Ken McCarthy: Timeless Copywriting Secrets from an Internet Marketing Pioneer

In this wide-ranging and deeply insightful conversation, David Deutsch sits down with Ken McCarthy—one of the original pioneers of internet marketing and the visionary behind the legendary System Seminar. Ken takes us on a journey from the early days of the web to today’s fast-moving digital landscape, sharing timeless principles of copywriting, marketing strategy, and entrepreneurial thinking.

What makes this interview essential listening is how Ken blends classic direct response wisdom with modern marketing realities. He explains why “old school” copy techniques still dominate online success, how bullets are the hidden foundation of great copy, and why your most powerful asset as a marketer is your ability to hold—and honor—your reader’s attention. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to sharpen your edge, this is a masterclass in copywriting mindset, mechanics, and marketing philosophy.

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Million Dollar Marketing Tips from David and Ken:

• Master the Fundamentals of Direct Response: Learn the time-tested principles of direct response marketing—they work online because they’ve always worked in the real world.
• Think Before You Write: Copywriting is really “copy thinking.” Do the research, know your customer, and clarify your strongest sales arguments before writing.
• Start by Writing Bullets: Bullet writing builds your skills in intrigue, curiosity, and benefit-focused language. Great bullets translate into great headlines and hooks.
• Always Write for Attention and Value: Don’t just sell—earn and hold the reader’s attention with useful, compelling content throughout the piece.
• Study the Greats—and Get the Right Editions: Read copywriting classics like Tested Advertising Methods (4th edition or earlier), Claude Hopkins, and Victor Schwab to build your foundation.
• Give First—Then Sell: Providing real value builds trust. Educational content creates goodwill and positions you as a credible expert before asking for the sale.
• Rewrite. Then Rewrite Again. The pros don’t stop after the first draft. Most of your power comes from polishing, cutting, improving, and tightening your copy.
• Practice with Real Projects: Don’t wait for paying gigs. Write ads for your stuff, your friends’ businesses, or even eBay listings to gain experience and confidence.
• Tailor Your Message to Your Market: Not all audiences respond to the same tone. Good copy feels like a natural fit for the reader and the product—no matter the niche.
• Build a Business on Your Copy Skills: Copywriting isn’t just a job—it’s a multiplier. Use your skills to launch, grow, or reinvent a business from scratch.

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Interview Transcript:

David:            It’s just great to have you on, Ken. I’ve been looking forward to this I think for years to actually just sit down and have an hour to talk with you like this.

I’d like to give people a little background on you. Ken was one of the original pioneers of the movement to commercialize the internet. He sponsored the first conference on the web’s commercial potential back in 1994, when if we were even on the web or had heard of the web at all we were posting on CompuServe bulletin boards or whatever.

He’s been developing internet marketing training programs since 1993. Today his System Seminar is recognized as the foremost internet marketing training in the world.

Before he got into the internet field, Ken did just about everything, from what I can see. He produced concerts and radio programs, taught advanced learning strategies at MIT and Columbia, he worked on Wall Street, he founded a direct marketing consulting company, and he helped start an audio post-production studio in New York City.

On top of all that he’s also one of the best copywriters and teachers of copywriting that I know. Gary Bencivenga called his copy, “Some of the best I’ve ever seen.”

With that, welcome Ken!

Ken:               Thanks for having me, David. It was great to hear everybody before the call introduce themselves and tell where they were from and what they were interested in. That was very helpful.

David:            Yeah, I love that part. I could just listen forever to people saying who they are, where they’re from, what they do, and every once in awhile someone is in Australia or Korea or something. There’s such a great variety.

Ken:               It makes it real.

David:            Yes. Listen, the first thing I wanted to talk to you about just because you were kind of there at the creation of the commercialization of the internet – I don’t mean to make you sound like Al Gore and say you invented it – but you were really there, one of the very first people to recognize the commercial potential. Today you’re one of the foremost teachers of how to utilize that.

Could you talk a little bit about what you see and what should we know about what’s going on now, what’s going to be going on tomorrow, and how we as writers and marketers can take advantage of that?

Ken:               Perhaps ironically the most important thing to appreciate about the internet is that everything that works on the internet works on the internet because it reflects something that works in the real world.

So even though the technology is relatively new, and new technologies are being developed and matured all the time – for instance, video on the internet now – things work because they’re rooted in age-old principles. That’s the first thing that I would point out.

As fast-moving as the internet seems, if you look at what actually makes the internet work socially and what creates interest and what generates sales, it’s the same exact thing that the classic direct mail and direct- response copywriters have been talking about since the very earliest days.

I’ve personally found that extremely helpful to stay deeply rooted in I guess what I would call old-school direct-response copy principles. I note that a lot of the best “new” internet marketing copywriters are also very well-schooled, self-trained in terms of reading and making sure they’re conversant with the greats of the past. That’s a very good thing for people to keep in mind as we go forward.

David:            Can you give an example of that, about how something old is new again or how you’ve used direct-response principles on the internet?

Ken:               For example, if you’re doing internet marketing odds you’re at least interested in, if not involved in, something called Adwords. Adwords is the secret sauce that’s made Google so rich, and on the other hand has made so many internet entrepreneurs so rich.

Now when we want prospects or visitors to our websites or traffic, whatever you want to call it, we can now pretty much turn traffic on just like a water faucet.

But when it gets down to actually writing your Adwords ad, you only get four lines. It’s very much like the old classified ads. We still have classified ads, but the classifieds ads used to be a much bigger part of the media mix. Small print ads used to be much much more important than they are today.

There’s a great book that I recommend to everybody. I’m sure many writers are going to be recommending it. It’s the classic by John Caples, Tested Advertising Methods.

If you want to learn how to write good short headlines – I’m sure we’ll be talking about long headlines tonight or some other people will in other sessions – long headlines are wonderful and can be very powerful, but you don’t get a chance to write a long headline in Adwords. You have to write a short headline and it’s got to be powerful.

John Caples was writing ads from 1929 or the late 1920’s until he passed away in the early 90’s or late 80’s. That’s a long career. He actually went through the work of documenting everything that he learned about writing headlines and writing bullet points and all those things in his book, Tested Advertising Methods.

So I would recommend that if people would like a really good solid tutorial, more than a tutorial but a reference book. I always keep it around. That book is fantastic.

Make sure you get the 4^th edition or earlier. Unfortunately the new edition has been textbook-ized and sort of watered down. It’s not the classic that he wrote. It was re-written after he passed away, so try to get the 4^th edition or earlier.

The challenge that somebody faced in the 1920’s or 1910’s or even before the turn of the century in print was how can I write an attractive, compelling, attention-grabbing headline when I only have room for four words?

We still have that challenge on the internet when we’re dealing with Google Adwords. There’s an example of absolute 100% transference of skill. John Caples or Claude Hopkins or John

E. Kennedy or any of those old-school copywriters would be very at home on the internet today.

I want to encourage anybody who’s a writer who may feel they’re not technically adept, don’t worry. The technical aspects of the internet are very easy to learn.

Learning to write, that’s a whole other thing. So if you’ve become comfortable with words and writing, you have a skill that’s pretty rare and in hot demand on the internet.

David:            That leads me to something else I was going to ask you about, which is how you came to be teaching copywriting as a separate thing. Obviously you’re an internet marketer.

Ken:               I started out as a writer and I realized that, “Gosh, this is kind of rough. People aren’t paying writers that much. It’s kind of hard to find writing assignments.” So I decided, “I’m just going to publish my own stuff. That way I’ll always have a publisher.”

The self-publishing boom took place in the 80’s when suddenly we could all be desktop publishers and that was very exciting. Then I realized, “Gee, I’m making even less publishing myself than I did writing for people. This isn’t working,” at which point I realized I needed to become a direct marketer. In other words, I needed to become not just a writer and not someone who could package writing into book form or article form, but someone who could, in addition to all that, market the information that I was writing about.

Once you get to that point you realize there’s really a lot of different kinds of writing. For instance you’re writing a novel or writing a travel story or a how-to book. That’s excellent, that’s a good form of writing, very valuable, very useful, but the real money gets made when somebody sells the course or the book or the article or the home study course.

So I discovered there was this other kind of writing called copywriting. I didn’t know it existed, then I discovered it did. I realized that this kind of writing was different in that its goal was not to purely inform, its goal was not to purely entertain, its goal was to capture a person’s attention, focus it, present sales arguments in a pleasant way, and lead to a measurable action.

This is very different from most writing. Most writing is just happy to lay on the page and give you a nice experience and then you go off and do something else.

With direct mail or direct response or internet marketing, we’re writing because we have a very clear goal in mind. We want someone to give us their name and email address. We want someone to download and listen to an interview, or we want someone to buy a course.

So it’s a very interesting kind of writing for folks who are just getting into it. It requires and encourages a lot of focus that sometimes is missing from sort of free-form writing.

In fact, I found that with direct-response writing, the discipline of having a goal and moving towards that goal has made me a better writer overall. If I’m writing a letter to somebody or I’m writing an article or I’m writing something that’s not even direct response, I just have this very well- developed habit of focus.

“What am I trying to convey? What ideas am I trying to get across here? How am I going to capture the reader’s attention and hold it throughout the piece?”

These are things that are on the minds of all writers, but being a direct- response copywriter they’re really on your mind, because that’s your job. The great or bad thing about copywriting is that you know the results. It’s hard to think, “Gee, I wrote a beautiful piece and nobody really appreciates it.” That doesn’t fly in the world of direct-response copywriting.

“I wrote a piece and I got so many responses. Somebody else might come along and write a more effective piece and get more responses.” The proof is in the numbers of how effective you are.

So how did I get involved in teaching copywriting? First of all when I discovered it I was just fascinated by it and I read every book I could. I’m largely self-taught. I took lots of classes as well, classes like this one for example, where you get to meet talented experienced people who have done a lot of this kind of writing.

Then I wrote my own copy. This is another important thing for everyone, the ability to write your own ad copy is possibly the best business skill you could ever develop. The reason that I have a successful training business, that we were able to start so early and stay at it for all these years is that I’ve been able to just churn out lots and lots and lots of ad copy to keep my enterprise afloat.

I often say that my business, or any publishing or information business, floats on a sea of ad copy. The ability to write your own copy is really the ability to stay in business and to thrive.

I had a business before the internet came along. I was in the real estate finance business and I was teaching mortgage brokers how to get business using direct marketing. I was teaching them everything about direct marketing, including copywriting. That’s when I first started. This would have been the very early 90’s.

I just enjoyed the process of teaching, because it helped reinforce my own understanding of it.

The reason I got back into teaching it is copy is essential to internet marketing, especially if you’re selling information, but it’s also important if you’re selling physical products as well. Basically for anything you’re selling on the internet copy becomes essential.

There’s a lot of good material out there, but there was a lot of material that just, I don’t know, I didn’t think it was as helpful as it should be. I kept waiting for something really good to come along, then I decided, “I’m just going to have to start teaching my own course with my own methods and my own approach.”

I had clients, I had students, customers, and I felt they needed this piece and I felt there were certain messages about how to write good copy that just were not getting to the marketplace. As often is the case, “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.” That’s a good motto for all of us to have.

So I just dove in and started teaching copywriting and I’ve been pretty happy with the results.

The best testimonial I ever got was in a course I gave. A man stood up and said:

You know, I’ve been in business for 25 years. We’ve been very successful. I’ve been trying to make the transition to the internet and all the internet people have been telling me that I have to do this, I have to do that, I have to change the way I do business, I have to change the way I express myself.

Ken, you’re the first person who told me that I could take all the things that worked in my brick and mortar business and apply them to the internet world, and that I don’t have to change my character, I don’t have to change my personality, I don’t have to change the way that I talk to my prospects and my customers.

I’ve learned this stuff after 25 years. I know it works. Why should I have to put exclamation points everywhere and underline things with yellow?

In those days it was in vogue to put a clock so that when somebody opted in the clock ticked away and if you didn’t opt in by a certain point you lost the chance. These things just didn’t fit his business or his personality. He was very successful in what he did.

I was very happy that I succeeded in conveying the message that the best copy are sales messages that are tailored to the marketplace. They’re the right tone for that marketplace in that time. They’re also the right tone for you.

There’s no truth to the belief that there’s one right way to write copy and every other way is wrong. It’s just not true. There’s so many ways to skin a cat.

The most important thing again is that there be a sort of harmony between who you are, what your business represents, your attitude towards your customers, the nature of the marketplace that you’re in, the tone of the time – all these things are variables that need to go into the recipe.

It’s not just a matter of “Here’s three things I have to do to write copy. Here are some headlines that I heard work. I’ll just squeeze myself into this format and hopefully it will work.”

Just today we were doing a little benefit workshop here for some clients in New Orleans. One of the guys that came down for this is a big real estate developer. They’ve developed millions of square feet of office space, and he’s starting a new venture where he’s going to focus on selling medical condos, condos to doctors so that they can buy their space instead of leasing. He’s been given all kinds of copywriting advice.

I sat down with him and I said, “Look, you can’t use some of this wild-eyed stuff to sell to physicians. They’re just not going to respond very well.”

He understood that. He was actually relieved to hear it because somehow he’d gotten the idea that the only copy that works is hard sell, hyperbole- laden copy.

There are markets where you need that. Again that’s the tailoring aspect. If you’re in a market that has high claims and that particular marketplace really loves the drama of the big promise, then you have to go there. But if it doesn’t, you don’t have to go there. You can tailor-make the sales presentation to the audience and to your business.

David:            It’s almost like a lot of people teach copywriting and there’s really good techniques in there, but it’s like an arrow in your quiver. It’s something in your arsenal. You have to know when to use it, when it’s appropriate and when it’s not.

One of the reasons I wanted to have you early on in this series is because I think one of the things you’re so great at is just putting these things into perspective, putting the whole copywriting business and industry into perspective, and giving kind of an overview of how to go about learning copywriting.

Your course, the way you teach, is one of the few that really teaches you how to study copywriting and then really how to do it, how to take the best of everything and find out what’s appropriate for your business.

Ken:               There’s really two things to copywriting that I don’t think get talked about enough. One is the fact that we really should call it copy-thinking. 90% of good copy is all the thinking that takes place in gathering your evidence, your sales arguments, getting to know your customers and learning what it is that they most respond to, and just figuring out how to shape your sales message in such a way that it has the highest possible resonance with your prospects – all that thinking!

It doesn’t really show. It’s not something that’s visible. It’s not in writing. You’re not sitting down and creating something, you’re actually thinking through things and talking to people.

I think it’s really important for people to know that one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived, Claude Hopkins, made it a practice for example before he even thought about writing an ad to actually take the product – and most of the things he sold were things that housewives bought, like canned foods, cleaning supplies, soap and things like that – he’d actually take the product and play door-to-door salesman.

He’d just walk down the street and knock on doors and engage in conversations with his prospects. He would see what arguments worked, what arguments didn’t work, what was effective, what was not so effective, the kinds of questions people had, the kind of concerns people had.

He would think through, “Ok, what’s the biggest hook here that’s going to get the most interest. What things must I remember to include in the sales presentation so that people are persuaded?”

There was a lot of research, a lot of thinking, a lot of wood shedding, which is a term from jazz, which means practice. Nobody’s seeing it, you’re not getting paid to do it necessarily, no one’s applauding, you’re just out in the wood shed practicing.

There’s a lot of thinking involved in copywriting and I don’t think that’s talked The other thing is a lot of what you do in copywriting is just pure craft in the sense that brick laying is a craft or wood working is a craft. There’s certain skills that you’re endlessly perfecting as you go on and on this career, and they’re somewhat mechanical.

The quicker you recognize what those mechanical skills are and the quicker you focus on them and start honing them and improving them, the quicker you’re going to get to be a good copywriter.

One of those skills clearly is the ability to generate bullets. What’s a bullet? It can mean a lot of different things, but if you look through a sales letter at various points you’ll see the writer will often have a list of things –

• 33 ways to amaze and surprise your friends. Details on pg. 42
• The secret formula that you won’t believe until you hear it. Details on pg. 97

I’m just making these up off the top of my head.

David:            Right. “What never to eat on an airplane.”

Ken:               That’s a great one, “What never to eat on an airplane.”

On the one hand, bullets are an element within a sales letter. What do I mean when I say an element? A headline is an element. The sub-heads that you use throughout the letter are an element. If there are any photos or graphics, the captions that you use under those photos, the P.S. is an element, and bullets of course are an element.

I noticed that people wrote bullets badly. They somehow got the impression that bullets were just any old list of stuff. I said, “That’s certainly not right. Bullets are supposed to do something particular. They’re supposed to have a very specific impact.”

I realized that in a sense if you really knew how to write a good bullet you would also know how to write a good headline, you’d also know how to write good captions, you’d also know how to write good sub-heads.

I developed this theory, which seems to be proving itself true, that one of the core skills to writing good ad copy is to know how to write good bullets. All a headline is, for example, is your best bullet, or one of your best bullets. All a sub-head is, as you’re going through a letter, are really good bullets.

So what is a bullet and how do you create a bullet and what’s their function? The function of anything you write in a sales letter is to fascinate people, interest them, and get them to want to read more.

I forgot who said this but the function of a headline is really nothing more than to get someone to read the first sentence of the sales letter. Then the function of that sentence is to make sure they read the next sentence, and so on.

Bullets are things that are designed to capture the mind, intrigue the reader, and fill the reader with the desire to continue to read more, learn more, and also implant a desire for the product.

In a classic case you have a book or a course that you have for sale and you want to fill the reader with this longing for the product. One of the ways to do that is to refer to topics that will be discussed in the book in a way that’s just fascinating.

You don’t say, for instance, “3 ways to make more money.” That’s sort of not interesting, kind of bland. If somebody is really really really interested in making more money and they’ve never seen a letter like that in their life, maybe that would be interesting.

But you really need to know how to take the normal and add a twist to it and make it seem exciting. In the case of “3 ways to make money,” one simple way to juice that up would be to say, “3 surprising ways to make money,” “3 ways to make money that you’ve probably never even thought of,” “3 ways to make money that might shock your parents.”

All these things are literally true. Your parents may never have thought how to make money that way. It might shock them, and somebody could. Your friends may never have thought of these ways for making money and it might amaze them.

You’re basically looking for ways to glamorize and add some mystique to plain vanilla information. That’s one of the key skills of a copywriter, to make straightforward information fascinating and to find the parts of the information, things about the product, whether it’s a physical product or a book, that are intriguing, that are unique, that are exotic, that are glamorous. That’s our job.

I believe I’m quoting a famous ad copywriter here and I wish I knew which one said it, but our job is to take plain facts and breathe life and excitement into them. We do that through the careful use of language, not just, “I heard I have to put some bullets so I’ll just list a bunch of stuff.”

No, you’re going to take each bullet, polish it and refine it.

If you can imagine you have a shop and you have a bunch of things for sale, maybe it’s silverware. The silverware is displayed on the table so when people walk in they’ll see it.

You’re going to want to take each one of those items and polish them as nicely as you possibly can and just shine them up so they look great.

It’s the same thing with your language, whether it’s your headline, your bullets, the sub-heads you use, or your opener.

One thing I just want to point out to people that may not be obvious because we all kind of go our separate ways and do our writing, and nobody watches over our shoulder as we write.

I may read over a section in my letter or the whole letter itself dozens of times, scores of times – that’s how I do it. I don’t know how everybody else does it, but I just keep reading that thing over and over again. I’m looking for anything that sort of sticks out, anything that doesn’t make sense, anything that’s not interesting, anything that’s not credible, anything that doesn’t flow.

I just keep reading it over and over again. I’m just ruthless about pulling things out or changing things. I won’t say it’s obsessive, but it’s workmanship. I don’t want to just hack away and say, “Ah, I’m done.”

I want to cut off some big pieces of wood and then go in with some sanding paper and make it nice and smooth and maybe carve something there.

I don’t know if I’m conveying this, but one important formula, if people want a formula for the reality of writing good copy, is it’s only 20% actually writing, at least in my case, and I’m spending fully 80% of my time re- writing what I’ve written to make it “perfect” or to make it as effective as I possibly can.

I try to get the writing done as quickly as I possibly can because I know the bulk of my time is spent on improving the writing.

Maybe there are a few people that can sit down and bang out perfect copy right off the top of their head. Sometimes I can do it for short little pieces, but if I’m writing a major sales letter there’s no way that I can do that.

I’ve had the chance to see Gary Halbert’s original drafts and how he changed it and changed it and changed it, so I know he did it.

I know another big hero of mine, Gary Bencivenga, and I know he put a tremendous amount of time into perfecting his letters after his first draft was written.

I hope that encourages people. If you sometimes read your copy and go, “I wish this was better,” you can make it better. You make it better by going over and over and over it and looking for things that just don’t work or things that are sticking or things that aren’t clear or things that aren’t exciting enough or things that aren’t compelling enough and removing them.

David:            It’s a great way if you have writer’s block or if you’re stuck – just write. Don’t worry about whether it’s good or not, then polish it up. It’s also a great way to get emotion into your writing, because you’re writing in kind of a white heat. Just get it down while the passion’s there.

Ken:               Not only can you always go back and fix it later or improve it later, even if you’re a so-called great writer, you’re going to be going back and fixing it later anyway.

The worst thing is to try to have it come out right the first time. Luckily we don’t write in public. We can write all kinds of stuff that’s no good and we can throw it away or improve it or re-arrange it. We’ve got word processors, thank God. My original ad copy, I’m sure yours too, was the old typewriter. It was so hard to change something.

David:            Right, you never wanted to change anything. It was so difficult. We’re so lucky now.

On this theme of writing is not writing, one of the things I noticed from studying what you’re doing with the System Seminar – and I had people go to that for homework to look at how you go about selling it…if people haven’t done that, they should go do their homework now – the thing that I found interesting is that so much of that is not writing per se, but it’s the mechanism of how you sell people.

You get them to sign up for something, you give them a lot of free information, you give away a mini-course which is incredibly valuable even if you never go to the System Seminar.

It’s a very interesting mechanism of selling that really doesn’t have to do with putting words on paper, and yet technically it’s a big part of what we do and what we need to be able to do.

Ken:               There’s the great old formula of A-I-D-A – attention, interest, desire, action – and I think a lot of people sell short or don’t fully appreciate the power of that first A, the attention.

I think they think, “Oh, we just have to grab their attention and then we start the sales letter. We grab their attention with a big headline or something dramatic.”

David:            Double exclamation marks should do it.

Ken:               Yeah, or if that doesn’t work, a third one.

But really our whole battle is a battle to not only capture people’s attention but hold it. Not only hold it for the letter that they’re reading now, but hold it so that the next time they receive a letter from you or a communication or an email that they are interested and willing to read further from you.

When I’m creating a campaign, obviously I’m putting my all into the letter. I’m doing everything I can to accomplish the sale in that letter, but I’m also very aware that no matter how well I write – this is very important – that no matter how well I write a letter, never will 100% of the people buy what I have to say – not even 50, not even 20. I’m very lucky with the best effort to get a small percentage of response.

Because it’s a business and I know my numbers before I even start writing a letter about something, I know that I don’t need to sell anything but a small percentage. I’ve structured my business in such a way that if a small percentage does say yes I’m going to do very well.

That’s a very important aspect of direct marketing, by the way, knowing your numbers first before you even write the letter.

I know that since only a small percentage will respond today, that there’s this vastly larger percentage that are still interested. Circumstances may not make it possible for them to buy today or maybe I just didn’t hit the right tone with them.

Especially in the internet world, and this is also true in the direct marketing world but it’s more acutely important in the internet world, because we have email and because email appears to be free, sometimes people get sloppy with it.

What I want to say to people is email is not free. You’ve invested time, money, effort, and sweat into getting the list of whoever it is you’re mailing to. Maybe you’ve run Adwords ads or maybe you’ve done a joint venture or maybe you’ve written articles and people are coming to your site as a result of those articles, and then some of them have opted in.

There’s nothing free about that. Those names are very valuable. So yes, it’s true you no longer have to go to Uncle Sam and buy postage stamps and get a bunch of paper and go to a mail house and have people stuff letters. I lived in that world, and I know you did too and still do. That puts an automatic focus on what you write.

Email gives you a false sense of security that, “Oh, this doesn’t cost anything so I don’t have to worry too much about it.” I say worry not in a negative sense, but worry in the sense that you not only want to write a compelling sales piece for today, you also want to write and think in such a way that people will be happy to hear from you again later.

The battle is for attention. Really the only way you’re going to get people’s attention is if you offer interesting, useful information. I’m trying to make sure that my sales letters are not just sales letters, but that you can actually get valuable information from the sales letter itself. There’s a reason to read the letter above and beyond the fact that I’m desirous of telling you something.

This is really really important. I’m just going to mention my two favorite writers. Gary Halbert was brilliant at making everything fascinating. He was one of those guys that it was almost hard to figure out how he was so good at what he did, but one of his ultimate skills was he just knew how to talk about things in such a way that they were just fascinating.

Then if we look at Gary Bencivenga’s work, that is packed with information. In fact, when I finally got one of his letters I was kind of initially stunned because it was like, “Gee, there’s no selling in this at all.”

First, there was, but what Gary pointed out to me and what I kind of intuitively realized as well is that – here’s the key – there’s no possibility of any kind of a sale unless the person is giving you their attention.

It’s always been the case and it’s even 100 times more true today that attention is hard to catch and it’s hard to hold. The only way you’re going to catch it and hold it is if you’re offering value and you’re known as a person who offers value.

So even though it’s a sales letter, there better be something in that letter that’s useful all by itself. Otherwise, you’re never going to keep the reader going through the letter.

That first A in the classic AIDA is not trivial. It’s not something you do once in the beginning of the letter and be done. It’s something that you have to strive to do throughout every letter, every communication.

Here’s how it works in email, and everybody can check this against their own experience. As a email reader if you receive one really blatantly self- promotional or just blatant hard-core sell that doesn’t show any effort on the part of the writer to be interesting or compelling, it’s just buy buy buy and do it now, you’re probably going to be less inclined to read that person’s email the next time it comes around. If you get enough of those, you may just tune out altogether.

So it’s very important when you’re writing email. Some people say, “Oh, you can mix it up. One letter is promotional, one letter is interesting.” No, no, no, every letter better be interesting, even if it’s promotional.

In other words, don’t send anything if you haven’t found a way to make it interesting. That’s our art. It may seem like an over-simplification, but a big part of our art as copywriters is to make sure whatever we’re saying has a certain compelling nature to it, because we’re just not going to get the attention of the readers otherwise.

I don’t know if this is talked about enough. I think the emphasis in a lot of copywriting training is sell, sell, sell.

That’s important and you need to know every sales trick, every sales technique, every formula that anybody ever comes out with. My goodness, read it, study it, and commit it to memory. Have, as you say, arrows in your quiver, but realize that you’re asking somebody to give you the most precious thing that they have, which is their time and attention. You better be offering value from the get-go.

David:            I think it’s talked about sometimes, but not to the extent that you’re aggregating it. In the System Seminar, when you go to that landing page it’s like you don’t even try to sell us on the System Seminar. You just say, “Hey, sign up for this free course, which is like this little mini-System Seminar course, and I’m going to send you emails with good information in it.”

It really takes a little bit of courage to delay selling people like that I think. It’s one thing to give information in a letter and then sell them in the letter. It’s another thing to say, “Hey, all I want you to do right now is sign up here and I’m going to send you some great information.”

Ken:               Maybe I’m quirky that way. I have multiple aims. This is why formulas are good but ultimately you throw formulas aside and customize your sales letter to who you are, what your attitude is, what your market is, the place you want to occupy in the market for the long term. That’s part of the consideration. I don’t think anybody ever talks about that.

Sure you can write a high-pressure sales letter and convert some people, but maybe you’re killing your long-term prospects that way. Maybe serious prospects are reading that and going, “My god, this guy’s a buffoon. I’m never going to buy from him ever.”

You think, “Oh, I’ve won. I’ve sold something.” Maybe you sold to the smallest segment of the market and turned off the largest segment of the market.

I’m writing for my own account in a sense. I’ve got a business. I’ve been involved in this particular industry, as you mentioned, for a long time. I’m very committed to the industry.

I happen to just naturally want people to understand the basics of the industry, whether they become my customers or not, which may be altruistic. Maybe it is, I don’t know.

I want people to know it, but on the other hand the businessman in me knows that it’s going to work out fine because if I’m putting out high-quality useful interesting information people will keep reading it past the first email and past the second email.

They are more inclined to tune out blatantly promotional copy and tune into mine over the long run. They’re more likely to share what I write with friends and colleagues. There’s a whole bunch of good things that happen, and I’m creating good will.

Now I’ve got to also be a businessman. I’ve got know, “Hey, I’ve got seats to sell,” and I’ve got to be focused on that throughout everything that I do, but I see every letter as building the long-term viability of my business.

I had this confirmed for me that this was not a crazy strategy. I had a chance to meet the founder of Expedia, which is the big travel site where you can book your airline tickets and your hotel.

He said, “You know, only about 3% of the people use our service actually buy tickets through us. The vast majority of people just use it simply to see what’s possible and check out different fares. A lot of them then will call the airlines directly or they won’t actually book the flight.”

He says, “You know what, we’re doing fine with the 3% that buy.”

In essence, he and I are doing the same kind of thing. I’m just providing lots and lots of good core information about internet marketing. He’s providing this marvelous utility that lets you check out all kinds of airfare.

Because what he’s offering is so compelling, it’s become a traffic magnet because it’s a useful tool, so you come and you use it.

The law of large numbers and the fact that they deliver well on their services says that a percentage are actually going to come to the site not only to get the information but also to make a purchase, and then purchase again and again.

On the internet you have two challenges. One we’re aware of, which is to sell people, which we call conversion. The other is to get traffic. You need both.

I can tell you a lot of sites that get huge traffic that can’t monetize or convert their traffic. For instance, Britney Spears photos. Millions and millions of people even at this late date want to see Britney Spears photos, but that traffic just doesn’t convert. There’s not much you can do to monetize it, so traffic alone is not necessarily valuable at all.

On the other side you could have the greatest ad copy in the world, but if you’re not getting qualified prospects in sufficient numbers that’s kind of worthless too.

You really need both. It’s like two wheels on a bicycle. You need traffic strategy that makes sense and you need conversion strategy that makes sense.

Above and beyond pay per click and Google Adwords and search engine marketing or article marketing, one of the ultimate traffic magnets on the internet is useful stuff.

In the case of Expedia it’s a utility that allows you to check out air arrangements and hotel arrangements and prices from the comfort of your own home.

In the case of the System Seminar it’s a large body of high-quality how-to information that’s given away absolutely free.

A lot of people in my field, since I did pioneer this, when I came along the only selling method basically was you’d be driven to a sales letter and that was it. You either bought or you didn’t.

Sometimes people would do things like give away a free e-book and pack the e-book with affiliate links. That was kind of an interesting advance. But ever since I started marketing the System Seminar the way I market it, which as you point out is by giving away lots and lots of information, that’s become the dominant model for everybody else in the industry.

You see people do phenomenally successful new product launches and new businesses coming sometimes out of nowhere to be able to invest the time – 3 months, 6 months – and a lot of energy in putting out lots and lots of good material and then build a list that way, build the interest, build the credibility, and then attempt to sell.

We didn’t have that luxury in direct mail. You just can’t do it. You get a chance to mail somebody maybe once or twice. If they haven’t taken some kind of action, you have to go to a new list. But with the internet we have this opportunity.

If people want a model for this, because it seems kind of counter-intuitive. It seems against logic. “Gee, why would I give away good stuff? Heaven forbid why would I give away my best stuff?”

Well, think about how the music industry works. In essence a band gives away it’s absolutely best stuff. They don’t take the worst song on the album and send it to the radio stations and try to get that song played.

They take the best song they’ve got and hope the radio station gives it away over and over and over again to millions and millions of people.

Why do they do that? Because people will hear the song, they’ll like the song hopefully, they’ll associate the song with the band, and they’ll start to get curious about the band. “What else is that band doing? Gee, I’d like to hear that song played live. Gee, I’d like to have the download so that I can listen to it on my iPod.”

So as counter-intuitive as the model may seem, it’s actually tried and true. We can see that it works across many different industries.

Just one last point on this before we go to another topic, an awful lot of classic direct marketing flows directly from the world of door-to-door selling.

Gary Halbert was a door-to-door salesman. Ed McLean, who wrote one of the great Newsweek direct mail pieces that I think that they ran for 18 years or some crazy amount of time, he actually sold products door to door. I mentioned that Claude Hopkins wasn’t a door-to-door salesman, but he used that method for selling.

In that environment you kind of have to close the deal right away or there’s no deal. There’s a positive side to that because it focuses your mind and gets you to focus on what you’re there for. You’re there to sell.

The negative is that sometimes it compels people to push harder than would be beneficial if one took a long-term view.

I guess my point is if you have the luxury of taking a long-term view, and you do with the internet, realize that everything you write is going to have an impact, a cumulative impact on your prospects, those that buy today and those that don’t buy today.

You want to leave a good impression with everybody. You leave that good impression by basically being generous and providing value to folks.

David:            And you have that long-term ability to have a relationship with them because of things like being able to keep in touch by email and tracking and all the things that the internet enables you to do.

Ken:               Yeah, and I hope everybody on this call is aware of what an autoresponder is, and if not very briefly it’s a way to automate the process with follow-up emails.

Even in the direct mail days, there was quite a bit of very intelligent follow- up. A lot of mail-order sales were two-step sales, and that two-step is almost a misnomer because sometimes it could be an 18-step sale, where you would run an ad not to sell the product but to get the person to inquire about the free report or the free lesson.

I don’t know how many people are aware, for example, that the famous ad by John Caples – “They laughed when I sat down at the piano” – that whole full-page ad with the picture and all that text wasn’t selling anything other than getting you to write away for the real sales letter. They didn’t call it a sales letter, they called it something else.

The other ad that’s so famous – “Do you make these mistakes in English?” – which ran for 40 years virtually unchanged, again that wasn’t selling anything. It was just trying to get the reader to ask for the prospectus.

The prospectus was a big sales letter, and you better believe there were as many follow-ups as economics would allow.

What’s beautiful about the internet is that we can follow up forever. By the way, if you’re in business or you’re counseling people who are in business, you should follow up forever until somebody formally unsubscribes. There’s no reason to ever stop following up.

If somebody was interested enough to stop what they were doing, come to your page, read what you had to say, ask for more information, that person is if not gold then at least silver or even copper’s valuable these days. You should continue to mail and mail again.

The beautiful thing about the internet is that the economy of the internet allows you to mail forever.

I have students – and this is something that wouldn’t have been possible in the mail order days – I have people that show up at my System Seminar, which is not inexpensive, it’s a couple thousand dollars, who have been following my emails for four or five years.

Some people have been following from before I even started this particular new training. They were quietly receiving my emails and enjoying them, filing them away, happy to see new ones come. Their circumstances changed and lo and behold they had the resources to actually come.

Now what if I’d given up mailing them after a year or after two years? So the economy is there.

The second thing is there’s this wonderful tool called an autoresponder. My favorite one is AWeber.com. Basically this lets you automate follow-up. If somebody writes you and says, “Yeah, I’m interested in your widget,” you can send them, “Hey, I’m glad you’re interested.

Here’s some information.”

Then you can put in line another email to follow in a day or two saying, “Hi, We sent you the stats on that widget. Just wanted to make sure you got it. If you have any questions give us a call.”

Then you can send a third email saying, “Hey, we just got this amazing story about a guy that bought the widget. It worked in ways that even we didn’t expect. Here’s his story,” and on and on and on.

Notice what are you doing? You’re coming back again and again and again. This is one of the arts of copywriting. How do you come back again and again and again and tell the same story a different way?

Basically you’re still selling widgets. That hasn’t changed, but you’ve found a new angle to come from and it’s bringing value.

Interestingly enough, if somebody wants to read a great copywriting book, I want to recommend to everybody a book called How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success Through Selling by a guy named Frank Bettger.

I believe that Victor Schwab, who’s one of the great copywriters, actually helped him write that book. You can certainly see his fingerprints all over it, especially in the titles to the chapters. It’s just obvious that some great copywriter was in on that, and I know that Vic Schwab also helped write the Dale Carnegie book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

That book is, interestingly enough, not a book about copywriting. It’s a book about personal selling, but all the strategies of being a good copywriter and a good direct marketer, that ability to start a relationship and come back again and again and remain interesting and remain compelling is all laid out. The psychology of all that is laid out in Bettger’s book.

Interestingly enough, Marty Edelston, who’s a great great great direct marketer, founder one of the great mail-order publishers of all time, he loves that book. I’m told he gives it away by the case. He just hands that book to everybody.

I’ve always thought that book was great. My friend, Gary Bencivenga, has told me privately that he thinks that’s the best book ever on selling. He’s never seen anything better.

That’s one of his secrets, and I hope I’m not giving away a secret here, but I’ll let you know. He feels that one of the secrets of his career was that he used that book so carefully and thoroughly that he would take personal selling strategies that Becker would describe and figure out a direct mail application for them, or in our case an internet marketing application.

This goes back to what I said at the beginning of the call. Here we’ve got these new tools on the internet today and it’s global and all this stuff, but the reason the internet works when it does work is because it’s drawing on these old old principles of human nature.

David:            Right, just like we talked about in the beginning.

One thing I want to be sure to ask you about, because so many people have asked me about this when I asked them what sorts of things we should ask you, a lot of people asked about getting started as a copywriter, both in terms of the skills they need as well as getting clients and just progressing on the rungs towards becoming a highly-paid copywriter, or more highly paid than they are now.

What are the best things that you suggest for people?

Ken:               One thing if your goal is to become sort of a top gun copywriter is to as quickly as possible identify who the big buyers of ad copy are and who pays the best at the highest rung. It’s good to know what your target is.

It turns out that the biggest payers and the ones that appreciate copy the best seem to be mail order publishers, in other words people who are selling material by mail largely – the Agoras of the world, the Boardrooms of the world, it used to be Rodale but they’re sort of leaving their direct marketing model behind, the Phillips of the world.

These are companies that lean heavily on ad copy. They know the value of a good direct-response letter, so just know that certain areas like finances, investments in particular, is a very hot area and pays very well. Health is another one. Business opportunities is another one.

If you’re going that route, the reality is that’s where the market is, the big publishers and these sort of vast hot button topics of health and wealth.

If you’re getting started I’ll tell you this. I did a tremendous amount of freebie writing and counseling and helping friends and colleagues with their marketing, primarily to develop confidence. How do you know you’re good unless you’ve gotten some results.

Really, why should anybody give you real money unless you’ve got a track record of getting results. Let’s be realistic. Do you want to hire somebody that doesn’t have a track record?

This is my advice and my experience. I was never shy about offering to roll up my sleeves and help people for free when I was learning the ropes. It’s a great learning experience for you because you get to work on a real business. It’s a great confidence booster when you had a good outcome. You now have a referral, somebody that you can say, “Hey, I wrote for the Acme Company and they got a good result.”

David:            Right, and hopefully you asked them for a testimonial up front, saying “If this works I would like a really nice testimonial from you.”

Ken:               Absolutely. Now all the sudden you’ve got a client. They don’t have to know that it was free. It’s not their business. They just know that you were effective. So that’s one thing.

I think a lot of people sometimes think, “I have to get paid immediately.” Sometimes you can shortchange yourself and even short-circuit your progress by worrying about – when you’re a beginner, the last thing you should worry about is compensation.

The thing that you really want to worry about is “Am I getting enough opportunities to practice this craft? Am I getting enough of the right kind of opportunities?”

If I wanted to go into a new field tomorrow, and I’ve done this – in fact, let me show you how this works in practice. I had a pretty successful direct mail based conference business pre-internet. That was a good 8-hour or 10-hour day just to keep that thing running.

This was the early 90’s and the internet came along and I was kind of interested, so my day was I worked all day at my business, had dinner, and then worked all night at my internet business, because the thing didn’t make money, believe me, for many years in the early days. That was just the price I paid.

Was it hard? Yeah. It would have been easier to flip on the tube after dinner and not worry about it. Sure. Am I glad I paid that price? Oh boy, I am! Am I ever glad that I worked a couple shifts in essence.

That’s a big part of learning a new skill. No one ever likes to use this word ‘sacrifice’ when it comes to anything related to business opportunities. We always like to talk about the glamour and success and what it looks like when it works. Nobody likes to talk about the sacrifice.

David:            And that it’s effortless and easy.

Ken:               Yeah, and I hope everybody knows that’s nonsense. What is true is after you’ve paid your dues and done the right things, which includes giving your all in every situation to every client, you do get to a point where you reach your critical mass and all of a sudden people are starting to come to you and your fees start going up.

In my case I chose not to write for other people. Occasionally I will. I’ll write fundraising letters pro bono for causes that I believe in, but other than that I don’t really write for clients. This is another path. I’ve chosen to use my direct marketing skill and my copywriting skill to build a business of my own, to build a business that I own.

David:            You said earlier how essential copywriting is for a business, whether it’s on the internet or not. The flip side of this is if you do have that copywriting skill, you have such potential for building a business because you have the very thing that most businesses lack and don’t know how to get, which is good promotional copy.

Ken:               The difference between me teaching internet marketing at the local adult education session at the public high school for $20 a night, and making over seven figures a year working hard but not too hard, is my ability to write copy. So for me it has been a multi-million-dollar difference.

There are probably great teachers of internet marketing that just don’t know how to present themselves through their ad copy. Therefore they don’t get the reward. You’re kind of rewarded by how you’re positioned in the marketplace.

Many people will spend any amount of money to get a BMW or a Mercedes. Those companies, in addition to making a good car, have done an excellent job of positioning themselves at the high end.

That ability to position themselves at the high end is very important. It applies to any business that you’re in. One of your goals as a copywriter is not just to sell today, but that every ad you put out reinforces the position that you want to have in the marketplace. That’s something that sometimes gets left out of the equation.

David:            It was interesting when you talked about getting started and giving your services away in order to get testimonials and a track record. It’s really similar to how you market in a way, where you give valuable information away and then you build relationships and get customers.

Ken:               When you’re trying to build the relationship and you’re a beginner and you have no business, you want to reduce any friction there is between you and the rest of the world. You want to make it as easy for people to come to you as possible.

David:            Right, and that experience is so important. A track record is just invaluable.

Ken:               I know testimonials are important and I know that being able to point to a track record is important, but I even think it’s so important to have the experience of actually writing real ad copy for a real enterprise.

That enterprise could just be your church picnic. It doesn’t have to be anything glamorous or exotic or high-falutin’. I would much rather that somebody has written a simple piece of ad copy for a very modest project than somebody telling me that they’ve just come back from the latest and greatest multi-week training somewhere.

You’re going to learn more on that little simple project than you could ever learn – I would say there’s three things you need:

• You need education.
• You need doing.
• You need networking.

Sometimes people are over-weighted in certain areas. There are people who have a lot of life experience but they never take advantage of education, and that’s a shame. They could go so much further.

Then you have people who – I won’t say over-educated – but they’re too heavily weighted on theory and they’ve never done a simple project. It’s important to have some balance there. Of course learn, but immediately after you learn something try to apply it right away.

Everybody can be a copywriter tomorrow. Go through your house, find all the stuff that’s good but you don’t want anymore, and start selling it on eBay and start writing ads for each one of those items in your house.

You know the difference between getting a sale and a non-sale, or a low price and a high price, is going to be a couple of things. It’s going to be the quality of the photograph, but also the quality of your copy. Those who write the better copy are going to get better prices on eBay.

If you want you could start there. You could help a friend who needs to clean out their closet and just practice writing for sale.

David:            What a great idea! You get to see the results of it and you get to learn from it and you get to clean out your house at the same time.

Ken:               And even make some money.

David:            And make some money! I forgot about that. I got so excited about the idea of cleaning out my house.

Ken:               In fact there’s a woman whose last name is Muldoon and I can’t remember the full name, but she’s one of the experts on catalog marketing. She used to write a column every issue for Direct magazine I think.

She said, “You know what, if I was advising people in the catalog industry how to improve their skill, I’d tell them to go run some ads on eBay and get back in touch with the basics – good photograph, good headline, good punchy copy, and just reconnect with what really sells and what really doesn’t sell.”

That’s kind of the thing. You realize that copywriting is not beautiful writing or wonderful writing. Ultimately it’s writing to sell, it’s writing to get an effect. As a fledgling copywriter you want to put yourself in as many situations as you can where you can see results from your writing.

This is such a worthy and noble profession. The world needs people that can communicate worthy ideas well, and it’s a fun thing. As you know, David, you’re always learning new stuff, you’re always getting a little bit better.

It keeps your mind alive. It allows you to engage with people in a way that most people never get an opportunity to. You only have so much time, so what are you going to put your time into?

I’ve never regretted any of the effort that I’ve put into learning how to write, and specifically write ad copy better. It’s maybe the best return on any investment I’ve ever gotten.

David:            You use it in so many ways, too, not just for making, as you say, seven figures a year, but for the good work that you do and you’re doing down there in New Orleans right now.

Ken:               Yeah, for example, I’ve been able to basically be the marketing and communications advisor to a really important non-profit down here. I work directly with the founder.

Because I’m a copywriter I can help her articulate things better, more impactfully, more compellingly, and we’ve helped them do tremendous things.

We’ve tripled the membership of her group. We’ve gotten her from somebody who was sort of a marginal figure in New Orleans to now she was just voted into the Women’s Hall of Fame for the state of Louisiana based on her accomplishments in the last year since we started working with her.

It’s a power to do good. You make money from it and you can make a handsome living, but when you see something that you think is important that you want to help, it’s a fantastic contribution to be able to make.

There’s so many reasons to learn this skill.

David:            I appreciate you taking the time to share what you’ve shared with us. I know you’ve kind of stepped away from what you’re doing down there tonight to do this and I’ve kept you a little over.

I just thank you so much.

Ken:               Thank you, David. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for creating this opportunity for me to talk about one of my favorite subjects.

David:            My pleasure. Thank you.

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