Timeless Lessons from Three Decades of Online Business with Terry Dean

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 bestselling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus a $3,000 bonus package 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.

00:52

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets. And today I have the pleasure and the honor to be speaking to Terry Dean, a true legend in space. If you’ve been marketing in line for more than a few years, you probably heard the name somewhere, you ‘ve probably been referenced to you by some other guru. Because, you know, we’re again, we’re talking to a living legend. So, it’s a true pleasure and an honor. Terry, welcome to the Lisbon lifestyle. Well, thank you for bringing me on the list building lifestyle.

01:26

Yeah, it’s quiet, quite incredible. I’m grateful to our mutual friend. I think it was Doberman den who made the introduction, who also hosted them on the show a couple years back. In fact, he was one of the first 20 guests I think that we’ve ever done. Because initially, the show didn’t really have a guest format. It was just introduced a bit later, so I’m grateful to him for that amazing guy. And by the way, if you’re looking for a great copywriter for the next project, you should reach out to Doberman, Dan, because he’s quite one of the few remaining Gary Halbert students I think, and another living legend in the space. So, but that’s enough about Doberman, Dan. So, Terry, you’ve been playing this game, the Make Money Online game since 1996. Just so you understand how crazy this is, for me. I was born in 1988. In 1996, I was still living in Ukraine. And then I think the pinnacle of technology that I’ve seen was a portable cassette player, and a VCR that was like, the most you could expect. And you know, there was no So, talk about the internet, ever in the household or in the media. So, you’ve already been on the forefront of online marketing and you know, the interwebs. So how’s that? Like? How was it back then? What was it different or same about the industry and the methods used and then the landscape in general? Well, we go back to 96. And you have to remember, this is the very early days of the internet, people might know in the US, AOL sending out all of those free discs, hey, take your free trial of AOL or, or I started with CompuServe, which is a company that’s long gone. And using slow dial up modems and where you would have never even thought about having video online. Now everything today is video. There’s no chance you could even play the video back then when I first started online, but one of the smartest things I did in the beginning, which really led to my success long term was I got a hold of some materials by Gary Halbert. I got a hold of some materials by Jay Abraham, Bill Meyers, some of the other direct mail legends. And one of the first things that I said was I’m going to look at everything they’re teaching about direct marketing, and how much of it is going to apply to the internet. And I found quite happily that the majority applied to the Internet, what was working in direct mail courses, little adjustments as little changes that we make, but what they were teaching worked online, so I took it online. And you mentioned that in your intro about Dan, who’s a friend of mine, he was actually one of the protegees of Gary Halbert. Gary Halbert materials were some of the things that got me started online, even though Gary Halbert, I don’t. At the time when I was reading his materials, he didn’t say anything about the internet at that time. But everything he taught about direct marketing applied to the internet, whereas they were building up direct mail lists. I started building up an email list. And that was my start online. Same thing that you teach today about a list building lifestyle, the biggest discovery that first six months in my business was the importance of my email list. And that really led to my success back then. And it’s still the major source of my income for myself and my clients today. 

05:00

Yeah, that’s So, pretty impressive. I think given that data under this is famous for churning out fads, right, like every year, there’s these two to three fads. And it seems like these fads are speeding up. As I grow older, right? Like they used to be a fad used to last five years now fad is probably less than five months. And you can’t really build it’s almost feels like everything is a shifting sand where you can really make a long-term play. Because in six months’ time, something might happen. Like, as we’re filming this, you know, there’s talks of tick tock getting bent. While I know there’s a lot of people who rely on tick tock heavily for their online presence and everything else. So that is quite fascinating. I’m really happy. Obviously, it serves us well, here, the Lisbon lifestyle that, you know, having an email list back then was just as important as it is today. I think today, it’s even more important, because it’s one of the few remaining ways to months’ time have control over your audience. Right, that, you know, obviously, if you’ve got like a YouTube channel with 500,000 subscribers, you know, that YouTube channel can be shut down. If you’ve got a Facebook account with a large group, that account can be banned. I know a few people who not only got their ads account banned, but also their personal account accounts banned at one point. So, having a list is Right, one of those super, super important things too, almost to build a moat, around what you’re doing right? It is, I’m going to disagree with you slightly, not the importance of a list, of course, but the fact that you said it’s even more important today than it was then I’m gonna say it’s always been premier importance, I’m always gonna say, pretty much. Now I’ve been doing this, how long is this? This is 27 years now that I’ve been doing this, and then having clients and hundreds of different markets over that time. The list is the number one thing. And it has been this entire time. In the vast majority of the markets, I have a few clients who have direct connections, especially if they’re selling a high-ticket service, like a $10,000 month service, it’s more direct selling that they’re doing than email. But the vast majority, my clients, their email list is their income. And everything else is a way to help them build their email list. Yeah, you know, it’s so true, what you’re saying about people who sell something really high ticket, they’re doing more direct selling, because I remember back in 2019, I was a member of the Joe polish’s Genius Network. And I went there because I wanted to make great connections. But I quickly learned that half the room were actually service providers, you know, financial advisors, insurance people, people who do your estates and people who teach how to sell to people that teach how to speak. And all of a sudden they’re, like, interesting. So, half of this room is actually trying to sell me products and services. Because I’m a high-ticket, high-quality buyer for that, and I fit into their ideal customer avatar, they’re not here to mastermind with me, they’re not here to like share techniques, they’re actually here to demonstrate their value to build a connection with me, and then pitch me with a service. And that was a big, it kind of put me off if I’m honest, because if I’m paying 30 grand a year, I felt that I shouldn’t be paying 30 grand a year just to be absorbed into more stuff. Now, there was no hardcore upselling in the room, obviously. But you could, I mean, you could read between the lines, you know, like you could feel that sound and wouldn’t want to take you out to lunch or whatever. And all of a sudden, after the event, they hit you up with a random text message in a winning set up, a call and wanting to find out what you do, and all that stuff. And high-ticket, high-quality there were some crazy obstacles, though there too, like not high-ticket, high-quality the most practical stuff that you’d imagine.

08:49

We’re like art, for example, right? Again, the least practical thing of all, but there was this guy who had this really interesting style, who ended up building a business selling this art for entrepreneurs. For high-ticket, high-quality lots of money. And any right? If you’re selling something ultra-high ticket, like a service, you’re relying less on your list. But if you’re not older, high ticket, you’re definitely like everything is a slave to building the list. Almost everything like these days, anything I do ever. My first concern is how am I building a list off of that, you know, like and running traffic of any kind to any page that isn’t capturing email address is a huge downturn for me. You know what I mean?

09:43

Well, I’ll even admit it this way, because I have some of my clients, especially in the consumer markets, and I’ll mention that upfront that I’ve helped a lot of clients in internet marketing type niches, but I have more joy. I think today, in many cases in a lot of the consumer niches and consumer niches mean things like I have clients who help people.

10:00

We’ll improve the tennis game, or help them learn Spanish, or help them train their dogs or things like that. And I have clients also in specific business to business and uses. So, a lot of different variants that I’ve helped people with. But in some of these markets, we’re running ads directly to a low-cost offer for like a $49 offer. Okay, so we’re running Facebook ads directly to a sales page for $49. We found in many cases, that’s more successful for us than running to an opt in on Facebook ads. Okay, so we’re reading this, but even then, we’re thinking that what we’re doing is we’re building a buyer’s list, right? We don’t even care about profiting off the $49 sale, that $49 sale is to help us pay for the advertising. That’s what it’s there for. We might earn some profits on the upsells. Okay, but we’re building a list of buyers in that case. So even in that case, where we’re selling something, we’re still focused on the list. Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s tremendous. So, you know, now I can check off the list discussion off my checklist to make sure that a legend like you Greek reaffirms the primary message of this podcast. Now, we can chat about some other stuff. 

11:09

So back in 1996, compared to today, almost, almost 20 years later, right. So, 90, more than 20 years later, more than 20 years later, almost 30 years later.

11:21

What are some of the differences that you’re seeing, as far as markets, as far as media, as far as techniques?

11:31

Well, what stands out for you? Well, a lot of things are going to have changed. From then till today, of course, we have so much more technology, we have so many more tools that make things a whole lot easier when I first started online, makes it sound like you know, Grandpa, I was had to walk uphill both ways to school, but we actually had an offline credit card processor. So, I took orders from the Mexico website, and then actually had to process the orders separately. They didn’t process at the same time somebody was ordered. That’s the original 1996. Okay, so we have all these automations, we have all these tools, we have AI that’s taken over everything is only going to get better in the future. So, you have all these differences, that makes things easier, faster, and more effective. Now, what we’re also going to have, at the same time, you’re gonna have more competition. So, no matter what market you’re in, it’s going to be more competitive. So, we work really hard. I will tell clients that we choose a big market. So, we choose a market that has a lot of customers, and it has a lot of demand, and it has a lot of competitors in it. Because I don’t want to go to a market today that doesn’t have any competitors, because that means everybody failed. Oh, okay. What we’ll do instead, is we’ll take this big market, and then we’ll start niching it down. So how can we be unique? How can we make a unique promise in this market? How can we stand out against the competition? So that’s a much bigger factor, and going into the market today is looking at what everybody else is doing? And how can we find the gap? That’s still there. And many times, you know, a quick tip of finding the gap is, a lot of times it’s focused on the audience themselves. I do so much of my focus on the audience and what makes them stand out. And I’ll say right now, when we’re in a period where there’s a lot of turmoil around the world, there’s, you know, a lot of people talking about recessions, things like that. Always get more focused when I’m in this big market. But what is the most fluent portion of this market? Want?

13:27

What are they buying? The top 5%, the top 20% in its market? What they want is what’s in most demand for them. And that’s the type of audience you want to go after. And like one quick tip, this doesn’t apply to everybody. But if you’re selling any type of info product, a lot of times your audience is going to be a little bit older than you expect, especially the fluid audience because many times those who are older have more money. And I’ll say from my clients selling info products across consumer markets, a lot of their best buyers are 45 Plus, even if it’s a market that you might think was often younger than that. Yeah, that’s So, a really cool observation. I think Dan Kennedy has a whole book about it about a fluid buyer, and he wrote many, many years ago, he’s basically said the whole thing. He also has a book about baby boomers. I think, like a whole book about why boomers are, should be the target of your advertising, because they actually hold on to most of the money in America. But I want to circle back to what you said about markets with competition, because it’s such a counterintuitive point.

14:29

As somebody who teaches people how to get started online, naturally, I get a question about niche selection, market selection. I had to teach her a few times over the last year. And you know, usually people are extremely, they sort of take aback and be like what but there’s so much competition in that market. Why would you go there?

14:51

Yeah, you actually want to go there because if there’s no competition some other market means everybody feels like I’ve never had anyone. Put it that way.

15:00

You know, I’ve always heard people say, well, if there’s competition, there’s money to be made. But I’ve never heard the other end of it where it’s like, if there is no competition, then everyone died, you know, where everyone failed, or everyone burned their money and wasted their time, and they couldn’t make it work. So, that’s, that’s so smart. Well, you asked the question based on what was different, you know, 27 years ago to today, and I can tell you 9096 Sure, you could find all kinds of markets that had no competition at all. Yeah, but today, you know, right now, I’m not smart enough to figure out a market that no one’s ever thought of before. Okay, that’s that it’s too much arrogance, to think that you’ve, you’ve somehow figured out a market that all the other billions of people have started hadn’t thought of yet. So, somebody has been in the market. So, unless there’s people who are successful there, then that means everyone failed. And at the same time, you know what, I really like a lot of these consumer markets. Now, you’re not going to see this in making money, okay, make money has some awesome competitors, people who know what they’re doing. And you have to really narrow down to the niche that you’re going after inside the big market, make money, but you go in some of these other markets. And what I really love in a consumer market is when you find a market where you know, there’s people making money, so there’s a lot of competitors there. But the majority of them are doing a really bad job. That is a dream market to me. Lots of competitors, making money doing a bad job of it at the same time. Because that means you can go in and use good direct marketing principles and clean up in the market. Yeah, yeah, you’re basically sticking them the odds in your favor, especially if you’ve got any skills.

16:32

That’s really cool. Yeah, you know, the other thing I was thinking about, what Wait, what is different in the last 27 years, I think the barrier to entry is now so low, both in terms of how much money it takes to start an online business, as well as the technical skills you need to have. Because even when I started that, you still had to know how to use the FTP client to upload files, you still had to know how to work with WordPress, you still had to know how to write some basic HTML code. Because most websites that you’d be building would be, you know, either HTML pages, or whatever WordPress or whatnot. Now everything is a drag and drop. Everything is online SAS platforms; you don’t really have to understand much of anything at all. And AI, of course, makes it even easier because now there’s AI that’s creating an entire ecommerce website from a keyword or something. This is definitely true. So, technology makes everything easier. But I’ll say this, this is an advantage we have if you’re smart about it, as I got my foundation with those core direct marketing principles, the Gary Halbert principles, all of those. And you’re going to find that a lot of people get so enamored with the technology today, that they don’t learn the basics. They don’t learn the basic foundational direct marketing principles of how you sell and see I’m going to mention something that hasn’t changed in the last 27 years and isn’t going to change in the near future either. And that’s human nature. I can say back 2000 years, human nature hasn’t changed, which means the selling process, the overall messaging that we use, hasn’t really changed either. Now how we deliver it might change. But the actual core message and what convinces people to buy hasn’t changed. And one of the best things you can learn is how to persuade people to learn the basic persuasion skills, for email, for sales pages, for videos, for all these principles, and it’s all the same message. It’s just core selling to people that a lot of your competitors that know how to use all the technology aren’t learning how to sell. And you end up getting lost at that point in time. I have all the tech, but you can’t sell, right? Well, you know, a lot of people are afraid of this word sell. They’re just like, Oh, I’m a salesperson. I don’t want to be a salesperson, it’s dirty.

19:02

But, uh, but I agree with you that fundamentally, the way people buy and what they think they’re buying doesn’t really change. So, the actual thing that they’re buying might be a little bit different compared to 10 years ago, but the underlying reasons, both emotional and logical as to why they’re making the purchasing decision. Those don’t change at all the primary motivations, you know, such as fear, greed, love, wanting to be accepted, et cetera, that doesn’t change at all. And speaking of these things, I completely agree with you that this is the So, the things you absolutely have to know. In other words, if you suck at tech, but you are at least medium to advanced, as far as human psychology goes, and as far as being able to perceive why people are buying or you educate yourself on these things, you can quite quickly succeed, while if it’s the other way around when you’re super technical, but you’re completely ignorant about the other stuff, there’s no way you’re going to succeed. So, with that in mind, do you mind sharing maybe a few resources, your favorite resources that you recommend to your clients as far as being able to hone your skill when it comes to perceiving? Who’s buying, why they’re buying? What, what is the driving purpose of them hitting that binary?

20:30

Well, I’m gonna be self-promotional first here, hopefully, it doesn’t offend you too much for that. And I’ll say, I give away a free report. Actually, there’s a free cheat sheet for the Golden Glove. On my website, I think we have a link for that, that you’ll probably share alone with this. Yeah, we’re sure that you can also state out loud but it’s over at mymarketingcoach.com/golden-glove. And you can pick up a free cheat sheet, which is the five steps I call the five fingers of the Golden Glove, and I’ll throw them out right here really quick. It’s a desperate problem, a unique promise, overwhelming proof, an irresistible offer and a reason to act now. And how you apply those five principles. No matter what you’re using online, that’s inside the cheat sheet plus you get several videos that teach you that as well. So now we’ll get past the commercial section of me and commercials. And I’ll say there’s a lot of really good books on sale. And as weird as it may sound, a lot of times I would tell people to go back to some of the older stuff. And that would mean looking up some of the stuff by John Caples. Look up some of the stuff by Joe Sugarman. These are just books you can go over on Amazon and pick up some of their books. There’s a lot of really good books if you can go to Gary Halbert, I think his son still has all of his newsletters online, you can look for Gary Halbert, newsletters and read through all those. As I said he was one of my foundational things that I learned from a lot of things and all his newsletters are free to read online from his own life. Harry’s writing is almost hypnotic. Like when I reread his newsletter issue, especially the one about water, where he’s sharing it, this is the sales letter he wrote about waters, like how do you sell water? It’s like the most mundane commoditized thing in the western society. And he made me excited. Wow, that guy, that guy could write insanely.

22:21

It’s, it’s, you know, you know, there’s a resource that I hear I’ve never heard anyone talk about, there’s this author, I really, really like him. Robert Greene, he wrote, he wrote the 48 Laws of Power. I think that’s his most famous book. Now 48 Laws of Power is a book about manipulation, mind games, tactical warfare, et cetera. So, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, like you really need the stomach for that book. But he actually wrote a different book. I think after 48 Laws of Power, it’s called seduction that I really enjoyed. Because what is seduction? It is marketing. It is the art of getting someone to like you, trust you and want to, you know, want to do your bidding, basically. And that book outlines lots of really, really cool proven principles as far as you know, getting people to like you, trust you to want to be with you, want to be friends with you want to, you know, buy from you or, etc. And he and what’s really cool, just like you said, Human Nature doesn’t change. The examples he’s providing are always based in history. In fact, he would pull up a story you know about Napoleon or about, you know, the Queen Elizabeth or some Karl eats from France or something. And it’s so fascinating. It is absolutely fascinating the way he breaks it all down. And of course, another one is a classic is Influence by Robert Steele, Dini, and then he’s got a follow up book to that called pre fluence, which I actually didn’t think, you know, I didn’t think it was as good as the first. Yeah, those would be those are great resources. I’ll mention this too, because you said a lot of people are afraid of the woods. So, I think part of that is because they’d have to, they’ve had to deal with bad salespeople at some point in time where they felt a lot of pressure came in on them. And I’ll say this, you know, I’ve never enjoyed one on one sales, like doing phone sales and things like that. Even in my own business. I run a coaching practice, you know, high ticket coaching. I don’t sell it by free discovery calls. I have done them, but I don’t like doing them so I don’t do them. I do all my selling straight from emails from sales pages and from videos. Okay, I’ve done sales through webinars, but I don’t even like doing those unless we turn them evergreen. So, it’s an ongoing recorded one that we do for webinars. So, when we talk about selling this doesn’t mean in person uncomfortable selling, most of your selling can take place, right and all of my selling now all takes place simply from written or produced materials I did by myself in my room. No, no, that’s, that’s absolutely true. And, you know, people are a bit shocked when they ask me about, you know, whether I have an office or whatnot. And I and I don’t actually have this same laptop, I’m not sure if I can pull it all the way here. So, this is a 13-inch MacBook. Obviously, I upgraded over the years, but it’s the same 13-inch MacBook from which I do everything. And, you know, you really don’t need to go and talk to people or get them on the phone or whatever a lot of it can be done in a safe environment where you don’t have to risk embarrassing yourself or you don’t have to put direct pressure on somebody. 

25:49

But I also want to say that you can be ethical and still sell really well. If you understand the difference between pressuring somebody unethically and creating urgency in your offer. Now, you mentioned that in your five-step framework, right? The fifth step is giving them a reason to act now. So can you maybe speak a little bit more than that, a reason to act now means that now it’s possible to do an offer that does not have a hard deadline. But I promise you, every one of your offers that does have a hard deadline is going to out produce all the ones that don’t. Okay, let’s take somebody who sends out daily emails, and they send out emails, let’s say that most of the daily emails are promoting a membership or they’re promoting another product. And then they run a special for four days, okay, during the month, and they only do this once a month, okay, for some reason, this person only wants the one five-step special the whole month, right? You’re probably laughing at this, like I’m only doing one special, but okay, they’re only doing one special. Alright, and so they render for four days with a hard deadline. On the fourth day, there’s a discount, there’s a bonus, there’s something else that makes it special that you have to jump in now, that last day of the special is probably going to outsell every other email they sent for the entire month. That’s how important a reason to nail is. And I even call it a heart attack curve at this point in time. What’s that mean? Well, with all these years of experience, you would think that I would always get my offers, right? Okay, that’s what a beginner would think. All right, you know better than this, because you have experienced this, not every offer you produce is going to be successful. The other offers, every offer I lost, that I launched to my list is profitable, because that’s easy, okay. But there are some that are much, much more profitable than others. So, there’s times, we’ll all run a new offer to my list. And I did this for years, I don’t do it anymore. I’ve actually got past it. And that’s why I joked around the heart attack curve. And that is the first day I’m like, you get the sales from all those people who immediately jump on, you’ll know that anybody has list, you’ll know that when you send out a new offer that people haven’t seen before, that first about 10 to 15 minutes, you get a whole bunch of sales from the names you already know, I know these people, okay, they jump on it, immediately they jump on everything new, then you’re gonna have a little bit of a drought often will say again, a four day special. The rest of that day in the next day, there’s not a whole lot of sales. Okay? The third day, usually early in the morning, there’s not a whole lot of sales on this four-day special. And so, I call it the heart attack curve. So, there’s a lot of times I went to my wife and said, you know what, I really missed it on this offer. Because we’re not selling much. Okay, and then you start to hit that last day. and everything changes as you get a flood of orders. And I’m saying it’s common now that we see more than half of orders in the last 12 hours of that special. So that’s a reason to act now.

28:33

No, that’s absolutely true. And you know, I almost never mail offers without a deadline. In fact, many of my offers are evergreen, just like you mentioned. And what I try is even if the offer is like say evergreen, I’ll still put some kind of a deadline on it and say, well, if you get it after the deadline, you don’t get the bonuses, or something that extend or I’ll even create a very specific type of website where it’ll know that you visited the website before. And if you didn’t act within the deadline, you simply can’t act on the offer, unless you like actually going through the trouble of clearing your cookies or getting a new device or going reconnecting from a library or something. Because, you know, we actually went through a lot of trouble to try and connect the device cookie and the connection, like your WiFi connection and everything to try and have a more authentic feel to our scarcity. But I’ve always, always, always, always advised people to always have some kind of scarcity because if you don’t, they can put it off forever. And there’s a great phrase, I don’t recall who said it many, many years ago when I started in marketing later means never it does. Well let me mention this. This will give something that people can use. And that is let’s say that you have a membership site. So, the offer is always the same.

30:00

What if we have this membership site, it’s a monthly continuity that people are paying for, there’s a lot of little tricks that you can do to add in some scarcity, for some reason. For example, I published a print newsletter 15 years ago. Okay, I stopped publishing when I got tired of writing it myself. But one of the things I did is the best time to actually sell that newsletter was right before the next issue came out. Because I say if you want to print a copy of this newsletter, you have to join by this moment, because this is when the list is getting used, and it’s going to be printed and mailed out. So, you have to be by this time. In addition, another thing is that since I had a monthly live webinar for q&a, that’s another reason act now was right before the monthly live webinar, you tell everybody else about the monthly live webinar. Another trick is what you just said, is you have a series of several different bonuses. And I’m thinking right now one of my clients, I think he actually created almost like 15 different bonuses like this so that he could rotate different bonuses and all different Ponton times to bring people into his membership site. Okay, now we’re writing this bonus for the membership site now that he could run through, and he’d have the next bonus that he could run next. So, he’s constantly having something to promote, to get people into that membership site. So even at a point where you don’t think there can be a reason , there’s still gonna be a reason to act now. And then I, I actually call it the continuity double bump, which is any client who launches a membership site, we always launch it at two price levels below where we want. So, if our goal is to sell it at $39 a month, we might launch it at 19. Okay, we launched at 90 in the first 30 days, that’s our founder’s price, the price now goes up to $29. For the next six months, as long as you stay a member, you keep the $90 price. And what you’re going to find is those original members, they’ll stay for years, they do not want to cancel because if they cancel and come back, they’re getting the new price. That’s right, so $29 now we keep that for six months, we do the exact same thing. About six months in, we run the same special again, okay, now it’s gonna become $39 for you. Same thing, another huge wave of members joins and never cancels.

32:02

I’m thinking right now of one of my clients who ran a fixed term type of membership, which meant the view was you joined today, you got month one. Next month, you’ll get month two, and he got out like 100 months in it. And he got tired of actually doing this membership site. He’s like, you know, I want to cancel it. But I got these, all these members who joined at the original price we came up with who will not leave, they will not stop, you know, being a member of the site. I mean, money, right, I don’t know what to do with it.

32:32

It’s like golden handcuffs, I have to keep producing content, because these people will never leave them. We’re talking at that point in time. He was like nine years old. So that’s what you do with membership sites, as well as just figure a way to use that reason that now he knows everything we’re discussing here. It’s ethical, because the fact that you’re getting this bonus, and we’re doing our absolute best to make it a real deadline for this, even if we’re doing software. So, it’s evergreen, you’re still okay, how can I make this as effective as possible? I mean, there’s, there’s got to be some way people can find a way around it. They can use their friend’s phone, for example, to get around it. But we’re gonna do our very best to make it a real deadline. Because you know what I hate? I hate it when people say, hey, this is the deadline, or you see, there’s websites that actually have the scripts up top and say, hey, you only have 10 minutes left? What happens in 10 minutes, the counter now still shows zero. Or you can reload the page and start it right up. Right? Right, that happens too. And, you know, anytime that my team sets up a timer, and we don’t set up a redirect, although it doesn’t quite happen a lot anymore. But it used to happen. So, I would actually check it like so if the offers end at midnight, right? I’ll check at 1am. And it’s like, still, there’s the offer and the timer’s just go 10000 You know, I would always be so mad to be like, people think I’m doing bullshit scarcity. And I gotta buy from me anymore, just the interchange.

33:52

But yeah, you don’t want to keep your scarcity authentic. And I think you want to have fun with it too. Because just like I mentioned with a membership site where you can launch it at 50% off, or with 50% Off with different bonuses. You could do occasional sales, like every now and again, I’ll do a Canada Day Special, or I’ll do on Black Friday, I’ll try to put something together. And yet, it means that people who joined before are paying a different price than the people who will join Black Friday. But guess what? It? They don’t necessarily complain, you know, they recognize that the way our capitalist society works is that there’s specials every now and again. And if somebody comes in and complains and be like, hey, can you put me on the new price? We’ll put them on, we really don’t mind that. There’s no bad blood. And we know we’re not going to go broke over one or two customers switching to a lower price point. You know, I’ll mention this one because several clients use it for their Black Friday special. And as weird as it sounds. We’ll throw in some extra bonuses for Black Friday for their membership, and we’ll do a $1 trial. You know what I love about the $1 trial is you don’t have the problem you just mentioned. Because you don’t have customers that come back and say hey, somebody’s getting the cheaper price. 

35:00

But it cares about $1 trial for the next 30 days. And it makes us special. The first time we did this extra bonus $1 trial on a $29 a month membership site, this client signed up like 700 members for his Black Friday special, which was like, like, that’s awesome. And as you can imagine, we just now use that exact same email sequence every Black Friday, exact same one. Of course, these are my favorites, the ones you can repurpose over and over again. Because at the end of the day, I don’t know what it is about our, you know, industry or whatever, but you eventually become lazy. Like when I started out, I was willing to put in all the hours needed. These days, I’m actually consciously looking for the absolute shortest path to making money when it comes to offering production. Do we have an offer? That work? Yes. And we don’t have anything we’re running this week? No. Okay, can we do a coupon code for this offer? And just, you know, use the same emails from last year? Yeah, yeah, let’s do that. Like anything, anything, but so I don’t have to create new offers, you know, it’s so this extra bonus lazy and in a way, it’s serving, because you end up making the same or a little bit less money, but with virtually no effort. But in a way, I think it kind of stagnates innovation as well marketing wise, because it is only in the moments when I’m feeling truly pressured to way, perform, it’s when I you know, have to sit in front of a blank canvas or take a poor performing offer and start kind of using my creative my creativity and my clinical with marketing superpowers to make it better to improve it to change it. And oftentimes actually does require creating a whole new offer, instead of trying to change an existing one doesn’t work, I find that it’s very difficult to take an offer that isn’t selling and making it into a best seller versus coming up with something completely new, that just sells so much better. It all depends on the offer I find a lot of times. Well, if it’s an offer I created, coming back and getting to produce probably isn’t gonna happen. I’m thinking of it. From another standpoint, a client comes to me and brings me an offer. There’s been a lot of times I can fix their offer exactly using the Golden Globe I just mentioned earlier. Okay. Did they hit the problem? Right? Did they hit the promise? Right? What about proof, and I’ll give that as another tip for people here. One of the best things you can do is move proof earlier. And I always joke that a lot of people have proof of hiding disease. Okay, and exactly what is proof hiding disease? All right, here’s an example of a I looked at someone’s website who was in the fitness market. Okay, they had a testimonial of basically an endorsement. He didn’t use the product, but it was an endorsement from Arnold Schwarzenegger hidden at the bottom of the testimonials page.

37:48

That is proof of fighting disease. Okay, work that needs to be front and center, right under the headline on the sales page. That’s where that should be. Oh, my God. And I’ve had a lot of clients, we’ve tested on proven different variations. I’m thinking right now I have a client who has a sales video. And he has a lot of really good before and after in his market because it’s a market that you can see the before and after. And we get him late in his video. Well, here’s the simple test I wanted to do for his offer. And it really improved conversion. We took those before and after. We stuck them at minute two in the video. Okay, so he had time to call out the problem. He basically said, here’s what makes us different. And here’s all the proof of it. Okay, here’s all the results, people have gotten right into the video. So, two minutes in the video, this is like a 17-minute sales video. I took it from the beginning, put it there and immediately changed the results. So just moving proof, earlier. Same thing. I’ve done things like that with clients. And here’s another quick tip for it. This is part of what you’re saying. I’m being lazy, though. Alright, so something’s not converting. I look at their headline and I don’t like their headline. I will then scan their testimonials, looking to see if there’s a headline. I can swipe right out of one of the testimonials and then move the testimonial right under the headline as proof of it. And people will be shocked how often that works.

39:01

And that’s an easy way to improve someone’s conversion. So, I just go back and look at those five fingers, which I’ll mention, I actually came up with the origin of those way back when earlier I spoke at a lot of conferences because we go way back to 96. I started actually speaking at conferences, and I did a lot of speaking at conferences from about 2000 to 2004. And we always had hot seats at these conferences where somebody would come up and show me their website. And I’d have like 10 minutes to see if I could improve their website. And so, I basically said, okay, these are the five elements that are constantly missing. This is my cheat sheet to fix these people’s problems quickly. That was the basics of it. I came up with a better title and like Glenn Livingston and I partnered up and did some other pieces with the Golden Globes as well. But it really came back just from Hey, I have a few minutes. Can I improve someone’s website really quickly and even for a while run with the angle that I can improve anyone’s website conversion within 15 minutes or less? No, I believe it because for the most part, as you’re saying, it’s the same components that are missing. And if you’re able to, if you’ve got some pattern recognition abilities, you can quickly tell right? It’s kind of like that story that Dan Kennedy talks about Gary Halbert, where people paid like a lot of money to come to the seminar, where halberd was supposed to fix their copy, like you said, like on the spot. So, you know, he tells the story of this one guy coming in, he’s got a golf product, and he’s like, talking about his product. And he explained about his product. And Gary Halbert is like, like this, you know, just sleeping in his chair, you can almost hear him snoring, or something. Again, I’m kind of retelling based on what I heard from Dan Kennedy, but I might be getting completely wrong, but you’ll get the point. And you know, this guy is talking about this product and this swing and you know, part of that. And eventually, a second before he finishes someone kind of you know, elbows Halbert, be like, Hey, you’re up. So, help helpers. Like, you know, he wakes up, he walks up to the board, he, you know, he knows it’s a golf product, he just starts writing this amazing headline and amazing bullet point and an amazing guarantee. And, you know, it’s just shocking to see that he’s doing it so quickly. And it’s only because most copywriting is formulaic. And as long as you know the customer avatar in any particular niche or market, you can write, copy, or create offers with your eyes closed, you really can. And I will say I taught the Golden Glove at some of those seminars. And this really goes back to what you said with Gary Halbert kind of sleeping, so I would teach it so they give me an hour to teach it. Okay, then I would do a review of one or two sites, like I just told you. And then for the next person who wanted help, I would then say, okay, I’m gonna let the whole audience review this. And you can see, they gave the exact same advice I was going to give, after going through one hour of learning how to use the Golden Glove, see me use it, you know, for one or two sites, and then they could all use it very effectively, immediately after. So that’s what if you have the basic tools, you can, you know, find why an offer is not working. But then let’s say that you go through all five pieces, and everything is right, the actual mistake, most likely, because you probably didn’t know your avatar well enough, you probably didn’t know what the customer really wanted to buy, which means you have to go back and fix the offer. Because it has to match the customer’s desires better. Interesting. Interesting.

42:26

Let’s switch gears a little bit. What are your feelings about AI, and where it’s taken us right now? AI is a lot of it, it makes people fearful. And I’ll say I’m a little bit fearful of what our governments might do with it. Okay, on controlling the people removing freedoms, you know, big brother’s watching. So, I’m nervous on that side. For the business side, which, of course, is what we’re mainly talking about. I love it. And I love where it’s gonna take us. We’re in the UK called The Wild West beginning, where every stage is like that. You know, I know I don’t want to say this is like everything else. But over the decades, I’ve seen lots of different trends. And the very beginning when the trend starts, it’s kind of wild. Okay, and everyone’s jumping on it, there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it. And then it kind of levels off a little bit. This is one of those that it’s going to only get better and better. Right now, there’s a lot of excitement. I think there’s a little too much promise of saying how easy it makes everything, okay, which is again, always the case. But it’s going to make our businesses so much easier, because it’s going to do a lot of the work you don’t want to do. Okay, let’s now, stay on topic of, you know, list building and marketing, conversion, all things that we talked about, okay.

43:44

You can actually go through, and you can have it help you come up with your avatar, you can have it you can describe a customer to AI now, and it’ll help you come back with your avatar. You can have it, tell it to write you 100 headlines. Okay, well, how long would it take us to write the past? I did that for AdWords, I basically said, here’s what we’re selling. And I need you to come up with 20 other word headlines for this keyword or for this keyword group and start writing them. And it was really cool. Like, I didn’t use all of them. But you know, there were a few nuggets. That’s what I say too. So, I would say the reason I said 100 here is because I want a whole bunch written. I’m gonna immediately throw out 80 of them. Okay, because I know marketing, which is why here’s why I’m saying people are over promising. People are gonna say AI will replace a copywriter and get a chance, it’s gonna replace No, a good copywriter. Okay, it’ll replace a bad copywriter. But what it will really do is it’s going to make that cap rate or get their job done a whole lot faster. Because I’ll say, hey, write me 100 headlines, I’m gonna throw out 80 of them. I’m not even gonna consider those. Okay, I’m probably going to rewrite the 20 good ones or the 10 good ones that I actually liked there. Because you know, it’s always going to miss something. It’s not going to be it’s not good.

45:00

To get the emotion in well, at the moment, it doesn’t get your story in well, for copywriting, which you need a story to go along with it. But what it does really well is it creates good outlines for you to use. It can do some of the grunt work, hey, create a whole bunch of headlines, hey, write some bullets. I’m gonna take them and rewrite them. Because you know, the real job in producing great copy actually comes in the editing stage. And so, you can say we have the AI do a lot of the rough draft. And we can even take this strangle. There’s a lot of copywriters who’ve had what they call copy cubs. Okay, that’s other beginner copywriters that they teach the basics to, they’ll often have the coffee cup, write the rough draft. Well, what if you did the exact same thing with AI, having the AI help you do the outline help you do the rough draft for sales copy for emails for a book that you want to write. And then you go in and spruce it up with more emotion with more story. And you just had it do the 80% of the grunt work for you. So, you made a whole list. Now I’m just talking about today, what’s going to happen a year from now, two years from now, and three years from now, I don’t know. But I could see that here’s the type of thing that I’ll see with it, you come up with a really good idea.

46:19

You then have air create you an outline, for a video, you have it then write the video, as you kind of coach it through on right in the video, you edit it a little bit. And then you have the AI produce the video using an avatar of you. So that you actually have to sit down and shoot the video and produce the whole video for you. Because we talked about deep fakes and all the stuff that’s out there, it’s getting pretty realistic, I would consider that a big-time savings of doing Cartoon Videos, or even a deep fake of myself using the script I wrote, let’s save, let’s save time and let the AI do it. So, you’re going to become more than anything else, an idea generator, the person who has to know your customers. And you’re going to become doing the final edit and understanding the storytelling part. So, you still need to understand all the basics. That’s like it’s talked about, but AI is going to make it so much quicker, easier and more effective, just like it has for everything else online over the past 20 plus years. You know, I think I think just like many new things, people still don’t really know how to use AI effectively. I think for now, I mean, the way I use it is kind of treated like the next version of Google where I’m asking questions like it would Google but then I would kind of mold the answers. I did attempt writing quite a few times, I actually created a comic book script with it, that’s now almost finished, they just need to get the covers done. I wrote some copy, took my copy and rewrote it in the voice of Stephen King and others. So, it’s quite useful. But so, but yeah, I’m really looking forward to the stage where the excitement died off a bit. And when the tools become more optimized, because what I found is I found myself kind of, in this sinking into this rabbit hole, where it’s like, especially with tools like mid journey and the visual stuff, where you can be spending hours upon hours upon hours just exploring what it can do and trying to mold it when at the end of it, you’d be like, ah, just I’ll do it myself. You know, like, especially with ah text trying to get it to like this one thing that he does right now that’s really annoying to me, is it anytime I ask you to write an email, and marketing email, it’ll start with a question. Right? It’ll start with something like, are you tired of blah, blah, blah. So, if we were writing for tennis players, he’ll probably send some like, are you tired of missing 50% of your serves? Or are you tired of losing to your best friend? Are you tired of, you know, not being able to win your local trophy? You know, in your local tournament? Whatever, whatever tennis players want to do, I have no idea.

49:06

And so, I can’t get it to stop. I can’t get it to stop asking the question at the start of every email because it makes it very repetitive. You know, I mean, that again, that just comes back to you editing, you know what you’re looking for. So, you know, to delete the question off, you know, to start off with a quick story that you just add into the rest of that produced. So, a lot of this is just knowing how to use it, like mid journey. I haven’t even gone into any of the art or design type tools. That’s because I learned pretty early on okay, not early enough. But I have wasted a lot of time in my early days, trying to do designs, eventually learning that I could pay a designer to get a whole lot better job done for me, then wasted my time on it. So, you know what, I’m not even using any of the AI tools for art or design right now. Because I know the exact same thing still applies. I can pay a designer who knows how to use that tool. And they’ll get it done a whole lot faster with the tool and do a better job of it, then it’s worth my time to pay them. So, I’m not even going to look at the AI tools for design, personally, because of that factor, I would recommend the same thing for everybody listening to this, is figure out what’s important. What brings in the cash. John Carlton, this is a phrase, he always used operation money suck, what brings in all the cash, let’s throw out everything else, let’s focus on what brings him the cash, do that and your business, learn how to outsource all the other things, knowing that the people that you outsource to are going to use AI, which means it can actually decrease your cost of outsourcing because it’s not going to take them as long to do a good job anymore. But I’m still not going to try to do those jobs myself, nor am I going to rely on AI on its own without an expert at hand. Yeah, you’re absolutely right, you do need an expert to handle any sort of AI. And every now and again, I will watch one of these YouTube videos, that’s like all the 20 most insane AI tools, and I’ll be getting recommendations for what we could be using. And then I would actually take the ones that I really like. And I’ll be suggesting them to our team, for any department, whether it’s design, video production, or anything else, and kind of trusting that they will do a good job with the software. For example, one thing we do here is we’ve been experimenting with AI introducing the episode. So, we’ll use chat to write the intro. And we’ll use a different AI tool to actually speak it out as in my voice. And so, we’ve been using this tool called D script for a while, but then we switched to a different one, that’s actually a voice cloning tool that works a lot better. And all of a sudden, you know, I’m sounding a lot more natural in the introduction, you know, so I’m keeping an eye out on all the tools, I don’t use most of them, I do try to suggest them to my team. So, they’re so they can produce a better output. And, you know, it is for the exact same reason, there’s a lot of stuff out there that I don’t need to be doing. I mean, the philosophy of Operation money suck did not change in the last 30 years, you really do need to narrow down on what’s important. And for me, that’s always been the marketing. Now the other part of it that I unfortunately can’t really outsource is also, you know, creating the training that we do and all kinds of stuff like that. But, you know, still the most important thing that I need to make sure is in place before doing anything else is you know, are the ads running. Are they converting? You know, are their mailings happening? Is there like money coming in? Because unless there’s money coming in, there’s nothing happening.

52:39

On the topic of AI, I want to ask you in a non-business context, are you? Are you using any AI tools right now in your day-to-day life?

52:50

No, not really. I’m a little weird, which might be older in the fact that I’ve now worked on line 27 years that I don’t use as many tech tools as the average person away from business. Okay, I enjoy being outdoors. I enjoy, like enjoyment. I only actually even play many video games. I’ll play old fashioned board games, miniature type board games, things like that. So, I do a lot of things that are not tech, technical. partly just because I’ve worked so long online, I don’t do as much away from it. So, my answer is no. But most people probably are. And for all of us, there’s probably some AI in the tools that we’re using. We’re just not even thinking of it. In the background of things. Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right. On my end, I’ve been using quite a few tools in the AI realm, and actually teaching my So, kids to use them too. So, my daughter, you know, I’m teaching her how to identify problems or come up with solutions or, you know, basically, almost any time she’s gonna come and ask me a question, I’ll actually point her to some sort of AI in one way or another. For myself, I’ve also been actually kind of looking for different useful tools that again, are outside of business more for, I guess they could be applied to business, but they could also be applied to personal life like this. One that I came across yesterday that I’m really likely liking is called rewind. And what it does is it has a memory or the ability to go back in time with your computer. So basically, what it does, and I know I’m pretty sure you’re gonna hate it though, because you mentioned Big Brother and everything but it records everything that you’re doing. It compresses what it’s recording down to miniscule file sizes, but you can actually go back in time and see your screen and search through everything. It’s like you know, sometimes if you know, I would be like, I know, you know, I had a conversation with one of my team members, or with my wife or something, and I’ve written a link or a reference to something, right, and I can’t find it. So, with this tool, you can actually search for something that appeared on screen. And it will go find it, whether it’s text or video, a website, you went to something you wrote in the chat or anything else. Now, of course, it comes with the other downside of the dark downside is it will record everything you don’t want other people to know you’ve done with your computer, right? So, but it’s so cool. Because I found myself over the years, many, many times losing information, not being able to recall something or having even something as silly as having an argument with a friend about Did I say something? Or didn’t I say something? Right? So, this thing can record the transcripts of your zoom calls, it can pinpoint the YouTube videos you watched, it can record the chats. And it’s all done in a very efficient way where you can search in the form of keywords or application titles. I really, really liked the concept. And I’ve been using for a couple of days now and already use it to recall See, I would I would consider that a business tool that except for it in personal life, though, because you know, most of what you mentioned there, you mentioned some personal things, but most of what you mentioned were business applications for that. Yeah, I guess I would agree with it.

56:28

I would probably like that tool. Also, for the search. Something that I do that is actually a good habit for anybody who’s a consultant or coach is after you speak to someone, we record all calls, just like you said, all calls are recorded. A lot of times after you speak to someone, you then email them the key notes of what you just discussed. That’s always a good practice anyway, which then means you can search really quick, in your email for anything. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, in general, to sum up about AI. Um, I really want to see it develop. And your summary about where we’re at with it right now, where right now you still have to be an expert. And the tool is just making you better , making you better at what you do, but not doesn’t necessarily replacing you.

57:12

I think you’re absolutely spot on with that description. I know we’re coming on time.

57:19

So, I want to ask you one more question. So, you’ve been in the game for a while, almost 30 years, but you’ve also lived in that time as well. So, whether you choose to take this to business or personal doesn’t matter. What would you do if you had a chance to go back in time and meet up with yourself back in the year 2000 Or something? What would you tell yourself? Going back to 2000? What would I tell myself?

57:51

I would have told myself to think further into the future. Because I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning and a lot of internet marketers make it today by living in the moment creating offers for the moment, not creating the really long term offers, not creating a team. That was long term because one of the big mistakes I made early on was I overwhelmed myself, overworked myself, not using as many team members as I should, and not putting as many systems in place, as I should. So, the thing I would go back and tell myself Okay, I want you to think further ahead. Dan Sullivan, has some really good advice and his program, he tells people to think 25 years ahead, which is insane internet terms. And we said the same thing back in 2000. Look how fast things are moving. You know, you can’t think ahead 25 years. But look 2000 We’re now in you know, 2023 we’re 23 years, we’re almost at 25 years now. Now, you can’t predict how everything’s going to look. But what you can do is you can come up with what is my mission? Who is my audience? What can I help them do? What systems can I put in place? What phrases could I trademark? Like, I think I was the first one to ever use the phrase Internet lifestyle. It just came as a passage. It was the title of an email subject line, the Internet lifestyle. I wish I would have been back and say, okay, I need to trademark this internet lifestyle, you know, term using that, because it gets used everywhere. A lot of other terms that I use that kind of just went past because you know, with email, you’re always experimenting. A lot of your best terms, ideas just came out in an email somewhere as you wrote it. But I wish I would have trademark more I would have wished I would have thought further ahead, thinking about the systems thinking about the long term of what I wanted to create, and what I wanted to build up over time, because that would have been a much more effective business and would have had less stress on me than I did through the years. So that’s what I would have told myself to do early on is think longer term, not promotion and promotion. But think, okay, if I’m going to do a promotion today or launch today, where does it go next year, five years from now, what’s the next phase? Let’s take a hard one. Let’s say somebody is going to launch a product on AI. Well, we know that’s going to change by next year. I would make sure to see that I didn’t do this in the original . Also, I’d be thinking, okay, what are the basics with using AI? Can I put that into something? And then can I put all the stuff? That’s actual specific tools separately over here so that I can redo them quickly? And, you know, how do we keep building up the systems? How do we keep building up the funnel? How do we keep building up the pieces, so I now have an offer that can be re-recorded, but will be the same offer essentially, years into the future? Same thing with everything that you do in your business? Anything I do today? What does it look like five years from now? What does it look like 10 years from now? What will it look like 25 years from now? That’s what I wish I would have done early on solid, solid advice. Thank you. So can you remind us once again, where can we go to get the Golden Glove method, go over to mymarketingcoach.com And mymarketingcoach.me Go there, you’ll find other freebies other things, just that the main website, and then just type in slash golden dash glove to go download your free cheat sheet and get access to I think it’s three free videos that teach you especially on the problem, the promise and the proof, the three pieces of the Golden Glove, and if somebody’s listening and they you know, qualify for the criteria of your ideal dream clients to consult with Is there any other place where they can go to reach out to for that, they’ll want to join my email list first, they can go over when they go to mymarketingcoach.com There’s a little section that says one on one coaching, they can click over. And they can opt in to the waiting list, because I’m currently full-on clients. So, even if they are my ideal client, I still can’t take them as a client right now because I have as many clients as I want. But there’s a waiting list there so they can sign up for that also. But they should also sign up for one of the other lists, because that waiting list doesn’t necessarily receive all the other content emails, and you’re gonna find that they’ll get some really good training on writing emails, especially a content rich personality format, by getting on the list, but that’s what they can find out go So, to mymarketingcoach.com Subscribe to the list. If you want to find out more about coaching, go over to one-on-one coaching. Get on the waiting list there, you’ll get information you notice how I just told him three different listens that can subscribe to. Can you tell what I do in my business after all this time?

1:02:14

Beautiful, beautiful guys. So go to mymarketingcoach.com and get on Terry’s list. Also go to mymarketingcoach.com/golden-glove to get the one-on-one five step marketing method that Terry developed for fixing any offer or erecting a new offer in a very effective way. And if you want to get one on one consulting with Terry, head over to mymarketingcoach.com and look up the one-on-one coaching link. Please note that by the time you reach out to him, he might be fully booked with clients. But you never know. You might be listening to this podcast a year after we recorded it and he’s ready to take on someone new. So, Terry, thank you so much for spending this time with me. It was a true pleasure sharing the microphone with you in this virtual studio. So, until next time we chat. Have a good one.

1:03:14

Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle, get access to the previous episode’s transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I 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