A Transcript of an interview with

A-list copywriter and author of

Just Sell the Damned Thing

Doberman Dan

Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other
experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and
their habits, then steal and idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob
and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Rob: You’re invited to join the Club for a special, unnumbered episode as we
chat with copywriter and tabletop entrepreneur Doberman Dan Gallipoo about
how he went from cop to copywriter, writing daily emails and monthly newsletters,
meeting and working with Gary Albert, and the one thing that has made the
biggest difference in his career.
Rob: Dan, I can’t tell you how excited we are to have you here.
Kira: Very excited!
Dan: Well thank you!
Kira: Extremely excited!
Dan: Well, when we were talking before you hit the record button, when you said
is there anything that we shouldn’t talk about, and my answer was nah, we can
talk about anything... okay, I stand corrected. The one thing you should never,
ever mention is my real last name, so Rob...
Rob: I’m cutting it out! I’m cutting it out.
Dan: I’m just kidding. So here’s why the stage name Doberman Dan. He
revealed the big huge secret—my last name, Gallipoo. Come on, man, has that
got to be the weirdest last name you’ve ever heard?
Kira: It’s the best last name I’ve ever heard!
Rob: It’s a great name!
Dan: Oh, come on. I was teased so bad as a kid—I’ve heard every version of
that. The most creative one I heard: I was in 6th grade and one of the kids called
me “Dan Gallon of Poop!” You gotta admit, that’s pretty darn funny. Even though
I was pissed off, it was pretty funny.
Rob: That’s gotta do some pretty weird stuff to your psyche though; you know, as
an elementary school kid, right?
Dan: Well, yeah! And I was always jealous of the kids and was like, man, I wish I
had a last name like Smith.
Rob: Jason Jones. That guy has a good name.
Dan: Everybody knows how to spell it, they know how to pronounce it, yeah.
Kira: Or like, Marsh! Rob Marsh!
Dan: Exactly. How many times is your last name mispronounced, Rob?
Rob: Not mispronounced, but I cannot tell you the number of times that I was
called “marshmallow”, or you know, my dad was called—my dad obviously grew
up in a different era, but they called him Marsh Gas, which I guess nobody even
talks about what marsh gas is any more.
Kira: No.
Dan: You gotta bring me up to date on that reference.
Rob: Apparently it’s just another name for methane or whatever, but because it
leaks out of marshes back in whenever my dad was going to school, that’s sort of
what they called methane. So, yeah, he called got called that. Methane doesn’t
exactly smell good... but I mostly got Marshmallow.
Kira: This is great! Now I have a new nickname for you, Rob.
Rob: Yeah, like we needed that!
Dan: Oh no.
Kira: I’m glad we’re having this conversation.
Dan: See what you’ve done? My gosh; kids are cruel. Kids were cruel in my day,
kids were cruel back in your dad’s day; kids are just cruel, aren’t they?
Rob: That’s right.
Dan: They’d probably find a way to make fun of a kid with just the last name of
Smith, also.
Rob: I am never going to refer to your last name again, though, Doberman Dan.
We’re only going with the stage name from here on out.
Dan: We’re good. Alright.
Rob: But let’s talk about that! So, how you got your stage name and how you
went from cop to copywriter. Tell us your story.
Dan: So, the stage name story is seriously—I have not liked my name since I
was a kid. And of course I was older when I finally asked, like, that’s a really
screwed up name! Like, that can’t be right! And then finally my grandfather said,
well, it’s not. It’s French-Canadian. His dad immigrated from Quebec and I don’t
know what the story was; I guess the immigration people screwed it up on the
paperwork.
He told them however he said in his French-Canadian—my name is Gallipoo,
and you know, it’s supposed to be like a eau on the end, and they’re like, yeah,
whatever, we’ll spell it however we want to! And they spelled it Gallipoo. Which,
some immigration guy hundreds of years ago was probably laughing about it. Ha
ha, check it out, we gave this guy’s last name a poo on it. Now his grandson will
be ridiculed in the 70’s when he’s older! So, I’ve always hated that name.
But, when I was writing for the bodybuilding market, my first ever successful
business was a mail-order business in the bodybuilding niche. So I wrote an
article about my Doberman puppy back then, how he got in a fight with this 130
pound Rottweiler who was big and bulky and my Doberman was just you know,
sixty pounds at the time, but super lean and muscular so my Doberman won the
fight. So I wrote an article about like, you know... I realized I’ve gotten like that
Rottweiler, I’m power lifter big and bulky and I want to be lean like my Doberman.
And I signed the article as a joke, I signed it “Doberman” Dan. And all the guys in
that niche liked it and stuck with it.
Bob Kennedy, the publisher of Muscle Mag, God rest his soul, he liked it.
Everybody started calling me Doberman Dan. It’s stuck ever since! And I was
thrilled with that! I thought, any opportunity I have to never use my last name
again is great!
Rob: Awesome. And does the Columbiana call you Doberman Dan?
Dan: She does not. She calls me amore.
Rob: That’s beautiful. (laughs) So tell us a little bit about how you became a
tabletop entrepreneur and copywriter. Just how you fell into that.
Dan: I’m glad you asked, because I think how I became a cop is instructional.
Because I think it’s how a lot of people find their way into various professions
(laughs) that they stay in for sometimes the rest of their lives. I had no direction in
my life whatsoever; the only thing I really wanted to do since age 7 was be a
professional musician. And that was the goal my entire life. And even when I got
out of high school, that was the goal. And that was what I did for a short period of
time, and then I let the well-intentioned, yet still, the dream-stealers, although
most were family, and well-intentioned, I let them steal that dream from me and
so I just bounced from thing to thing and took the first job I could get and one of
them was in security.
That led to a job in loss prevention at a department store. Those are the guys
that walk around looking for shoplifters. And then I met some cops there and
some of the guys I worked with were like hey, the city of Dayton, OH is giving a
civil service test for police officers. We’re going to take it. You want to take it?
And my response was yeah, I’m not doing anything that day.
So you know, lots of planning and forethought on that career decision.
Rob: Yeah.
Dan: And I thought, aw, whatever. I’ll take the test. Seems like it’d be an
interesting gig. I used to watch TJ Hooker when I was a kid in SWAT, and I liked
the idea of being the Blue Knight on the white horse and riding up and saving the
day and I’m sure that’s what that job is really like in reality. And then I thought,
I’m not gonna get too worried about it because if I pass the test, as soon as I get
to the part in the process where they interview you about drug use, I’ll be
immediately disqualified because I’m gonna be totally honest with these guys.
Because I was somewhat of a wild child in high school.
Long story short, they hired me and they loved the fact that I was honest about
my drug use because most people tried to lie about it. They figured eh, geez, this
guy’s gonna be honest about that, he’ll be an honest cop. And that was the
extent of that.
I never had any kind of life goal to be a police officer. In fact, I still wanted to be a
full-time musician and I thought, okay, I’ll save up money and live under my
means for a few years and then I’ll quit and take that money and go out to the
Musician’s Institute in Hollywood and study music! But I stayed in that job for 12
years.
Kira: Wow.
Dan: So, it wasn’t anything I wanted to do, and somebody that I used to go to
school with hit me up for the Amway business. And I got excited about that
because they showed this level like, when you get to direct distributor, you make,
and I still remember the exact number, you’d make $2,138 per month, which was
exactly what I was grossing on the police department.
I’d been on the police department a couple of years at that point and I realized I
didn’t want to stay there my whole life and I thought oh, that direct distributor
thing seems really good! I can leave my job. But long story short, I failed
miserably in that and lost a lot of time and money, but it got me on the path to
understanding being a business owner and entrepreneurship.
So of the 12 years I was on the police department, the last 9 were full-time cop
and part-time entrepreneur. Although, every single business for those 9 years
failed time after time, at least 2 of the 2-3 year businesses failed for a lot of
reasons, all my fault. But at least it got me understanding that you know, what I
really wanted to do—I wanted the freedom of owning my own business. So that’s
how I had transitioned from cop to entrepreneur/copywriter.
Kira: Wow, okay. So I would love to hear about those failures. You know, you
said it was you and that’s how you really learned about entrepreneurship, but
could you share a couple of examples of some of those failures? And even what
you took away from it that maybe you changed later on?
Dan: I have to give a lot of credit to the Amway business. I knew nothing, really,
about being self-employed, owning a business, principles of success,
entrepreneurship, and Amway really opened the door to that with listening to all
the interviews of their successful distributors. Knowing what I know now about
direct response marketing, I feel that’s an extremely flawed business model, I
mean just extremely inefficient and seems very outdated these days.
And knowing what i know about direct response marketing, if you have a truly
revolutionary product, you know, you can launch that thing and scale it up huge
yourself with direct response marketing without having to go through the decades
of gut-busting effort of building up a distributor network.
But it was a good experience regardless, because I got to meet some successful
distributors and hear the interviews of them and then they had a recommended
reading list, which was all the classic success books: Think and Grow Rich,
Magic of Thinking Big, Psycho Cybernetics, all that stuff. Stuff which I had never
been exposed to before. I grew up in a—probably even stretching it to say it was
a lower-middle class home, but I’ll stick with that. I’ll say it was lower-middle
class.
So you know, somebody from that upbringing would probably never be exposed
to those kind of things. So, I did everything they told you to do in Amway for
years and years and years and invested a lot of money into that and really had
little to show for it. And the same thing with all the other businesses. There were
two vending businesses, home-improvement business, a jewelry business,
another MLM, just a whole string of them. That went on for 9 years. I wish I could
say you know, the business has showed hope, I made a little money and then
they crashed and burned... I never made ANY money.
Kira: (laughs) Oh no!
Dan: And that’s why I kind of get a little upset with people who are like, hey Dan!
I’m gonna launch something... They launched their first “thang” as I affectionately
called it, because my mom was from Mississippi so I know “thing” is pronounced
“thang”. So they do their first “thang” as an entrepreneur and the results aren’t
what they expected and they quit. I’m like, dude! I was utterly kicked in the gut,
humiliated time after time after time for 9 years, almost six figures in debt and
credit card debt from all those failures... and I kept going! Because I just knew
that to go from point A to point B is never a direct line. It’s always about
continually making mistakes and doing what doesn’t work to finally get to what
does work. And even though my journey was way longer than it had to be, mostly
for mindset reasons, that’s the process. And so that was incredibly painful. All my
family laughed at me. Everybody thought I was a failure, including myself. But I
was just too damn stupid to quit!
Kira: (laughs)
Dan: All the guys on the police department reveled in every single failure I had.
They LOVED it. They predicted my failures. When I finally had that first
successful business, the mail-order business, they predicted I’d fail at that and be
back in 6 months. And there was nothing that would’ve made them happier. And I
was utterly humiliated.
I was at the lowest point you could ever possibly be for NINE straight years. But I
kept going. Would I want to go through that again? Heck no. It was so
emotionally painful, even more painful than the divorce from my starter wife. But
it was pretty bad! You know? Probably the worst thing I’ve ever been through.
But I’m so grateful for that.
Rob: What was the thing that, at that point, when you hit so many years of rock-
bottom, what was the thing that actually turned it into a success?
Dan: We could talk about mindset stuff, but really from a purely pragmatic
standpoint, it was all those failures led me to keep searching. Like, why is none of
this working? I mean, there are plenty of people in all these different businesses
who are successful! It’s not working; what am I doing wrong? And in the process
of that search, I stumbled upon Dan Kennedy and bought his Magnetic Marketing
System, which he still sells today. Or GKIC now sells.
That was all about hey, if your business isn’t making money, you can’t get
enough new customers, here’s a system for doing it that replaces all the grunt
work stuff of meeting people, belly to belly, and doing all these cold calls and all
that stuff. So I bought it to try to fix whatever business I was failing at the time.
What I got to understand is I observed Dan Kennedy’s process of selling that for
$400, which back then was like, ten-generation Xerox copy, if you remember
those. Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. And cassettes, which maybe he had
$10 hard-cost in, and he sold for $400. And I thought this is pretty cool! This guy
put words on a piece of paper and just sold me paper for $400! Paper and a
couple cassette tapes. And I thought, wait a minute, that’s a way cooler business
model. I want to figure out how to do that.
That’s how I started that bodybuilding mail-order business. I thought, I can do this
in that niche I’m already passionate about. So I created my own self-published
info-product course and created my own B-Generation ads, ran them in
magazines, and created my own follow-up sales piece to mail to those people
who requested info. So I mean, that was the big breakthrough there—just
discovering direct-response marketing and copywriter. After 9 straight years of
failure, that was the first business that finally made me money, and a year later
was making enough money that I was able to leave the police department.
Kira: So, we have a lot of newer copywriters in our club and a lot of mindset
challenges. What would you say they need to do to really pull it through? I mean,
is it really about investing the time and just failing over and over again and they
just need to know that that’s okay and that’s part of the process? Or is there
something else that we could share with them that could help them early on in
their career?
Dan: That’s a good question. And that’s good looking out for your peeps, by the
way; I appreciate that. There’s a lot to say about that. Probably the most
important is for the rookie copywriters, is for the love of all things good and holy,
get out now, while you’re still sane! (laughs) Or if you’re already insane, then you
are in the perfect gig for you. Now, you know, this is somewhat of a weird gig
because you gotta be in your head a lot. A lot of copywriters I meet have introvert
tendencies. Would you guy say that you’ve run into that a lot too?
Rob: Oh, no doubt.
Kira: Yeah, for sure.
Dan: So, I don’t really know any extroverts who are copywriters. I know people
like me who have to play extroverts, but truly we are introverts. If you’re a true
extrovert, I think this gig is going to drive you insane because you’ve got to spend
a lot of time in your head. For a lot of reasons. I mean, you gotta work out ideas
in your head and you gotta figure out hooks and figure out how to make
something that is truly not at all unique, at least appear to unique.
So there’s a lot of head-time and if you’re a true extrovert and you like being out
with people, you may reconsider. You may want to reconsider what you’re doing.
If you have introverted tendencies and you like that, and you actually like being
by yourself and living in your own head, and those around you can tolerate it,
because that can sometimes be a strain on your relationships.
You know, when you’re supposed to be with somebody and you’re in your own
head figuring out, I wonder what’s unique about this supplement? And your
spouse is wanting to talk about his or her day, that can sometimes cause issues.
So there’s one piece of advice. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say who is a
true extrovert who is a successful copywriter. If you are an extrovert and you
want to be a copywriter, don’t take that as you can’t do it, just you’d be the first to
show me that I’m wrong. And Second of all, about this—what you asked about is
the process. Just, you know, failing and continuing to get up time and time again.
My answer to that is I don’t know. That’s been my process and every other
successful person I know in any field, not just copywriting, but in anything. All the
successful musicians I know, that has been the process for them, so—my
experience tells me, if you think it’s going to be any different for you I think you’re
going to be really disappointed. Like, the best of the best of the best, they don’t
hit it out of the park. Here’s a good example.
Agora Financial, one of my clients, those guys are some of the smartest
marketers in the world. Some of the smartest marketers I’ve ever met. They hire
some of the best copywriters in the world. They hire the top talent in the world for
every single aspect of their team and they’re growing like a weed because of it. I
mean they’ve gone from 50 million a year to, in 2 years, they’ll finish up at over
150 million this year. So that is so rare—to take a 50 million dollar a year
business and triple it in two years—that it’s so rare a lot of experts would tell you
it’s darn near impossible, but that’s how good they are. And when you talk to
them, 3 out of every 10 new projects, or new pieces of copy they test, are
successful. But now don’t think that those three are big grand slam home runs
that make forty bazillion dollars. No. Out of ten things, seven bomb.
They’re so bad they just want to bury them as fast as possible before they start to
stink too bad. The other three of those three, those three might be like, I like to
use the baseball analogy, base-hits. Like, okay, these make pretty decent
money. And that’s it! There’s no big huge successes. Those three are base hits.
Or occasionally it’s like, two are base hits, and one’s a home run. And those are
the best copywriters and marketers in the world with the best marketing
intelligence available to them, and even then, it’s three successes out of every
ten! And all three are not always home runs. So what makes the rookie
copywriter think he or she is going to do any better than that?
Rob: That’s actually a really good question.
Kira: Well, that makes me feel better!
Dan: Heck yeah! It makes us all feel better. I just had a piece that totally bombed!
It stunk so bad I had to even like, check the phone number. Did we use the
wrong phone number?!
Rob: Dan, you’re not the first copywriter that came out of Barberton, Ohio that
struggled to make it. My understanding is that you got to know Kerry and work
with him. Will you tell us a little about that relationship and how it came about?
Dan: Yeah! I did. I got to work with Gary Halbert for, I guess, around two years. A
little less than two years. And he even—when I was living in Costa Rica, he
asked if he could crash there for a weekend and wound up staying four months.
Rob: That’s the perfect house guest, right?
Dan: Yeah, exactly. Always want a house guest who stays for four months.
Yeah, I got to work really closely with Gary. Also from Barberton OH, ironically.
You know, there’s another example. Gary Halbert, a legend in this business, who
to this day, probably had one of the most successful mail-order businesses in the
history of the entire business. The Halbert Coat of Arms business, which later
became Numas, to start that business and to write the mail piece to launch that
business, for FOUR years he did nothing but work on that mail-piece. And it was
failure after failure after failure for four years. He didn’t have any other job but
working on that mail-piece. And his partner in that business, Dennis Haslinger,
supported Gary and his family for four years. Dennis had a successful, I think,
insurance business? Some other business Dennis was successful at and he
literally supported Halbert and his family for four years while Halbert tried to crack
that code.
So Halbert, one of the best copywriters to ever walk the earth, launched, still to
this day, one of the most successful mail-order businesses in the history of direct
response marketing. For four years straight, everything Halbert wrote bombed.
You know, and while I worked with Halbert, that was another great lesson. He did
a really good job of promoting himself as the best copywriter in the world. And I
used to play a straight man when he’d ask, and you know how I know that’s true,
Dan? And I knew when to leave the pregnant pause and everything, no Gary—
how do you know it’s true? And he’d say, because it says so every month in my
newsletter.
So he was really successful as promoting himself as the best copywriter in the
world. Many people believed that, myself included. It was great to see him fail, it
was great to see him spend weeks and weeks and months on something and
have it launched and it performed so badly, we thought somebody screwed up
the telephone number because like, not a single call came in. And that was really
refreshing. So that was, back to what I said earlier, that is the process. Fail, fail,
fail, fail, fail, success. Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, lot of success! Fail another
50 times, huge home run, success.
And by the way, yeah! It does get better with time. Your hit rate gets better. But
you never arrive—that’s the process. Ad infinitum. Until they plant you in the
ground. Failure is never permanent, but guess what? Neither is success. It’s
going to be a constant fight to have things that are successful because that is the
process—till you die! Continue to fail until you, you know, get something that
does work!
Rob: That’s great advice.
Kira: Okay, I have two questions. How is it living with Gary? I imagine it’s hard to
live with any guest, like for four months, so what was it like living with Gary? But
wouldn’t we know—you can share it with us!
Dan: (laughs) Everybody seems to be fascinated about that because he was
quite the eccentric character. I mean, like, the stories about him being eccentric
weren’t exaggerated, they were really true. And he was, just like I am. He’s an
extreme introvert. So you know, I don’t like living with anybody, so that was
difficult. It just meant for me, especially when I thought it’d just be two days... and
it turned into four months... It was like, a never-ending adventure.
Some of the whacky stuff he’d do. I went back home where I grew up to Ohio
once, and I should’ve known better, and I said hey Gary, you know, take care of
my place and take care of my dog, my Doberman at the time when he was still
alive, and he was like yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem. I should’ve known better
than that. And I come back and he’d fired my housekeeper and the place looked
like a tornado hit. All the furniture, throughout the entire house including the
kitchen, was crammed floor to ceiling in the guest bedroom and the entire house
was empty except there were papers from a yellow notepad all over the floor of
the house, like lined up in a certain crazy order, and my dog was locked in the
bathroom. I don’t know for how long. But like, he had scratched the wood off the
door and his paws were bleeding. Like, Halbert had no concept of time. God
knows how long things had been like this! That’s just one example.
He was really funny. His mind worked—as far as like, daily things, was so totally
dysfunctional because you talk about being in your own head... well, he was in
his own head so much trying to figure out copy or trying to figure out stuff for his
monthly newsletter, the rest of the world just kind of went past him. He paid no
attention to it. And sometimes he’d tell you like, here’s a piece of copy, you need
to work on this and then he’d go and start working on something else and like an
hour and a half later, he’d say hey man, let’s go. He’d take you with him the
whole day when he was running errands when you’re supposed to be working on
copy. And then you’d come home and like a half hour later he’d knock on the
door and say, is that copy done yet?
Rob: What?! That’s crazy! (laughs)
Dan: Gary, don’t you remember? We screwed off the entire day! You drove me
all over town to buy stuff for your boat and buy CDs and stuff! So yeah, it was
definitely an interesting experience. I learned so much by just observing him. It
was extremely challenging working with him, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Rob: How is your process different from what you saw Gary doing? Like when
you sit down to write, when you take on a project, what do you do?
Dan: When I take on a project, I want to get started right away. Like, I really want
to start writing right away and a lot of times, I do, just start writing headline ideas.
Even if they totally suck, even if it’s complete nonsense. You know, like, I’d just
write yada yada yada, just to get started, and there’s value in that. There’s value
in just getting forward motion started, even if it’s writing complete nonsensical
stuff. Because good can come out of that!
But one of the breakthroughs I got from Halbert is that he’d never start on
anything. He’d do his research and if the client provided any research, he’d read
the research package, and/or do his own research, and then he’d literally goof off
and sometimes I’d get really nervous, because he’d goof off for weeks straight
and I thought, man oh man! You just took a lot of money from this guy! And we’re
doing nothing, every day! We’re literally just screwing up! But that was his
process. Because he needed it all to gel in his mind and he needed the big idea
to bubble up and it couldn’t just be like, eh, this might be good. It had to be the
big breakthrough idea, or he would never get started. He just waited for that. And
there’s a lot of value to that.
Again, there’s a lot of value to just getting started, especially if you’re excited
about it, even if you do nothing but write blah blah blah on the paper, because
something good can come out of blah blah blah just because you’ve got forward
motion started. But then, there’s something to Halbert’s process too, of you know,
waiting for the big idea to bubble up. The problem is, again, Halbert had no
concept of time, nor was he ever worried about you know, the client just paid him
$40,000 and he hasn’t produced anything for 6 weeks. He couldn’t care less. But
for the rest of us who live in the real world, when we have deadlines, you know,
we want to respect that. So I can definitely appreciate both those processes but I
guess mine is somewhat of a combination of the two.
When the big breakthrough idea ain’t coming, you still gotta produce. And that’s
when you’ve got to suck it up and if, even if you’re completely blank, when you
literally do start writing blah blah blah on the page, just to get something started.
Kira: During that time when you’re getting started and you’ve got blah blah blah,
are you getting it out and then going back to research and revisiting it? What else
happens during that time for you?
Dan: Yeah, all of the above. And usually panicking. You know? (laughs) Because
like, wow. Here I’ve spent however many days or weeks on this and I got nothin,
honey! Yeah, so a combination of writing nonsensical stuff, even writing the tried
and true, some version of the tried and true, like the how tos, the who else wants,
that kind of stuff. And just hoping that some breakthrough will come out of that.
And sometimes, I learned this from a couple friends of mine, Terry Dean and Dr.
Glenn Livingston… sometimes the best thing for me, especially if I’m freaking out
because I’ve got nothing, honey, is the paradoxical solution and that’s where I tell
myself okay. I need to come up with a big breakthrough idea, so here’s what I’m
going to do. I’m going to come up with a big breakthrough idea, if it’s my own
business, like, to ruin my own business. If it’s a client’s business, I’m going to
come up with a big breakthrough idea and the goal is to ruin this guy’s business.
So then I start writing headlines like,

“Brand New Supplement, Made From Ingredients I Found Under

My Kitchen Sink, Gives You An Immediate Unibrow and Uncontrollable
Flatulence in Important Social Situations and
Turns You Into a Eunuch.”

And I start writing headlines like that, like okay, wait a minute, how can I make
this worse? Because is that good enough to destroy this guy’s business? No, let
me make this worse. So I’ll write headlines like that and then switch gears. Now,
let me write some headlines or come up with some hooks that will make this
guy’s company more successful than it’s ever been. And there’s something about
that paradoxical solution that seems to be emotionally freeing. Like, now all of a
sudden, the pressure’s off because all you gotta do is destroy the guy’s
company. You know?
You don’t have to produce anything, you don’t have to be brilliant, you can
actually have some fun with it! So that’s sometimes part of my process.
Rob: I like that idea, because it gets you creative. It starts the thinking going and
even though it’s just play, you’re starting to put words on paper and it just starts
the process. I really like that idea.
Dan: Yeah, play is important because your biggest enemy is a copywriter—your
biggest enemy is any creative person or any person who synthesizes. I call it
synthesized, I don’t think any of us humans really create anything. We just
synthesize new things out of existing things so, any person who has to
synthesize something, play is the best thing for you.
Your biggest enemy is that internal critic in your head. That internal editor. You
get an idea or think about writing it and it says, well that sucks! You suck, as a
matter of fact. In fact, you suck as a copywriter, you suck as a person, why are
you even attempting this? You’re a failure. You should probably just grab a bottle
and sit out on Skid Row because you are a worthless waste of human flesh and
you should probably just, you know, go somewhere and dry up and die. That
internal editor. And that seems to be silenced, to a point, when you can play. Or
just have fun.
Rob: Dan, what does your business look like today? You’re amazingly prolific, I
know you’re writing emails almost daily, you do your newsletter, you’ve been
working on a book, I don’t know if you still do client projects but you certainly do
your own projects; how does that all come together?
Dan: You know, I don’t see myself as prolific, really; I see that I could be more
prolific. But I guess I do produce a fair amount of stuff every month because I’ve
put myself in a position where I have to! (laughs) I think if it were up to me, I’d
probably goof off a whole lot more than I actually do, so yeah. I have to produce
this stuff or at least, I’ve committed to producing it.
I don’t take on a lot of new clients right now; I’m working with a handful and that’s
about it. Actually, just two on an ongoing basis—well, three on an ongoing basis.
Agora Financial is so nice to me; they just, I’ve got an open door agreement with
them. Anytime I want to write anything, they just say yeah! Just let us know and
you’re good! So three clients I work with regularly and then I have my own
membership/publishing business.
I have a membership called the Marketing Camelot for entrepreneurs and
copywriters. There’s an online membership site for that. I do a monthly webinar
for my knights in the Marketing Camelot. Not members—knights. And I publish a
monthly print newsletter for them. Yeah, so I guess I am producing a fair amount
of stuff. It’s somewhat of a mixed business model—so it’s a combination of client
work, and my own business, my membership.
My business occasionally spawns other mini-projects, like some that don’t have
an ongoing coaching business. I have an ongoing mastermind with a small group
of people and that’s a paid mastermind so they get personal attention from me
and we do in-person meetings. Like I said, I do occasional coaching that comes
from my membership. It’s only available to my knights.
I do have a new book coming out called Just Sell The Damn Thing, but that’s all
related to my membership. What that really is, is revealing my new marketing
system called JSTDT, which stands for Just Sell The Damn Thing, a term I
learned from Halbert, by the way, when he was critiquing my copy. He was like
ahhh, there’s too much damn throat clearing going on in the first three pages!
Just sell the damn thing! You know?
But that’s all related to my business so I guess it’s almost like a 50/50 split. I’m
writing stuff for my own business and for clients, too.
Rob: I like it. So, you had mentioned earlier that you pronounce thing as “thang”
and you just were talking about how you call your members “knights”, and I’ve
noticed this about a lot of the things that you write. You’ve created a vocabulary
that’s very unique to you and to the people that are in your group. I’m assuming
that that’s on purpose, that you’re very deliberate about doing that. Will you talk a
little bit about you know, the language that you use?
Dan: That’s very observant of you, Rob, and by the way... so, I’ve never said this
publicly; I’ve said this to you in print. You are Sir Robert of Marsh…
Rob: That’s correct.
Dan: So I want to personally thank you for that. I do my best to try to convey my
gratitude in the stuff in print I send you when you first got knighted, but I get the
opportunity with you to tell you thank you now, so thanks!
Rob: I think I get more from the relationship than you do at this point! But you
know, that might change someday; we’ll see!
Dan: You know, to be totally transparent with you. This thing of creating my own
language—I’ve been doing that since I was a kid. There are still to this day
certain words or phrases that only really close friends and family members
understand. So I’ve been doing that a long time. And I actually just kinda
naturally started doing that when I started publishing my newsletter.
My Marketing Camelot initially just started out as a print newsletter. And then it
morphed into you know, a whole membership around it. So I started that when I
first launched the newsletter back in 2011. And yeah, I started you know, little
words like thang, and JSTDT—just sell the damn thing—and “nuttin’ honey”.
“Nuttin’ honey” is an 80’s reference to an old cereal commercial.
Rob: I remember it well, yeah.
Dan: Here’s one thing I learned by observing Dan Kennedy—and this is why my
newsletter went from just a newsletter to a membership—Marketing Camelot. My
members being more than members, they’re knights—they’re part of a vision
here. They’re part of a movement. Because what I learned by observing Dan
Kennedy... I’ve been a membership in his deal since the mid-90’s. Many other
groups, successful groups, like even the Amway business, they all have their
own jargon and their own language and their own insider things. Like when
somebody says it, you can be like oh yeah! This guy’s part of the same deal. This
guy’s like me, he’s one of us.
So that was part of me wanting to create something much more important than
just a newsletter. Or something more important than just a membership. People
don’t stick in a membership. Talk to anybody who’s got any kind of paid online
membership. They’re doing a Bible-thumping, pew-jumping, tongue-talkin’,
snake-shakin’, hallelujah breakdown if they can get people to stick for three
months in their deal, because you know, that’s all it is. A membership.
You gotta make it something much more important to your peeps than just a
membership. And building something unique and something special, and building
something that has a bigger purpose, is all part of that. And the language that the
inner circle—the inner circle language that you use is all part of it, so that’s pretty
observant of you, Rob.
Rob: It’s obvious and it’s something that I see that happening, I’m guessing that
it resonates with people really well, so yeah. I like it.
Dan: Yeah, you’ll know when it’s resonating with your people when they start
saying it back to you. And you know, like, I have people who…
Rob: It’s your “thang.”
Dan: Yeah, exactly! People say, “thang” to me all the time. And I even heard
somebody say “nuttin’ honey” the other day and I just love it.
Kira: Alright, I want to make sure I ask you this question. What’s the future of
copywriting? What do copywriters today again, especially new copywriters, need
to master in order to be successful in today’s marketplace?
Dan: I should be asking you guys that! (laughs) I don’t think anybody’s ever
asked me that, so I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out. The three of us
should put our heads together and figure that out because that’s important. I do
know this—and sometimes I worry about this.
Microsoft has done studies now showing that the average human being has less
of an attention span than a goldfish. So, a goldfish has a 9 second attention
span, and now they’re saying human beings less than that? And now these
dudes who worked for Apple and Microsoft and Google are doing the
whistleblower thing and talking about how they have deliberately engineered
smartphones and apps on smartphones to be as addictive as slot machines, but
if they could do it more addictive than slot machines they did, and they have.
Mission accomplished.
So it’s more difficult than ever to get somebody’s attention and to maintain their
attention. And not just because of the internet. The internet was a big part of it,
there’s just overwhelm. There’s so much on the internet and so many things—
videos of cats in tutus vying for people’s attention on Facebook and people
posting what they had for lunch and their bowel movements after lunch on
Facebook—that people seem to be enamored with! And paying attention to! It’s
more difficult than ever to get people’s attention.
And now with mobile, everybody’s going online on mobile. 80% of all emails are
being read on mobile. So now, your message is being read on a “thang” that
has—that was designed to be more addictive than a slot machine. So your sales
message has to compete with whatever the flavor of the day game is on the
iPhone that literally stimulates the same parts of the brain that light up when
somebody takes heroine. So we better figure out what the future of copywriting is
because that’s our competition.
Rob: I like the observation. Dan, you’ve mentioned a few things—turning points
in your career, people you’ve learned from, books that you’ve read—is there one
thing that stands out to you that’s made the biggest difference in your career as
an entrepreneur and as a copywriter?
Dan: Probably the most recent breakthrough that I’ve had as far as copywriting,
success in business, success in anything, has been mindset breakthroughs. I
discovered direct response marketing 22 years ago. And I’ve been writing direct
response copywriting for 22 years. 20 of those years, my entire focus was on
skillset. And that ain’t a bad thing to focus on!
But any mindset stuff, I just dealt with. Like when I talked about the internal critic
earlier, I somehow found ways to deal with that that weren’t always healthy and
weren’t always productive, but I got them to work. There is a lot of that and there
has been a lot of value in focusing exclusively on skillset for 20 years. But I had
to—at one point—be honest with myself, and I felt like I’ve been plateaued for 10
years! And I thought it can’t be for lack of focus on skillset—I’ve done nothing but
focus on skillset for 20 years. Why the plateau?!
In a lot of different areas. I felt plateaued in my copywriting, my income level
certainly had plateaued, like growth-wise, in the business stuff I felt plateaued.
And I thought, you know, I’ve ignored the mindset stuff because I thought it was
all woo-woo kind of stuff but maybe I should take another look at that.
So my biggest breakthrough in the past 2 years has been focusing just as much
on mindset as skillset, and in some of it, when you get into it, does initially sound
woo-woo but it’s actually when you really understand how it works, it’s actually
very pragmatic. And so I think if I wouldn’t have focused on mindset just as much
as skillset, I think I’d still be plateaued. But just in 2 years, I’ve made some really
huge breakthroughs. I’ve eclipsed the ten year plateau, you know, by 3x just in
the past two years by simply focusing on mindset.
So, for you, that’s whatever it is. It is what it is. If that’s getting your spiritual life
right, if that’s gettin’ back into the mindset books, like Think and Grow Rich, it’s
whatever works for you. But when you start to understand quantum physics,
which, I don’t know if any of us humans will ever understand that, but when you
start to understand the basics of quantum physics, you’ll get it. Like, when your
mindset sucks, and you’re allowing the internal editor to completely sabotage
you, when you’re writing copy, well, you’re probably going to get less than stellar
results. Just due to quantum physics, man! I mean, it’s an energy “thang” and
you are literally imbuing your copy with an energy that’s gonna sabotage the
results of that “thang”. I know that sounds crazy woo-woo; it’s probably not
anything you wanted to get into, but that’s been my biggest, most recent
breakthrough.
Rob: I like it.
Kira: Yeah, that’s really helpful to hear. Just tuck it in your closet—the spiritual
stuff and the mindset stuff—just put it away and focus on the client work and
improving as a copywriter. But at some point, like you said, it’ll catch up to you
and you’ll plateau. I know we want to ask you so many more questions and we’re
out of time, but where can we find you on the internet, if people want to get in
touch with you, get on your list, where should they go?
Dan: The place to get into my world, the main place, is at dobermandan.com,
and there are tons of articles. I’ve lost count—hundreds of articles up there, you
can read. If you’re a glutton for punishment you can actually opt in there and get
a never ending stream of daily emails. Yeah, that’s probably the best way to get
into my world. I also do a podcast—it’s on iTunes, and it’s called Off the Chain
with Doberman Dan. If you get on my opt in list at dobermandan.com I also send
out an email every week when there’s a new podcast episode available.
Rob: It’s good stuff, the podcast, the newsletter. I’ve learned a ton. I would
consider you, Dan, one of my mentors from afar. So I’m grateful for the things
I’ve learned from you.
Dan: Well thank you! And I appreciate the invite on the show. I had a good time.
Rob and Kira, you guys are both two great hosts. You make this fun.
Rob: Thank you!
Kira: It has been fun; thank you Dan!
You’ve been listening to The Copywriter Club Podcast with Kira Hug and Rob
Marsh. Music for the show is a clip from Gravity by Whitest Boy Alive, available
on iTunes. If you like what you’ve heard, you can help us spread the word by
subscribing in iTunes and by leaving a review. For show notes, a full transcript,
and links to our free Facebook community, visit thecopywriterclub.com. We’ll see
you next episode!