The Man Who Commercialized The Internet with Ken McCarthy

Hi, I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle. the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best selling book, the List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 Bonus packages that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

Igor Kheifets  0:48 

Welcome back to the List Building Lifestyle. I’m your host Igor Kheifets. And today I’m hosting Ken McCarthy for the second time. Time Magazine credited Ken McCarthy with being the person who had the fundamental insight that made it possible to transform the internet from a non commercial technical platform to World’s Biggest marketplace and publishing platform. His insights are literally the foundation that made online businesses like Google and Facebook, and millions of others possible. In addition to this contribution, Ken was also the first to publish an article about email as a marketing tool in a marketing industry publication, one of the primary pioneers of the banner ad, early pioneer of the autoresponder marketing, early pioneer of pay-per-click marketing, introduced push button audio to the internet, the foundation of the podcasting industry, early pioneer of practical online video marketing through the e-published the first article on the subject in 94, early pioneer of mobile marketing, and with all that he’s also a phenomenal educator. 

He’s written many books, many of which are credited by some of the industry’s leading marketers as life changing. Ken organized and sponsored the first conference ever held on the subject of business on the World Wide Web way back in 1994. In 2002, when everyone else in the market had shut down after 911 and the dotcom crash, and declared the opportunities on the internet over, Ken launched the most important and influential ancient marketing seminar series of all time, the system seminar, which you can now get the insights from that seminar in the book, I believe with the same title. 1000s of students attended over the years from 23 countries and five continents and many went on to become leaders in the industry. 

In the system seminar, Ken laid down the fundamentals of internet marketing still used today, the opt-in form or the opt-in page, email follow up, A/B split testing, knowing your conversion rates, multiple forms of media, text, photo, audio, video, virtual seminars, a.k.a webinars, and high quality copy. So it sounds like everything that I still use today to make money. I mean, you saw that coming back in 1994. Now I was born in 1988. So I was only six years old back then. But it’s a true pleasure hosting one of the forefathers of internet marketing for the second time around on the show. 

So Ken, welcome back. 

Ken Mc Carthy  3:59 

Great. Thanks for having me. And yeah, I ran into a lot of people who were, you know, 5, or 6 or 8 or 10 or 12 in 1994. And it’s a very interesting experience. 

Igor Kheifets 4:08 

Yeah. And I just came back, as I was sharing with you, I just came back from Perry Marshalls definitive AI seminar in Chicago, and your name still comes up as interesting as it might seem, because in internet years, it’s now been, you know, 30 years, since you kind of put the industry on the map and said, Well, you know, internet is going to change everything, it is a commercial tool and business will be different. 

Igor Kheifets  4:10 

And your contribution is, I mean, it’s still today just keeps on keeping on paying back. So from myself and I guess the people I represent, I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done because I got my start, in a really small town, a hick town, if you will, in Israel, around near the Dead Sea. If you’ve ever been at the Dead Sea. The only jobs we had, by the way, were at the hotels and restaurants at the Dead Sea. That’s where I met my wife, and a bunch of my friends. And you know, there were really no opportunities. Like, you know, they say that America is a land of opportunity, and that’s true America is pretty big and vast. 

Igor Kheifets  5:00  

But there weren’t very many opportunities where I grew up. There were mostly just, you know, hotels, a few factories that ended up shutting down over the years. And the internet was the loophole or the escape hatch, if you will, for me, allowing me to, to build a, you know, a seven figure business like a seven figure US dollar business in a in a place where that, you know, was almost like the entire city’s budget for the quarter. It was just mind boggling way outside my comfort zone. And just I’m very grateful for the way things have developed. 

Igor Kheifets  5:41 

So welcome back to the show. Now, I know you’re not. I mean, you still have you’re in a circle, and you still do some work in the internet marketing space. However, I do know that in the past few years, your focus has shifted. And I only know that because I’m on your email newsletter. So what are you working on these days? 

Ken Mccarthy  6:12 

Good question. And I love describing the internet as a loophole or an escape. Believe me, it was for me too.And I was right in the middle of San Francisco with all the opportunities in the world. And I couldn’t figure it out, honestly. And then this internet thing came along. And I had had experience in direct mail, which is a physical medium. And that might be the theme of our talk today. And I knew a lot about direct mail. And so San Francisco is basically ground zero for the internet. It was, of course, distributed all over the world. But there were a ton of internet people in San Francisco. And there were also a ton of multimedia digital media people. Now this doesn’t sound like a big deal. There was no such thing as digital audio.

Ken Mccarthy  6:50  

You know, at one point, there was no such thing as digital digital video. And the idea of transmitting audio and video on the internet was considered, you know, impossible. Now, I’m not a technical guy at all, as everybody who knows me will attest to and I will confess to, but I do have common sense. And I remember asking an expert, I said, it’s all ones and zeros, right? He said, Yeah. I said, So audio can be broken down into ones and zeros, right? He said, Yeah, video. Yeah, I said, we’re gonna have audio and video on the internet. Now this guy was the leader of digital video in San Francisco, he was the head of the special interest group for digital video for all of San Francisco. And that was a lot of those were all those that’s where digital video was born, really between Silicon Valley and San Francisco. So he was very expert. And he said, Ken, you’re crazy. We’re never going to have video on the internet. I said, we just have to lay some pipe man. You know, because I did have experience in construction as a kid. And I learned very rapidly, you know, these mysterious things called houses.

Ken Mccarthy  7:58  

Put in the foundation, frame them, put in the power, put in the plumbing, seal up the walls, put on the roof. I mean, it’s you know, that’s how the world works. So about me not, I am kind of off, I want to grab something real quick. And I am off radar to the average person. Because you know, as you know, it’s a lot of work to organize a big following. Yeah. And I started in 94. And I retired from that business in 2011. So that’s almost I don’t know what that was close to 20 years. And but I still do think, I wonder if this is legible. Can you read that?

Ken Mccarthy  8:41  

No, my video is a bit blurry. Okay. It says Dear Ken, we ended up at $602,000. And all you got was this lousy gift basket. Thanks for everything, Tom woods. You know, Tom? Yeah. Okay, I have a video of Tom very graciously spilling the beans as to who the greatest marketer of all is. And Tom for people that don’t know is the best selling New York Times author. And he’s got a big following. And he’s no lightweight. And he went to everybody. And I’m not going to embarrass these guys by mentioning their names. But you think of everybody in the marketing field who charges mega dollars for advice. He went to them. He came to me. I charged him my normal fee of $2,000 an hour. And I understand that everybody can pay that, I’m geared to people that already have enterprises, and they want to kick it up a notch. I’m not geared to the big, we do have beginners material, though. We have a lot of that. But if you want to talk to me and work with me, I’m kind of I’m not. I’m not a cheap date, right. So Tom hired me for one hour to look at his strategy.

Ken Mccarthy  9:55  

I completely revised his strategy. You were radically and dramatically and then he hired me for now to look at his copy. So he was in for $4000. Previously, his biggest day ever on the internet was around $120,000. That was his biggest day ever, with two hours of my time, $602,000. So he made like an extra, I don’t know, somebody can do the math for me. But I think he got 100 times return, not 100% Return on my time. And that’s what I’m looking for. When I work with clients. Honestly, I’m looking for people that already have an enterprise that’s, you know, of size, and a little bit of my time can go make a go pop.

Ken Mccarthy 10:37  

But I do teach beginners. I like to teach beginners actually through my system club. So what am I doing now I’m going back to my roots, which is physical media. And the king of all physical media is the book. I was gonna say it in Spanish, but I forgot Libras or whatever. So, the book, and, you know, we’re definitely at and way beyond saturation point on the internet, it is tough to distinguish yourself on the internet. And if you take nothing else from this call, realize that all of marketing is figuring out how to economically distinguish yourself from everybody else in your niche. Economically, I mean, of course, you could, you could spend a billion dollars and become famous overnight. But you know, we don’t have that kind of money, we have to be intelligent.

Ken Mccarthy 11:29 

A colleague and student of mine, who’s from the Midwest helped me with this analogy, which he gave me and I’m going to give to you, if you ever go to Illinois, or Ohio or Iowa or one of these places in the summer, you’ll see it’s an ocean, and I’m not exaggerating an ocean of corn, you can literally wake up in the morning, drive west from Ohio, drive 15 hours, and you are always in a cornfield, alright, and he said, Look, all that corn is the same high, same height, it just all looks identical, nothing stands out, what we’re looking for is a little bit of Miracle Grow, which is a fertilizer, brand name of a fertilizer, we want to add a little Miracle Grow to that corn plant. So it just stands out a little bit more. So that you know 10,000, 10 million competitors, but you’re here. And that’s kind of what marketing is, you want to be the one that grabs the attention. You want to be the one that holds people’s interest. You want to be the one that fans the flame of their desire and imagination. And you want to be the one that gives them clear paths to action. And all of those things require being better at executing those better than everyone else. 

Igor Kheifets 13:00

Can I just chime in on that? 

Ken McCarthy 13:02

Yeah, please. 

Igor Kheifets  13:05

You know, I’ve always been of the same mindset when it comes to differentiation. And I was always willing to work harder than the next guy. You know, when it comes to product launches, or writing copy, I’d be willing to do more research, I’d be willing to write more words, I’d be willing to not take a day off and you know, work on my VSL on the weekends. What I found, however, is in recent years, a big breakthrough for me was not necessarily to stand out in a better way, or whether to just be a little bit different. 

I think that’s why we now see so much contrarian content on social media. For example, I have had issues with my lower back for many years. And so if you get on my YouTube, and as you know now social media is not social media, it’s like very personal media. So my YouTube feed will be different from my wife’s YouTube feed and will be different from your feed, etc. So my YouTube feed now is pretty much just Hip Flexor Stretches, you know, glutes exercises, lower back secrets, chiropractors showing how they’re cracking people. 

And, you know, it’s very contrarian, you know, one of the most common things you’ll see is like, stop stretching your hip flexor, don’t do this exercise, right? If you’re listening to your chiropractor, this is why your back is hurting. So a lot of that contrarian stuff. And this is why, you know, when you’re saying that it’s gotten saturated, it is in every market, it’s saturated. So the breakthrough that we’ve had was with our E-farming offer, and it’s funny using the corn analogy because we took an existing program, or flagship program where we teach people how to build an email list. Incidentally, exactly the same stuff you’ve taught back in the day. You know, build an email list, promote offers, stand out, you know, run email campaigns, etc.

Igor Kheifets 14:52 

And we repositioned it as an E-farming system. And by putting it in this frame of E-farming and people be like, the hell is this E-farming? Is this crypto, is this actually getting a digital farm like what’s going on? Like that doubled the business.

Ken Mccarthy 15:08 

Farming is a great analogy. You know, and the opposite of farming or the contrast of farming is mining. And mining is a cool industry to actually, I find it fascinating. I have mining investments. But mining is, you know, you go in, you dig everything up, and then the mine’s done. And you can make a lot of money. But when it’s done, it’s done. And farming is really interesting. And that if you manage your land properly, you harvest every year, just year in year out. It just keeps rolling along. 

So I really like the farming analogy a lot. You know, going back to Tom woods, the reason he was able to make $605,000 in one day, is he’d been farming for years, built up this huge. I mean, it’s almost like herding you know, like livestock, you know, and I’m not, you know, I don’t want to equate human beings with livestock. But, you know, the herdsman takes care of his herd, you know, protects it from the wolves, makes sure it’s got water, keeps it exercised, you know. So it is very much a husbandry kind of thing. And so it wasn’t so much that I mean, I did give him a great strategy, it was radically different from anything he’d done before. By the way, without spending an extra penny, I didn’t say hey, spend another $100,000. And you might make an extra 50. I said, just change what you’re doing without spending a nickel. And that I think for at least 4X his revenue over his best day ever, probably getting the math wrong, maybe 5x. I don’t know, do the arithmetic for me. 

Ken Mccarthy  16:54 

But that’s why he made the big money. And that’s why, listen, guys, that’s why anybody makes the big money. You know, a lot of emphasis is put on copywriting training. And I think it’s very important. I think copywriting is literally the Swiss Army Knife not only of internet marketing, but all of business and actually thinking all of life, right? Because, you know, what is the copywriter doing? He’s thinking about the other person, he’s getting to understand their viewpoint, their feelings, their motivations, their priorities. And he’s figuring out how to present, find and present an offer to that person that is congruent, right? And resonates with what that person wants.

So if you’re trying to get a kid to eat his vegetables, or you’re trying to persuade your wife that you really need this weekend to finish the launch, and I know next weekend we’ll go out together as I mean, life is full of persuasion. It never ends. And copywriting is sort of the Samurai art of persuasion, they’ve taken it to the highest level. Now that being said, if you don’t have a list to mail to, you’ve got nothing.

Ken Mccarthy  18:02 

Right? So I think of marketing as a bicycle, right? Yes, there are people that can ride unicycles, they’re in the circus, you don’t see them on the street very often. It’s not a very practical way to get around. So let’s forget the unicycle. If you’ve got a bicycle, that means you’ve got a phenomenal copy or strong copy, you don’t have to be a genius. And, a big responsive list, a list that knows you, trusts you, is curious about what you have to say, and you’re in harmony with them, because you understand what they’re all about. That’s the bicycle. And if you got those two wheels, you can pretty much go anywhere. But you can’t have one without the other. And that’s why again, going back to this Tom Woods example because it’s so apt, he had one of the wheels, he had the following. They know him, they love him, they listen to him, when his emails come in, they read them. If he says jump, they jump. Well he didn’t have something that made him different. And it’s hard to be different, right? 

Ken Mccarthy  19:07 

It’s easier to imitate and imitation is not a bad place to start. You know, all the great painters, all the great musicians, all the great athletes, all the great marketers, you start by imitating and that’s how you learn the craft. But at a certain point, then you have to, you have to jump it up a little bit. We talked about how I do that. There’s a wonderful book by Ries that is pronounced R-e-e-s-e, Ries and Trout, the Fish and it’s an old book, and it’s still powerful. It’s called Positioning the Battle for your Mind. I think it’s called the Battle for your Mind. And it wasn’t a new concept, but he described it so brilliantly. And the way I explain it to people is you know, we all have a cubby hole system in our brains. 

Ken Mccarthy  20:00 

You know, we’ve got a file for this, file for that, a file for this. You know what I’m thinking about, you know what toothpaste I use? Well, there’s already something in that cubbyhole. Like I don’t reconsider what toothpaste I’m going to use every morning when I wake up. If you know, and, and that’s how we are. That’s how we have to be, we all have to have these ones.

Ken Mccarthy  20:21 

One thing per cubby hole in our brain. So besides today’s sale, marketing is about identifying a lucrative cubby hole, one that you can place yourself in and placing yourself into that mental cubbyhole. So when somebody’s thinking of x, whatever that might be, you’re the one in there. And there’s not a lot of room in there. You know, you might have two choices. You know, people, you know, apparently I don’t drink either of these things. But people that drink Coke, only want to drink Coke, and people that drink Pepsi. You’re one of those guys? 

Igor Kheifets 20:22

I think that’s so true. You know, every time I go to a restaurant, it’s like, you got Coke Zero. They’re like, Diet Pepsi was like I’m leaving, I’m out.

Ken Mccarthy  21:09  

Yeah, so. So there aren’t a lot of spaces in the cubby hole. And so as you’re gathering your list, as you’re building followers, as you’re engaging and understanding them better, because that’s part of your job is not just to spew out, you want to understand them better, as you’re making offers to them closing sales, getting them in the buying funnel, the most important funnel of all right, everybody’s always talking about Funnels this, funnels that, you know, I have one funnel, people that don’t buy and the people that buy, I want them in that funnel. And once they’re in that funnel, now you can sell them, you have an incredibly enhanced chance to sell them the next thing and the next thing, the next thing. And if you’re familiar with escalation in any large group of people, there’s for those people that will only spend $10. But then you know, as you go up the pyramid, the bigger the pyramid is, the more people will be at different levels, there’ll be people that will spend $100, they won’t think twice. And if the pyramid is big enough, there are people that will spend $1000, they will not think twice about it. 

Igor Kheifets  22:20  

And yeah, this is actually a pretty interesting concept that I wasn’t really aware of until maybe five or six years into my journey. And it’s a really powerful one, because this is where you multiply your income. This is where you can really go 10x or 100x on whatever you’re making. I was just at the same seminar at Perry Marshall seminar, I met a guy who’s into fitness, and he’s like teaching barbell or dumbbell exercises like core strength and stoic strength, he calls it and he himself is very strong, like you can tell.

And, you know, he’s like selling stuff for 17 bucks, seven bucks, maybe 200 bucks. And the first thing I told him is like, Dude, you gotta create, like, at least a 2k, or maybe a 5k program. You know what I mean? Like, just you’re leaving so much money on the table? 

Ken Mccarthy  23:15 

Yeah, no, absolutely. And there’s two things to consider: a pyramid has a base, right? So the broader the base. Right? If you just got a little tiny base, your pyramid is gonna be that big. And you may not find the guys that can pay $2000 or $5,000. But the broader that base becomes, the bigger that pyramid becomes. And now those layers, as you go up, are broader too. It’s the law of large numbers. And it’s a practice of imagination. Some, you know, we’re all you know, there’s certain things that I’ll only spend X on, you know, like, I’m limited there, right? But there I have to remember there are always other people for whom, oh, that’s just, that’s not enough. 

In fact, I’ll give you a great example from my longtime friend and colleague and mentor, Dan Kennedy. He does private consults in Ohio, also extremely expensive. I don’t even know, last time I checked, this was years ago, it was 15 grand for a day. So you come, you bring your team, he just, you know, works you out for a day. Again, if you have an enterprise that justifies that the $15,000 is like nothing because, he’ll make that money back before the first coffee break with an idea. But anyway, he had a client, you know, he always tells clients, they stay in the Hampton Inn, it’s just, you know, two miles from my house where we meet. It’s all good. You know, Hampton is not bad. It was clean, new, you know, this guy couldn’t even imagine staying in Hampton Inn. So he stayed at the I’m drawing a blank on the name. It’s a super luxurious hotel chain, like the Ritz. The Ritz Exactly. So he had to stay with his team at the Ritz Carlton in Cleveland 20 miles away, because he just couldn’t envision himself spending time anywhere else. Now, so why do I bring that up when you’re thinking when you’re building your pyramid?

Ken Mccarthy  25:00  

And the pyramid starts with getting people to buy, make that first purchase, and then continuing offering them more and more and more, you have to remember, there are people that would be squeamish about only spending, you know, only buying your virtual training for $295. They would feel like oh, that’s like for the peasants. You know, they want to get with the guy and consult, you know, and I want to spend 5000, it’s crazy. Now, there aren’t a lot of these people, obviously. But they make a huge difference. 

Igor Kheifets 25:30 

But there’s enough of them, I think, yeah. We underestimate in my opinion, just how many people like that there are. And this is my experience with this when I started selling higher tickets. And so you’re describing the pyramid, right, with a wide bottom and a narrow top. I’ve had the experience of building a side business where me and a partner of mine, we actually went bottoms up, we started with a narrow top, basically, right, and I think we started like an $8,000 offer. But then, as we’ve accumulated, people who couldn’t afford it, didn’t want to buy it, we started creating, like the $4,000, offer the $500 offer that 100. And we build the business backwards. But the other experience I’ve had in the real world, quote, unquote, the real world is the first time when I totally blamed my wife for this, she totally ruined me. She insisted we stayed at the Four Seasons.

And this was the end of it. Like once, once you’ve expanded your mind about what a luxurious hotel is, you really can’t go back to the Hampton Inn, like it’s depressing to go back. And the amount of people who stay at these places, and they’re paying $1000, $2000, $3,000 a night is like a large number of people. So sometimes it’s a great exercise, I think, for your like, abundance mindset, or your ability to comprehend that the market is much bigger than you think, to go into these places to stay there and to observe, like, oh, look, this super luxurious hotel is booked out for the whole week, the restaurant, the reservations are booked out, you can’t get a seat, which means people are happily and willingly spending top dollar on these experiences. So there’s money to go around.

Ken McCarthy 26:38

You said a really important word, their experiences, people with lots of money, already have lots of stuff. And some of them don’t even want more stuff, you know. But what they do buy is what avidly they’ll buy experiences. And they’ll buy access. That’s the key word here. And you also gave a great model. And I think the business that you described where you started with the $8,000 offer and then brought it down, you’re already experienced. You’re an experienced marketer, I imagine your partner was too. Yeah, I would recommend that method. However, for people that are just getting started, it’s such a mind boggling concept. Yeah, that it’s better to, you know, it’s almost better to teach people in cages sell modest, this get learn the mechanics, you learn the basic mechanics, but what you’ll discover, as you’re found out,

Ken Mccarthy 28:22  

they’re out there, they’re out there. And if you lead with a high price thing, which is what I did with the system seminar, so I started, I put on that first conference in 1994. And that was true pioneering stuff. Like, I wasn’t even thinking about making money. I just wanted to get all the players together in one room in San Francisco and say, Guys, let’s commercialize this thing. What are we waiting for? There’s got to be because you have to understand when I put that conference on, and we’re coming up on the 30th anniversary in November, there was no clear concept for how to commercialize the internet.

Ken Mccarthy  28:55  

There was the idea of selling stuff. And Bezos already had eight employees doing that. And so that was a model that we were all looking at. But coming from direct mail and publishing, and I had a filmmaking background, I was also aware that selling information, there had to be an amazing opportunity for selling information and selling advertising. And there was no model at the time, you know?

So I originally put that seminar on the right. And that was like, it was just experimental. It’s like a moon wasn’t a moonshot. It was like, I don’t know, an experiment. But I soon started teaching practical stuff. And then the internet is, you know.  see if you were, how old were you in 1994? 

Igor Kheifets 29:49

six years old. 

Ken Mccarthy  29:50  

So when the internet crashed, you were just 10 so it probably didn’t make a big deal.

Igor Kheifets  29:54  

There’s more. I was still in Ukraine. I can no there was no internet. I had no concept of the stock market, I had no concept of the internet in general, I had no idea even existed. There was no talk of being able to send a letter over the ether. Not everybody had a phone in their home back then, that I mean, we’re talking like everybody watched the same TV show because it was on at like, 8pm on a Friday night. And many people didn’t even have a TV. So you had to go and kind of bundle up at the neighbor’s house and with a bunch of other people to go watch it. It was a different world for me. I wasn’t even aware of what the dotcom crash was, until I watched the documentary, like when I was 15, maybe. 

Ken Mccarthy  30:45  

Yeah, how would you know, how would you know? But yeah, there was for those that were younger, or in a different place and part of the world where you wouldn’t have noticed, the whole thing flamed out in 2000-2001. I had a friend at Knee House that had the biggest PR firm for the core, the mainstream, internet industry clients were AOL, Yahoo, you know, companies like that. And he had 140 employees, he had a whole floor of office buildings in San Marcos, San Mateo, excuse me, and another one in New York City. And they were rocking and rolling. And when I went back to visit or to put on a seminar in San Francisco in 2003, they were gone. There once was this thing that they used to talk about called the neutron bomb. And the idea was that if you dropped it, it wouldn’t destroy any property, but it would kill everybody from radiation, right? And that’s kind of what the internet industry became, between, you know, about 2002, 2002. 2003. It was, you know, when you went back to San Francisco, it was like, the buildings were still standing, but all the people were gone.

Ken Mccarthy  31:55  

It was unbelievable. But of course, it recovered. So I got to the point that I got off track, because like sometimes I get off track on things. I started doing seminars in 2002, when the thing was a smoking crater. And I said, Look, guys, this is a setback. But the internet is still the greatest direct response medium ever.

And the reason I was able to see that back in 94, and I was so confident in 2002 was I had been in direct mail previous to that. And I had been spending my own money doing mailings and seeing responses and working with responses. And I just knew if you could deliver messages for essentially free, you couldn’t fail to make money.

So anyway, as you were suggesting as an option. I started with an expensive seminar – expensive for those days. It was you know, if you got in early, it was $1995. Right. $1,995. 

Igor Kheifets 32:00

Wow, that’s like a lot of money back then. 

Ken Mccarthy 33:02

That was a lot of money. Yeah, that was a ton of money. I mean, now it’s just a month’s rent for a studio apartment. 

Igor Kheifets 33:04

That’s not even, that’s not even half my rent, with real estate prices, what they are in Toronto. 

Ken Mccarthy 33:05

Yeah. And that’s around the world. I just got back from where’s this place, Charlotte, North Carolina, which I’d heard about all these years. And we’re talking about Boomtown, I mean, there is nothing, they’re not giving away anything anymore down there. But anyway, 1995 was a lot of money. And if you procrastinated and didn’t get on the ball, you were paying $2,995. So that was my first product in the internet education space, of that, you know, for that era.

And it was cool, because, you know, I have hundreds of people in the room. And so you can just do the math, it was very good, but the thing that it did, besides making money for me, it also established my value. Right? I wasn’t a guy. So you know, at that point, there were a lot of guys selling, you know, $9.95 cent books on how to, you know, build your mailing list, you know, there were people out there, but they had a very limited imagination. And so I would kind of was the first one really, you know, put the flag in the sand and say big money big, you know, big opportunity, big money. So, yes, absolutely. You can build your pyramid upside down. By coming out with a big offer. Now, you probably have to be a veteran of some sort like it wasn’t my first rodeo. I have been doing business since I was 34. When I put that on, I’ve been making money since I was 14. So it was like 20 years of business activity. I didn’t, it wasn’t my first attempt. But keep it in mind as you learn more and gain more confidence and learn the ropes. Think about this idea that you were presented just you know a while back, which is to start with the big offer. You’ll make some money, you’ll build your, you’ll get attention and you’ll build a value for everything else you do.

Ken McCarthy 35:01 

So the thing that I’m focusing on now, believe it or not, is books, the physical book because we were talking earlier about the need to differentiate yourself from others. And as you know, a lot of internet marketers are lazy. They want to do the least possible they can. 

Igor Kheifets 35:15

And AI is not helping with that. 

Ken Mccarthy  35:39  

Oh, my God. And yeah, I mean, guys, if you need to, if you need to write, if you need to produce filler, and you don’t care about the quality at all, then use AI. Right, if you think you’re gonna write copywriting that’s going to build a real business, a substantial business, one with legs, when they can really grow with AI, dream on. Now, you might use AI for research. That makes a lot of sense, but you’re not going to generate good copy from Ai. But any event everybody wants to do the minimum, and you know, minimum input, minimum output, I’m sorry, guys, that’s just the way it is, you know. So one way to differentiate yourself is by the book, by producing a book, it has never been easier. 

Ken McCarthy  36:20 

And again, it’s as a veteran you’re talking to I remember when you’d mass produce limited edition publications with a mimeograph machine, which probably people don’t even know what that is, is like a round thing. And you, you’d crank that thing, and you put blue ink in and the paper would go in and it would come out. And that was considered magic. That was considered genius.

Ken McCarthy  36:43  

And then xeroxing and photocopying became a thing, believe it or not, there was a time when that was only in big companies, and you didn’t even see one. And then people started typing because there was no word processing. You type your pages out, you’d Xerox them, and then you’d bind them somehow. And now you have a book, right? And then the next stage of evolution, so people think it’s hard now guys, you’d have no idea what hard is, then the next big evolution was apple and the laser printer. And now you could print really good looking stuff as good as what a professional typesetter could do. So now you could instead of these sort of homemade looking things that you had to make by hand, now you could produce really good looking stuff. 

bookbinding was still a problem. If you wanted to print a book, you had to print 1000 of them, and it would be delivered to you on a pallet. You know, so the work. So just so everybody understands, in case you don’t know, you can now send Amazon and there’s a lot of other companies that do this, but Amazon tends to be the best at it. You can send them a file, a graphic for your cover, and you’re done. You don’t have to deal with a printer. You don’t have to write a five figure check. You don’t have to take receipt of…everybody knows what a pallet is, a pallet is like this big wooden thing. And, you know if you have never seen 1000 books on a pallet or two pallets, actually, if it’s a big book, you haven’t lived, you know, but you don’t have to do any of that, all that inventory, all that’s gone. 

Not only that, Amazon will put your stuff in their store. Now why would you do this? Not to be in the book business. That’s not the point. The book is the point at the end of your spear. It is a way to bring people in. I refer to Dan Kennedy a lot because he’s, you know, one of the greatest of the greatest. And I remember him telling me that at one point, produces pre internet 20% of his business, his considerable business was coming from Barnes and Noble retail shelf sales. So here’s a guy that really knows how to write ads, really knows how to speak from the platform, really knows how to build a following, really knows escalation. He knows the whole game. He wanted to make sure that he always had books in print and in circulation. 

And to this day, he puts out two new books every year, a minimum. So why does he do that? Because books establish authority like nothing else, right? There’s a million Instagram channels, there’s a million YouTube channels, there’s a million this, there’s a million that, there still aren’t that many people that get off their ass and put a book together. So having a book makes you an instant authority. A book is an easy thing for people to buy. It’s kind of low cost, it’s low cost of entry. And then the nice thing about it is it’s tangible. And this is the big problem we have with the internet, you know, like everything. It’s a double edged sword. It gives with one hand it takes away with the other. It gives us great ease and producing and distributing content, but also gives everybody else great ease in producing and distributing content. So how do you break that logjam? You include a book in your mix.

Ken McCarthy  40:00 

So, you’re not gonna get rich from books though, strangely enough, I’m making money from books. I’ll explain that in a second. I didn’t even expect to do it. But it’s not that you’re gonna make money. It’s a beacon. It’s like a light flashing. So anybody that’s interested in your niche will now see you and like, Oh, that guy? What’s he doing? Right? And now you receive some money from them, even if Amazon takes 90% of it, but they’re a buyer. Now, they’re not just some tire kicking time wasting pain in the butt. They’re a guy that spends money. And it’s an indoctrination device. Now, you grew up in the Ukraine, right? You must remember the indoctrination system even for children.

They put a lot of effort into it. Well, we capitalist indoctrinate as well. We want to establish that we are the best in our niche, that we’re the person to do business with, that we’re the person to spend money with, and so on. And a book is the ideal indoctrination device. It’s never been improved on. Mao had his Little Red Book. Christians have the New Testament, Muslims have the Quran.

Igor Kheifets  41:13  

The Jews have the Torah. 

Ken McCarthy  41:14 

And they make a big deal about it. They really, I mean, they carry it around on a stick. I mean, it’s a big deal. They don’t just throw it on the coffee table. You know, Christian scientists have the collected writings of their founder, Scientology there, they take it to an amazing extreme, I just this is a total sidebar, but I just want to lay this out for people. They have a facility in California with over 100 employees. They have a full scale, Hollywood size stage set, you know, with all the stuff and lights everything. They have video editors, they have recording artists, they have translators, they have voiceover artists, they are constantly cranking out material, why are they and their books, a lot of their books and what’s not books is films. 

Why are they doing that, because it works, they’re getting a return on their investment. So I want to encourage everybody, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling. You could have a book, a book is a fantastic representation for you. It’s a way to identify who the buyers are. And it’s a way to indoctrinate people. And of course, in the book, you can have all kinds of ads, some subtle, you know, like in the middle of the text, it says, Oh, by the way, if you want to be the world’s greatest List Builder, I have a book on that. Why don’t you write me and I’ll send you I mean, it’s something and then you can have, you know, overt ads, right in the end of the book you can have Caleb, I think it’s Caleb wood. Yep. He’s got a great book out now. He’s got he’s, he’s got his ads right up front, like you open the, brilliant. I mean, so it’s like, I figure that you open the thing, and the first thing you see is the ad for the next book.

Ken McCarthy  43:11 

So they’re a great way to bring people into the fold. So thanks to my wife, and I never would have done this. I used to have to show you how far back I go. I used to have the facts of the week for my club members. And, and I had to limit it because it’s the facts I couldn’t know, so they were short, bite sized pieces of information. I was just churning them out. I had over 100 of them. And my wife said these are really good you should, this is years ago she said she’d make a book out of it. I’m like, oh, man, forget it. That’s too much work. You know, cuz I had a lot I was doing a lot then still am but I was really busy with the seminars.

Ken McCarthy  43:49 

And she went through, picked out the best ones, organized them by topic, and put them into a cover for me. And I went through the whole thing. And I have this book. So I’m like, Cool. I got a book. So I had this book out there I was using as a premium. So when somebody joins the system club, they get this in the mail and I ascribe it to them. It’s great, you know, we talked about sticks, what do you what’s the technical term? You want people to stick rate, right? Well, this simple thing includes your stick rate. Why? Because it’s not a PDF that gets lost on their computer on day two. It’s in their living room, it’s by their bed stand if they’re a commuter, and they’re on a train, they read it on the train, that they take it to the beach, you know, the kids you know, that’s how they’re on vacation, families having fun and the dad is or the mom if she’s the entrepreneur is studying business on the beach, you know, everybody else is having fun, you know? So but it doesn’t disappear is tangible, it’s always there and it imparts your authority. 

Ken McCarthy  45:00  

So we said we’d get into some other things on this call. So I want to do that. So I was not in favor of Anthony Fauci and his malarkey. I saw through it pretty quickly. I have a tweet date, I love the Twitter I’ve been, I’m still frozen. By the way, my Twitter channel’s still frozen, they won’t freeze it. But they didn’t. They didn’t erase it. It’s still there. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know why they’re torturing this way. But I don’t care. And I backed up my Twitter channel. So in any case, they have some bright ideas, anyway, February 1, 2020. This was before there were even cases of COVID outside of China. I said, this is a vaccine marketing scam. They’re going to use it to try to develop a Coronavirus vaccine, which is impossible to do safely. And they’re going to use more speed than science. That’s and that’s to tweet, it took two tweets to convey that.

Ken McCarthy  45:55 

And I never had a reason to think differently. And I think I’ve been proven to be right. So as a marketer, and when you’re a marketer, you’re really a psychological strategist, you’re really kind of a psychological warfare strategist. This is a little secret. Because businesses war, you’re not killing people, but you’re conquering territories. And it’s a serious problem where you want it to work. So as a warrior, I was looking for how I could defeat this thing. And I’m quite grandiose, you know, when you’re the guy that put on the first web conference of all time, and you’re the innovator of all kinds of fundamentals, you tend to become grandiose about what you think you can accomplish. So I wanted to cut this thing off, I wanted to stop it. And I started writing articles to my following, not that that alone was going to do it. But then I started gathering information on Fauci and they very quickly had a ton of information on him. And he’s a bad guy. He’s always been a bad guy. 

Ken McCarthy  46:55 

And I made a film called Fauci’s First Fraud. You can go to it at faucisfirstfraud.com and watch it. It will be released in August of 2020. But now we’re getting to the book part of this. So I learned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. By the way, he was at a low point in his career when I started working with him. I mean, he would have been knocked down, you know, slandered, smeared. His various channels had been canceled. I mean, he wasn’t getting much traction.

But I liked him. I’ve always liked him because I live in the Hudson Valley of New York. And it’s a beautiful place. And they wanted to turn this area into an industrial sacrifice zone. And he was one of the guys that helped stop that. Interestingly enough, I was one of the guys that helped stop it too, and we used physical media, we used direct mail to stop a seven year battle, seven year war, and we won. But that’s a whole nother issue. But anyway, I heard he was writing a book on Fauci. So I sent him a physical letter, not an email, and I didn’t tweet him or any of this nonsense. I figured I guess I made a good guess about his address. And I was wrong, by the way, but I sat on it, please forward this to Mr. Kennedy. And thank God they did, and he read it. And because he was right in the middle of writing this book on Fauci, and he was just, he was getting an offer of a treasure trove of data. He called me up and that’s how we got to know each other. And my material changed the course of that book, he was only going to write one chapter on Fauci, he’s past nefarious stuff, I ended up writing six.

Ken McCarthy  48:29  

that book came out in November, his book came out in November of 2021. And I was the marketing quarterback for it. And because you know, if you sell a book, you want to market the book. In fact, here’s a rule of thumb. If you put in one element of energy into writing a book, you should spend at least the same quantity of energy promoting it. Most authors don’t do it, they put 1000 elements of energy in and they’ll use one element of energy to promote a big idea. If you want to be a success double that if you want to be a big success 10x That anyway, his group was going to launch the book and I asked them okay, what happens after launch day and they said they looked at me like with this sort of what do you mean after the launch day I said well, the launch day just the beginning right? Oh no, then we’re going to have a bake sale and then we’re going to do a Save the Wheels program I mean, literally insane. I said wait a minute, guys, you got the best book on the best subject about the most prominent guy, currently written by the guy with the best family brand name on the planet. There’s no better brand name on the planet for a last name than Kennedy.

Ken McCarthy  49:36 

I mean, he’s like that name right up there with Nike and Apple. So I said guys, this is like it will never get this good again for you or even for anybody else. Like this is the perfect pitch. And I had to fight and I mean, oh my god, the energy had to be put in to get these knuckleheads to use their million person mailing list, to use their daily news bulletin.  

When I had to, I made myself unappealing to have after. But anyway, we got the book up to the top number one Amazon for nonfiction and we kept it there for six weeks, and then I couldn’t take it anymore and I quit three days later it fell off the top rung and never recovered. There’s a lot of lessons there. Don’t think people that are famous are smart, and know more. Also, if you’ve got something to promote it, if you’ve got a list, use your dang list. But here’s the thing, that book was the beginning of the end for Tony Fauci. So if you’re a fan of Tony Fauci, you can hate me, if you don’t like Tony Fauci. And you’re glad to see he’s being called to Congress over and over and over again, it began with a book. That’s how powerful books are.

Ken McCarthy  50:50  

And then I thought, Well, I made this film. And it was cited 28 times in Kennedy’s book. So it had a big impact on it. So I’ve got a, I got to film, why don’t I make a book? So I just took the script of the book. And I put the script to the film and just put it in the book. So that’s all it was. That’s all it is. But what I did, this is kind of an innovation. I hardly ever see anybody do this and see if I can show this.

Ken McCarthy  51:15 

I put? Of course not won’t show. Wait a minute. Okay, well, that’s the appendix. Of course, you won’t see it in the main text of the book. It’s like a magic trick that’s not working. You can see, I had photos everywhere. So I took the script of it, I took the script of the book as the film, and screenshots relevant to that part of the script, and made a book out. And then I doubled the size of the book with a lot of appendices that don’t have any pictures. So you can literally go through this book and just look at the pictures and read the captions and know the plot of what happened. Or you can dive in and read everything word for word. By the way, I just gave you a very important powerful lesson on copywriting.

Ken McCarthy  51:57  

Okay, if you’re writing a copy, there are two kinds of readers, there are people that will start at the beginning and read every word. And there are people that will skim. So you have to produce the letter for both people, every word, every phrase, every sentence, every paragraph, it’s gotta be boom, right? But you also want to have call outs, graphics, captions, subheads, bullets, so that people who are in a hurry and don’t want to take a lot of time or want to look quick before they read. They can pick it up, go through it and go, Oh, wow, this is worth reading. I’m going to read the whole thing. 

So books are powerful. The next thing I did, I worked with a woman who’s in the Kennedy circle named Vera Shroff, and she was a child in Romania during World War Two. And, you know, the Nazis came and grabbed everybody who was designated Jewish, and, and took them to actually camp and you’re in what’s now Ukraine. And she luckily survived. Those Romanians realized they were going to lose the war. And they’re like, Oh, my God, we’re gonna lose this war, we better start doing some good stuff. So they took all the children who were orphans. And see if they had a family to go to, let them leave the camp, and send them back so that they can live with their family. So that’s how Vera survived, she went to Istanbul, which a lot of people should know this history, Turkey, took in a lot of Jewish refugees, and then and saved a lot of people. In fact, when Einstein was kicked, you know, basically, the way the Nazis worked, was if you were Jewish, you couldn’t work your way out.

Ken McCarthy  53:39  

I mean, it was just insane. And so Einstein had to find a new home, the first country that offered him a new home was Turkey. They said, we’ll make you head of our physics department. And then Princeton came along and said, We’ll do even better, we’ll give you an office and a house, you don’t have to do anything, just walk around in the woods and say a few smart things every now and then well, that that was a better offer than having to actually work for a living, you know. So anyway, Vera is big on this thing called medical freedom, which is letting people decide, hey, I’m going to research it, I’m going to talk to doctors, and then I’ll decide how you treat me, you’re not going to tell me that I have to do this or that. Because it’s my body and I’m the one that’s going to pay the price. So that was all encoded after World War Two after a thing called the not the Nazi doctors trial, the doctors trial. And these are just simple principles that are meant to protect patients from doctors because sometimes you have to protect patients from doctors. If you don’t know that I just gave you some really important information. And we had to translate. It’s a very small document. We had it translated into 12 languages.

Ken McCarthy  54:45  

Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, Indonesian, you know, we figured out what the top spoken languages were. I wrote an essay, she wrote an essay. Why did I do this? Because everybody talks about the Nuremberg Code. Nobody can put it and hold it in their hands and read it. So strangely enough, this is still the only copy of the Nuremberg Code you can buy in 12 links and in any language, but in 12 languages, we’ve sold nearly 10,000 of these. I didn’t expect to sell 10,000. I did it because I thought the book has to exist, it just has to exist. So I wrote another book that I felt had to exist. 

And by the way, I’m watching the clock. Are you okay, on time, and we have to wrap it up. We’ll have to do part two. Yeah. All right. I put this book out, merely because I thought somebody had to write it. We’ve sold over 10,000 copies, I put $45,000 in the bank from it, didn’t even intend to. And I think this thing could sell another $90,000. If I get a few mass media breaks Anyway, guys, start by getting my book that will educate you, right? But start thinking about, Hey, maybe I could have a short book. Igor has done this, of course, and he may educate you on how to do it. I’d love to do another, I’d love to do a whole section on it. Sometime with you. 

Igor Kheifets 55:00

Yeah, I, we might, we might just do that. I’ve had my own experience with books. And it’s been a fundamental part of the list building lifestyle in general, because we’ve got the podcasts, we’ve got the book by the same title. I’d love to share my experience on how that came to be and the hurdles that I bumped into with my own book. But I agree with you that there’s no, there’s no more powerful business card than a book. And I think the quality of the people that you get into your universe or into your herd, I don’t think there’s a better way to do it. Like even if it’s $5 or $7 or $10, even a free book that they can get on Kindle Unlimited or something like that. That gets you a fan for life, if that person agrees with your ideas. Now, if that person doesn’t agree with your ideas, they’ll still read your book just to see what crazy shit you’re gonna say. And they will continue to follow you. At the very least they’ll know who you are. And that is also a big deal. 

Igor Kheifets  57:08 

So we’ll definitely do a part two about COVID, about books about exposing Fauci about exposing the medical system, which I think is just fraudulent about the education system, perhaps as well, which is something that I have a big beef with. So Ken, almost everything you say, almost everything that comes out of your mouth is worth writing down. So I’m hopeful that our listeners will really listen to this episode every now and again. Thank you for sharing all these insights. Thank you for the work you’ve done. Thank you for the work that you continue to do. Thanks for being a catalyst for many people like me, just completely average people with no sense with no high IQ or whatever, just you know, opening the door and paving the path for the rest of us. With that. I do have to say goodbye for now, because we’re over time, but there will be a part two, I promise and when we sit down, then I look forward to having you share some more of your wisdom and insights. Great, it’s been a great pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes, transcripts of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my best selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how we made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.