on the Late Night with David Letterman, The Late Show, her opening joke was, “My kids were so bad in Wal-Mart today that I pulled a fly swatter off the shelf and I smacked them with it. In the second the fly swatter hit their ass I thought, ‘I don’t have kids.'” [laughter]

Igor: [laughter]

Kevin: Which is a great joke, and it follows and establishes her persona immediately. Like we learn so much about her in that short little joke, right? And its identity is what we think is a mom at Wal-Mart, struggle is that her kids are acting crazy, the discovery is the fly swatter, and the result, the surprise is that they’re not even her kids. She’s just beating random kids. As we’ve all wanted to do in Wal-Mart. And so to make it a sales hook formula, the only change is that last part. Because obviously surprise is fun in video and to keep people’s attention, but when it comes to establishing ourselves as an authority and an expert in something, what people want to know from us are the results. Like, “How did it work?” right? “How good is this working for you?” So we just change “surprise” to “result”, and it goes, “identity”, “struggle”, “discovery”, “result”. So when I might use as a copywriting expert and talking about this very formula, I would say, “My name is Kevin Rogers. I spent years traveling the United States as a dead broke stand-up comedian until I discovered how a simple joke formula could be used as an irresistible sales hook, and began teaching marketers how to use it to increase their sales. Since then, thousands of people have used this exact formula to, increase their opt ins up to 400%”, I’m sorry, “1000% and their sales up to 400%. If you’d like to discover this sales hook formula for yourself, simply enter your e-mail in the field below and I’ll give you my Amazon best-selling book for free as a digital download on the next page.” And that’s it, right? You see how simple that is? Same exact formula. We just change that last part. The magic of it Igor, is that when we’re willing to share our struggle a little bit, something we had a hard time with, that’s what creates the bond. People want to know that you’ve been in their shoes or you’ve felt lost, or broke at some point or whatever you struggled with, and finally discovered something that could help you get over it and then, well, how good did it help you? Like how much did it help you? That’s the result. And you can tell that whole story in 60 seconds and have people like really want to find out more. So there’s a bit of good old curiosity and teasing in there that is so effective in marketing. But the really important part of it is that we’re bonding, we’re telling our story, we’re sharing something of ourselves, so that even if they don’t opt in, which most people will, they’ll remember you. And if they like your story and feel like they can relate to it they’ll feel close to you and you’ll have more chances. You’ll have their attention now.

Igor: Oh, yeah. And you definitely stand out. I mean, you stopped being another Joe Schmo marketer; you now stand out as a unique individual.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: And that might be even worth paying attention to, which is great. Now here’s what I’m thinking, Kev. So your story has the struggle, and of course you have the success, because you’re a very successful direct-response copywriter. I mean, you’re participated in six-figure and probably seven-figure launches.

Kevin: Yes.

Igor: Now, what if I don’t have the result yet. I have the struggle. I mean, my daily life is a struggle, but I don’t have the result. What would I do then?

Kevin: Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, if you don’t have the results it does make it difficult. What’s cool about this is you can use the results of ideal customers for the product, right? And another thing people say, “What if I don’t have a result, and what if I don’t want to tell my story?” “I’m either shy.” or “I’m just a private person.” And I don’t want to go out there and tell all about me. The way to solve both of those things is instead of talking about yourself, you just talk about your best customers or the best customers for the products that you’re promoting. So let’s just say you’re an affiliate marketer and it’s not your product, but you believe in it, and you’re promoting it. And any good product page is going to have testimonials on it, right? So you can take a testimonial and turn that, and apply the 60-seconds sales hook to a really good testimonial, and tell the story of that person, right? So if the testimonial was that Alan from Texas was really struggling to get his business off the ground is on my marketing business and then he used this amazing traffic generator and today he’s making $10,000 a month, which is way more than he ever made when he was working an hourly job. And finally all his hard work paid off thanks to this product. Well, that’s the whole formula right there, right? So you could say you could just frame that story, you don’t even have to say, “Hey, this is me, and I want to tell you the story of Alan from Texas.” You could just put it in the context of the sales letter and say, “Hey”, because it is much more powerful to tell a testimonial as a story, rather than just some blurb on the side of the page. People scroll right past those, and it’s important to have them there, but if you can work it into the context of the sales copy it’s much more compelling, because it serves more like a case study in that regard, right? And so you just apply that same formula and tell a more dynamic story for those testimonials and that’s really effective that way as well.

Igor: Well, you know what you used to do when I was working with Ross Bowering, and he wrote along my copy back in the day, I didn’t have quite a few success stories with my coaching program, and what he did was he would even sometimes base an entire sales letter around a specific case study.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: Now, what’s interesting and I didn’t notice that until we started selling those coaching programs, was that a specific testimonial would sort of attract a very specific type of people. So testimonial about a lady from Florida would get me ladies from like America.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: A testimonial about a guy, like a young guy, who had his house like basically taken away, foreclosed or whatever, after losing his mom to cancer, attracted young ambitious guys who are just struggling and they were like super ambitious to take action. And so each and every testimonial would sort of like… People would try to merit themselves in those stories, like did you ever notice that?

Kevin: Yeah. It’s a great point. Absolutely. I mean first of all, you want to have your customer avatar. It kind of usually works the other way around. Like if you know who your avatar is and you build a story around someone that they can relate to, that’s powerful. But I love what you’re saying because when we tell the story and make it compelling, we start to see that maybe our customer avatar looks different than we originally thought, or they have a lot more faces than we originally thought, right? And the other important thing to note here and this is probably going a little deep, if somebody’s new into marketing, but we always hear about that sales… In order to make a sell you have to… People buy on emotion and then they want to justify it with logic, right? But they are actually nine buyer types out there and very often we think we have one customer avatar and it may be that we’re solving the same problem for all nine types, but they all have different objections and different needs in order for them to feel comfortable buying the product. And when you discover these different buyer profiles and you can do things like make sure there’s an FAQ question that appeals to every objection based on those buyer types, that’s when you can really start to see the sales skyrocket.

Igor: Alright. Well, without going into all the nine different buyer profiles, which I’m sure we can spend the rest of the night talking about…

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: Actually, let me ask you this. This is because I’m very curious. Stories work.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: And you’re not the first one who we’re hosting on the show that shares that.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: But why? Like how come I could come into the marketplace, have zero proof, or zero credibility, or zero authority, and I can actually build my authority by telling a very compelling story which as you’ve shown on this call so far ain’t that complicated. So what’s the deal with the stores?

Kevin: Well, I mean, it’s just how we work as humans. It’s how we’re wired. If you look back through, as far as we can see human interaction, species that looks nothing like us, but were basically human, homo sapiens, and we find how they communicated we see cave drawings and things like this, it’s always a story, right? They’re telling the story of the big hunt or warnings of things to come, or things to be aware of, ceremonies. These kinds of things and those all have a story behind them and it’s basically one of our very basic human instincts to tell a story, and I don’t know why that is, I don’t know if anybody knows why technically sort of scientifically, why that’s so important to us, but it’s really how we shape our existence. I mean, if you look at what is it we seek for entertainment, we look for stories, right? Everything if you, I mean, obviously if we go to the movies, it’s to see a great story unfold on the big screen. If we read a book, we want to hear the story. Even if we watch sports, what makes us so in love with our team, or what makes us so excited about a game, it’s the story line of the game. Why do they have an hour of coverage, or sometimes a full day of coverage, or in the case of the Super Bowl two weeks of coverage, leading up to a three hour football game, what are they doing? They’re finding stories or telling stories, the quarterback of this team and the linebacker from the other team went to high school together and now they’re in the big game against each other. Who will come out the winner? That’s story. And so everything is story. It’s just how we’re wired and the more you can tap into it and learn to tell different kinds of stories the more successful you’re going to be, because it’s what people are drawn to.

Igor: Kev, I agree with you completely. And I just want to point out that I think the element that makes every story good and worth remembering and that’s, I think, sports has a lot to do with as well, because it’s based on it, it is conflict.

Kevin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Great, great point. Absolutely. That’s what makes a story good, right? It’s conflict. And if you look at the Hero’s Journey, and you can just Google Hero’s Journey and get so many cool images, they have so many great like little graphics and things around it. It’s just a classic Joseph Campbell story dynamic and you’ll see it in everything from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, just all the great stories based on Hero’s Journey, and it’s all about conflict. So all you really need to tell a great story is what we call the protagonist, the hero of the story, the person we’re all rooting for. They have to have a core desire, something they really, really want. And again, that’s kind of like I talked about the struggle, right? It’s the bond. It’s like, we all know what it’s like to really want something.

And so, as long as you can establish what it is your hero wants, and then put stuff in the way of them getting it, that’s the conflict, right? And it could be stuff they deal with personally, could be that they’re an addict, and the thing that keeps getting in the way is drinks and drugs and bad people and parties and things like that. Or it could be external stuff, literally something in the road or whatever it is, just if it’s like Fast and Furious, if it’s all the external stuff of the rival gang trying to stop them from getting really going. And so, if you take that out of any story it’s just boring. If you don’t care enough to root for the character and there’s not stuff keeping them from getting what they’re after, you really have no story. And so, it’s a great point, Igor. If you think about establishing a hero character in your sales copy and then the conflict is the stuff we’ve all dealt with, that we’ve all experienced along the way, and not only does it keep the story interesting, but every piece of conflict you introduce creates another opportunity to bond with your audience because you’re relating to their struggle.

Igor: Well, it circles back to what you mentioned earlier, right? It’s like hear the hero the story that you’re telling, so I’m Kevin Rogers and, I went on tour and I decided not to do it and I went into the online thing and started writing copy and then I struggle. So there is the hero, there is the desire to make money and to be rich and famous and successful, and there’s the conflict which is the journey wasn’t all that all that easy.

Kevin: Yes.

Igor: And of course you overcoming the obstacle. Now, of course, we can like expand on…

Kevin: Right.

Igor: Like, you mentioned. Like I think the standard Hollywood formula is broken down into about 12 parts.

Kevin: Yes.

Igor: And so, I believe the best explanation to that I’ve seen is in Andre Chaperon’s “Storyfluence.”

Kevin: Yes.

Igor: Not sure that program is still available. But what’s important to remember when I spoke to Andre, and I said, “Andre, you know what?” Like, it’s a huge formula and I’m trying to just shoot a video, like for my Facebook followers.”

Kevin: [laughter]

Igor: “Can you condense it for me?” And he’s like, “Well, start with the hero and then outline the desire,”, that’s not how Andre Chaperon sounds, by the way.

Kevin: [laughter]

Igor: [laughter] “and then tell them how all the shit breaks loose.” Just tell them how everything goes wrong.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: And so that is where the connection happens, right?

Kevin: Right.

Igor: Just like you said before.

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. And Michael Hayes, by the way, who Andre did that product with, that teaching, is a master Hollywood screenwriter, and he has some great books on the topic. So yeah, it all goes back to that hero. And if you look at The 60-Second Sales Hook, and other people have pointed this out, it really is just a very condensed version of the Hero’s Journey. Like you said, and we could easily expand it the other way, but all I say for my struggle is I spent years traveling the country as a dead broke stand-up comic. Now, the reason I don’t go into more of the struggle is because for two reasons. For one is, I’m not talking to comedians, right? I’m talking about the fact that I used to be a comedian and I’m talking to marketers, and I’m talking to business owners. So it wouldn’t be a point to me going into all the struggles. Everybody can understand what it must be like to be a struggling artist and just being dead broke in anything sucks enough. Like you really don’t have to turn the screws when you only have 60 seconds. What’s more important for my 60-second sales look is that I found a solution and you’re going to really want to try this. It’s really interesting and I know there’s a lot of curiosity around what I discovered, so I spend more time on the discovery and the result than I do the struggle. Now, if you think about the other cool thing about this formula is that everybody has different stories for different occasions. So let’s just say I wanted to go into natural health niche, right? And so suddenly, the fact that I used to be a comedian has really no relevance. It’s a mismatch. But I did have heart surgery ten years ago, I almost died, and I had heart surgery, and if I wanted to talk about that I would say “Hey, I’m Kevin Rogers and a blood infection that I got from a routine dental appointment almost killed me ten years ago. A heart surgeon saved my life, but then the medicine that I had to go on after that was killing me slowly all over again. And then I discovered a natural herb that could do the same thing that prescription drug did, and now I’m as fit as I’ve ever been and I have ten times the energy and the doctors tell me that I probably added five years to my life.” “If you’d like to discover this amazing herb for yourself it’s on the next page.” right? So again same exact formula that little, mini Hero’s Journey, but a completely different story in a completely different niche.

Igor: Well, you know what? This is just that I can already see the headline for this episode.

Kevin: [laughter]

Igor: “How Kevin Rogers Turned His Death Into It A Million Dollars Sales Up”.

Kevin: [laughter]

Igor: But you’re totally right. Nothing bad ever happens to a writer. I don’t remember who said that, but someone did.

Kevin: Oh, yeah.

Igor: And I’m very famous for quoting people without actually mentioning their name.

Kevin: [laughter] Somebody said.

Igor: Somebody’s said…

Kevin: You’ve got a whole Facebook wall of inspirational quotes, it just says “- somebody”.

Igor: [laughter] “Some guy”.

Kevin: [laughter] “Some guy.”

Igor: So yeah. So nothing bad ever happens to a writer, and I tell my listeners and our clients same things. Like you are full of stories, like your life is full of stories and full of marketing fodder, because you can turn anything into a story. And obviously some stories require a bit more work than just the obvious connection between dying and herbs.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: But you can totally live what might seem like a totally boring life and make a story to sell your product to create hooks, to convince people in any way. Like Kev, do you ever like create stories or come up with stories, or just tap your experience for stories to overcome perhaps a specific objection, or maybe even one particular element of whatever it is that you’re doing.

Kevin: Yeah, great question. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one that comes to mind when you say that is like, for instance, if I’m talking about a coaching program, right, and it’s a high-dollar coaching program and I’ll just share a story of something that’s very true for me. And I’ll say, “Look, the first time I paid a lot of money to a coach was when I was at my most destitute and I knew I was standing at a crossroads, business had been humming along okay, and then suddenly it wasn’t. And my instinct was to begin to hoard cash and sort of like be protective and have this sort of scarcity mindset. But my better instinct was that I better take a drastic measure and if I’m ever going to actually take the advice of somebody who knows how I can solve this, I need to be willing to pay, and I did. And what I learned from that was that you have to really pay to pay attention. Because I invested a large amount of money when the stakes were very high for me, I did every single thing that that coach told me to do, and it’s turned out to be the best decision I ever made, and I’m sure if I would have just hoarded money and hoped things would’ve changed I’d be out of business right now. So that’s again kind of the same formula just a very true story. It’s about sharing is as much as it is storytelling, right? And that’s very effective when I’m telling somebody who’s kind of on a fence whether or not they should invest in coaching. It’s an effective story because it’s true and they can see the logic in it. And so I think what’s more important Igor, than then thinking of, “Okay, should I insert a story here in order to get the sale?” What’s more powerful is dedicating yourself towards becoming a great storyteller by using formulas like the “60-second sales hook” and “Storyfluence” and other things out there and just practicing, journaling. Tell a story, a really good story, on your Facebook page, your wall, and you’ll be surprised. You think people have short attention spans, and they do, but if you write something really compelling on Facebook, you’ll be surprised the reaction you get. People will read it and people will react in kind with long responses to it. If it’s effective and emotional. And so it’s just the more you can practice telling story and seeing what resonates the better off you’ll be as a marketer.

Igor: I’ve heard the same advice when I was trying to get my shit together in the dating game, not on the dating market but in the game, because I sucked with women. One of the guys there, I think his name was Craig or something, he was like a little encouraging everyone in the audience to just approach people in bars and start telling stories. Like don’t even say “hi” or whatever.

Kevin: Yes.

Igor: Just sit right next to them and start telling the story. So I walk into a bar and there’s this horse standing there, or something like, literally just without even any sort of foreplay, just literally start telling the story, and he did a case study, he brought someone up on stage and he literally took them through like four times I think, the guy told a story, and you could see the improvement.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: Like literally just stand there in front of the mirror, perhaps back home.

Kevin: Yes.

Igor: Tell your story three, four to five times to yourself in the mirror and you’ll immediately see how much you can improve it.

Kevin: Absolutely. Such a good point. Think about a joke. I mean, it all goes back to joke telling, because that’s something we’re all familiar with. And everybody wants to hear a good joke, right? But everybody’s had to suffer through a bad telling of a good joke.

Igor: [laughter]

Kevin: Right? And just think about if you, as a comedian obviously, I saw this evolution a lot, but everybody must have a couple of jokes, right? And if you don’t have a joke I would say find a joke. Like just go online and Google jokes and keep reading them until you find one that go, “Okay, this is a joke I could tell it to a lot of different people.” Doesn’t have to be dirty or whatever, inappropriate. But maybe practice like a joke you’d only share with your buddies and then when you could tell at a party, right, and not offend anybody. But just practice those jokes. You just say, “I’m going to tell this joke ten times this month.” and like you said you’d be amazed at how different it sounds the third time, the fifth time, this seventh and tenth time you tell it, because like you said, you’re learning along the way every time what you should have done better. Suddenly you’re adding more parts to it, or you’re doing voices for the different characters, right? All these things start to emerge that make it more dynamic and more interesting to listen to. So that’s a great example. And just all you need is a simple like again a 60-second joke. Actually start with a joke and hone that and then you apply that same energy to your sales hook formula.

Igor: And when you when you tell the joke to a bunch of different people you start watching their response, right? You see them kind of coming in or pulling back or looking to the side or pulling out their iPhone.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: So you know you’re not doing it right.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Igor: So they start to try again. And yeah, that’s great advice. And I think that if more people just were courageous enough to get out there and tell these stories there and tell these stories, we would not have such a distorted society of internet marketers that all they do is just click through stuff, as if the like they’re clicking through T.V. channels that they don’t understand or watching. So Kevin, this is a personal question of mine. You walked away from a very lucrative business, being a direct response copywriter; you wrote for top companies, you worked with the largest info marketers. What do you do now? Like how is what you do now better, more fulfilling, like what’s the reason you’re now devoting yourself fully to your community?

Kevin: Yeah, so well, the reason it’s better for me personally, is that I loved being a freelance copywriter, I loved my clients, I was privileged to work with, like you said, you know, some of the biggest names and the smartest, most successful marketers out there. The thing I’ve discovered since I stopped doing that, I knew it would be great not to have clients. There’s this whole running thing that all clients suck and the famous Gary Halbert quote and all that. As much as I get what he’s saying, that really wasn’t my experience. You know I love collaborating. I love working with other people. What is great though, is to not have to carry around somebody else’s deadline and somebody else’s success of a launch on my shoulders like I did for ten years, dude. I mean, I don’t know how many campaigns. I created at least 100 campaigns. You’ve launched, man, you know it is a lot of pressure.

Igor: I know.

Kevin: I love that it’s called ‘The Launch’ because every time I watch a space drama or a documentary and that room full of people sitting in front of computer monitors, sweating and haven’t bathed in like four days and they’re totally stressed out, chain smoking, that’s exactly what a product launch feels like, right? [laughter]

Igor: [laughter]

Kevin: Frankly, just to be out of that is pretty nice. You know what I discovered along the way as a freelancer, was that what I love the most, is teaching. You know I love teaching and I love coaching. I love seeing people get it and having it click for them, because it really is the difference between life and death in business. Copy you could pretty accurately say it’s only 20% of the success of any campaign, you know you’ve got to have the right product, you’ve got to have the right list, but then you absolutely have to have the right copy. But without copy you’re in trouble and seeing people go, “Oh, wow. I can actually do this I can write copy.” The 60 seconds Sales like it is basically a fill in the blanks thing, right? Every other training we have in Copy Chief is I try, strive to make it just the simple. So I have to do is watch like an hour long video and fill out the work sheet and your copy’s pretty much done. At least the foundation of it. To be able to give somebody the opportunity to put that little effort toward something that feels like you could spend your life trying to master it and get really impressive results, that’s what thrills me. I love that. Yeah, I wake up inspired every day. Like how else can I teach this. I love making videos, that’s really fun for me. I make videos for my car, I’ve been Snapchatting lately, which is kind of stupid but I really enjoy it. Because again, you know what it is, it’s a story format. I don’t know if you’re in Snapchat at all.

Igor: Oh, no. I’m making a stand, I’m making a stand for all internet marketers, and I’m not getting on Snapchat.

Kevin: Yeah.

Igor: I’m actually pissed off that everyone is.

Kevin: Yeah, well that’s how I felt about Periscope and a lot of the other ones. Like I’m with you, dude. But for whatever reason for me, Snapchat just resonated. Look, it’s different. If you’re a marketer and you’re saying, “I’ve got four hours to work on my marketing today. What am I going to put that my energy into?” I would not put Snapchat on that list. But for someone like me who loves telling stories, I have a colorful personality, I really enjoyed the video format. It’s great, and I already have an audience. It’s a really cool way for me to be able to bond with my audience who is on Snapchat, in ways that other apps or mediums just don’t allow me to do. But having said that, it’s important. Everything is story, and what makes Snapchat fun, is that you can tell a story ten seconds at a time, which kind of brings us full circle into the whole attention span thing, right? The value, Igor, of Snapchat, if you look beyond the fact that it’s this trend in everybody’s posting that ugly looking icon, that weird ghost. Dot icon thing, whatever the hell that is, you happen to see in on everybody’s thing and just say, well it’s teaching us to speak in ten seconds incriminates and actually build those blocks of ten second onto each other to make something interesting, and they call it a story, and it disappears at the end of 24 hours. There’s a lot of psychology behind that that helps us become better marketers. Because frankly, that is how your audience is going to encounter you and your products. They’re going to discover you on mobile, they’re going to engage with you for the first time on mobile, and the most effective way to make a connection on mobile is with video. Those are the reasons that I’m excited about Snapchat and telling other people they should be using it, because it’s training us for how to market in the future.

Igor: Dude, I don’t know how we ended up talking about Snapchat on List Building Lifestyle Show, but I’m just going to go and circle back to copywriting, because I spent a long time trying to get good at it and eventually it did, with the help of lots of mentors, invested a ton of money, a ton of time. I mean I spent pretty much six months just rewriting letters by hand, because that’s what Dan Kennedy says you got to do if you want to get any good at it. And in since most people don’t do it I’m like, “Okay, so I’m just going to zig while everyone zags.” Speaking of zigzags, the late Zig Ziglar, he said that financial security is the ability to produce. It’s not really about the amount of money got saved up in the bank, but it is about your ability to consistently produce sales. For me, for an email marketer, a list builder, copywriting is perhaps the single most important sales producing activity. Because it’s not just about saying the right words to right people, but it’s also about being able to craft an attractive offer. It’s being able to position something that might not be exciting at all in a very exciting way. Because in today’s marketplace everyone wants, like you said, stories are entertainment. So to me, copywriting is one of those elements. So if you guys are listening and copywriting still hasn’t clicked for you, and you’re like, “Look I need some fill in the blanks formulas, I need someone looking over my shoulder that I can get a second opinion on, that actually knows what they’re doing.” Then I do recommend you head over to copychief.com to find out how you can work with Kevin. Now Kev, we’re out of time man. So any last piece of advice for our beginner copywriters and affiliate marketers?

Kevin: Yeah, just practice stories, like you said. I would say go find a joke. Dust off when your favorite old jokes, or do a little Googling and find yourself a new one steal one from a few favorite stand-up comic and tell it, practice it. Get good at telling little mini stories in you’ll really have a huge unfair advantage.

Igor: There you have it, folks. This is Igor Kheifets and Kevin Rogers from copychief.com. This has been the List Building Lifestyle, until next time.

Thanks for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Google Play to never miss an episode because who knows just one conversion tactic we share on the show might double your list and double your business. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestylesshow.com/survival. This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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