John Carlton is a copywriting legend, a world-class copywriter firmly at the red-hot center of the marketing world, both online and offline. He's been a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant for 25 years, but he's probably best known as the author of Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel. He is the recognized expert when it comes to copywriting and the marketing issues tied to it.
His career arc is legendary, having worked with the big names in Internet marketing, as well as pioneering online advertising tactics, starring as the featured speaker at major marketing seminars, and running his own workshop seminars on copywriting and marketing, which sell out at $5,000 per attendee. His podcasts, teleseminars and interviews are must-hear material for every serious marketer.
He is frequently praised for his teaching abilities, and others defer to his expertise at crafting killer sales copy. He is a central character in the amazing explosion of online business, responsible for many innovations and famous for helping a host of top marketers get started with his brutal, real-world advice and specific advertising makeovers.
RIC THOMPSON: There are a lot of great Internet marketers out there, but you're a legend, John. You've been doing marketing and copywriting for a lot longer than since you've brought it over to the web, but let's start there. How did you get your start in copywriting? Not everybody starts as a legend, right? You weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Where did you start?
JOHN CARLTON: Ric, I started out back in the bad old days before the web. It was called the classic marketing period. The reason my story resonates with people is merely because I started out as close to zero as possible. I was literally sleeping on a friend's couch. I was homeless. I was living out of my car. I had no job, no girlfriend and no prospects.
I had this epiphany that if I was going to get my life together, I was going to have to do it. From that I took a small piece of experience that I had with marketing and advertising. I was in the art department of a computer supply catalog in Silicon Valley in the late '70s. I met my first copywriter there and I thought, "This is something I can probably do. I can get involved in copywriting."
I wanted to get involved in advertising and marketing in some way. I really had only the most distant idea of what it was all about, but I got involved and I educated myself in being a freelance copywriter. There were very few freelancers around at that time. This was in the early '80s. I had to invent the whole process on my own. I had to learn how to be a copywriter, how to market myself as a copywriter, and how to navigate the whole advertising world of agencies and private clients, and work with entrepreneurs.
Because I was on my own, I had to watch my own back. I kept a lot of notes. I kept journals and I kept track of my progress. I was really hungry to learn from every lesson that popped up. When I encountered something like a new client or a new market, or actually started meeting some other people in advertising when I worked for an agency, I would take notes and I would try to figure out the lesson.
I would try to figure out what the lesson was that I could take from the experience to help me the next time out. There is just one little detail of the start in my career as a writer. I was 32 years old. I'd been a slacker. I didn't have any idea what I was doing. I knew I had to get going as fast as possible because I didn't have the luxury of a lot of time left. I didn't have a 'Plan B' if working as a copywriter didn't work out.
I took a speed-reading course, Ric. I went to the Torrance Municipal Library, and I read everything in the Dewey decimal system from 700 to 900, which included salesmanship, marketing, writing, advertising, et cetera-all of those books. If you know how speed-reading works, you take piles of books and rip through them as fast as you can. You find the ones that are good and put them on one side.
The ones that are bad you toss back into the pile. You go deeper into the good ones. You keep going through them until you start finding common themes. I spent a couple of weeks doing this. Ric, I thought I had to do this to catch up to everybody else in the Los Angeles area's advertising community because I was going to walk into agencies and say, "I'm a writer. If you can hire me for single jobs, then I'm available."
I figured I needed to get up to speed. What I didn't realize is that just spending those two weeks reading all of those old books and new books about advertising, writing, marketing and salesmanship I could find, put me light years ahead of everybody in all the agencies I went to. This was Los Angeles. I was going to the biggest agencies there. I would walk in, sit down and realize very quickly that I had more academic knowledge than the guys sitting there.
A lot of the people in advertising get in there but they don't want to study it. Most of the writers want to be screen writers in New York and Los Angeles. They have their novel and movie script in the bottom drawer. They're being a copywriter while they're waiting for their life to start. They couldn't care less. For me, it was a totally different thing. I loved this. I loved the idea that I could write and make a really good living and be my own boss, and I was very interested in the whole process.
There were some psychological elements to this. There was this whole idea of studying human behavior and looking into salesmanship. It's a great field to be in. Everything that civilization is all about comes to roost when you start to market to people. It's demographics, it's psychology, it's history, it's bonding, it's tribal, it's everything that comes together.
I realized that when I walked into these agencies I was actually able to present myself not as a know-it-all, but as a guy who knew enough to not be scared to take on a job. After my first job, I started to get a reputation because I threw myself into this. Again, I didn't have the experience, but I figured out what I needed to do to write those first few jobs. They were small writing jobs, but I wasn't scared of it.
I figured out what to do. I did it. I did it well. I got it back on time and in a good way. I was able to talk advertising with these guys. My reputation started right away as a guy who could be trusted as a freelancer. That started me freelancing on the side. Because I was in LA, I happened to meet up with a guy named Jay Abraham, who your readers have probably heard about.
He's still around. Through Jay Abraham I met Gary Halbert. Gary Halbert and I hit it off immediately. I spent a long time with him. I started hungrily looking for mentors and for people who were already deep into the advertising, writing and salesmanship world. I took notes. I looked for the lessons. This helped me when I decided to start teaching other people how to write.
I was able to look back on my notes and say, "This is how I did it. This is how I broke it down." That's why I had a monthly newsletter for six years called The Marketing Rebel Rant. I've been online with the blog, and I just passed, I think, the five-year mark. I am not even close to digging into the stack of notes I have from my career as a writer. I take all those lessons I learned to help other people figure out what's going on. Does that make sense, Ric?
RIC THOMPSON: That makes a lot of sense. That's awesome. I think the next question, John, is this. As novel of an idea as it is to us nowadays, there are actually jobs that have nothing to do with the Internet at all. You took your skills from the offline ad writing and from direct response, and applied them to the Internet. Where and when did that really start?
JOHN CARLTON: There's actually what we call a metatext answer to this. The answer is that I did come up through the ranks of what's called direct-response direct mail, which merely means that there were letters that went out with stamps, and you told people a story and then you asked for an action: "Call this number," "Order this thing," "Send for this free report," "Call me at my office."
That's where the direct response thing comes from. I learned very early on that the letters that I wrote could be slightly massaged and put into magazine ads also. I realized that this was basic salesmanship that I was learning, and how to sell stuff. I was learning a lot from guys who had cut their teeth with face-to-face sales and even door-to-door sales; guys who had learned to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and guys who actually ran three-card Monte games in the streets of Berkeley.
You had to understand human behavior. You had to understand how to sell. This was all way before NLP came around too, by the way. I realized that ads that I wrote for a direct mail letter could also be used in a magazine, and about a year or two later, in infomercials. I was writing some of the first long infomercials that popped up in the early '80s when cable television was discovered as a new medium.
These were just vehicles for the sales message. It didn't matter whether I was going to write a letter, a magazine ad, a script for a television spot, or an audio that would be sent out by cassette back then, later a CD, and now an MP3. It was just the vehicle that might change, but the basic salesmanship never did. When the web came around I just said, "This is a hot new way to reach a whole bunch of people."
It was a new vehicle to get the sales message out. This is important, Ric. The difference between a direct mail letter and a magazine ad is the amount of space you have or the amount of bandwidth within that vehicle you have to present your sales message. If I'm sending out an 8-by-10 postcard, I have a certain amount of space to fill up. I can make the type very small, but I have a limit to how many words I can put in there.
It's like Twitter, I guess, or haikus, as we call them. If I write too much in a letter, the postage is going to go up and it becomes more expensive to mail that letter. In a magazine ad, you have a certain amount of space you can write in, and you can write no more. In an hour-long, or half-hour-long infomercial, you have a certain number of words you can actually physically get into that time period.
Online, all of that fell away. When people talk about the differences online, you can now write to your heart's content and not incur any other costs or any limitations. When people first starting writing on the web they started really letting it go. That's when old-school guys like me recognized the power of this thing. You were able to not just have your basic sales message, but you could indulge in your entire sales message.
You could make as powerful a sales message as you could online with no limitation to how long it was. We've gotten away from this, but some of the early letters were 100 manuscript pages long, which was unheard of in the pre-web days. We've gotten away from that, but writers who are writing online do not worry about how long the piece is. The way I describe it is that you start with your sales message.
You have to establish credibility, get the attention of the person you're after, and start to weave the story of what you have, why it's important to the person you're talking to, and what's going on, and you finish with, "Here's what you need to do now. Here's how to get it. Do these things." Then you look at how long that process takes. When you're through writing that down, talking into a video camera, or talking on an audio program, however long that is, that's how long the sales message is.
It could be very long. It could be very short. It could be broken up into various pieces. People get very confused about long copy versus short copy. They're basically confused about the salesmanship involved. The salesmanship is a very concrete thing. You need to establish yourself with me. With your credibility and your story, you need to weave this tale. If I don't know who you are, you need to spend more time on that.
If I do know who you are-let's say I'm on your list, I'm familiar with you, and I like you-you may spend less time with that. You may be able to spend more time going into background stories or other things. Basically, you are bringing somebody into your world through the sales message and persuading them to do something they weren't necessarily going to do if you hadn't intervened.
People will not buy a product just because it's a good product. They won't even buy a good product even if it's perfect for them and will change their lives. They need to be persuaded. People don't persuade themselves very well. It would be great to have a marketplace where we could say, "I have this widget or product that does this," and that's all you have to do to lay that out there and people see it and make up their own minds, and they work it out.
There are very few markets like that. In most markets, there is some element of salesmanship involved, like buying a guitar from a guitar shop. Which one do you choose, even if you thought you knew a salesman could influence you with one or another with information you didn't know before, or a special way of paying for it? It's the same thing online.
Getting online represented a huge opportunity for old-school guys who knew that they could now indulge to their heart's content without any restraints a new vehicle for reaching people on an unprecedented level, and reaching them with a full sales message. Of course, in the early days, video wasn't very viable because people had dialup connections and there were a lot of bandwidth problems.
However, now we have reached a stage online where it's pretty much, "Go for it!" I think it's going to get more and more exciting as we're able to do more and more things. We don't know what the marketing landscape online is going to look like this time next year. In two years, we'll have to look at William Gibson-style sci-fi to even begin to imagine what kind of things we will be able to do.
RIC THOMPSON: That's the point. The media may change-and will change, like you mentioned-but the solid core principles of the salesmanship in print isn't going to change. It's been here for decades or longer, and it's the same thing going forward. Basically, what you do is tie into human nature. Even if the Internet may drastically change, human nature's not going to change.
JOHN CARLTON: The more your competitors get confused about this, the better off you are as a marketer. Let them go off with their idea that somehow human behavior has changed because the web has arrived, and salesmanship is different. It's not. Salesmanship has not changed anymore than love between two humans has changed or basic communicating has changed.
I don't care whether you talk to me face to face, whether you pick up a phone and call me, whether you send me a Camtasia video, whether you text me or send me an email, the communication at the end of it is still human-to-human interaction. The same misunderstandings can happen and the same depth of bonding can happen if you know what you're doing and do it right.
It doesn't matter if you're texting in the non-English total-code like a lot of kids are starting to do, just coding everything. It doesn't matter. It's still communication. If there is persuasion involved, then you're going to be tapping into that part of the human brain that has been operating to persuade humans to do what they were not otherwise inclined to do. This goes back to the dawn of humans interacting with each other.
I'd like to say that salesmanship hasn't changed since the first caveman swapped up with a cave with a better view for a slab of Mastodon beef. It doesn't change. People get confused about this. This doesn't mean you need to put on a checkered coat, a loud tie, a toupee and go out and be that bad salesman. That's not what I'm talking about at all. When I talk about salesmanship, I'm talking about the persuasion process.
If you encounter anybody in your life who has convinced you to actually buy or get involved in something that you were not otherwise inclined to buy or get involved with, you have been sold. It's not a negative thing. This is how our civilization works. If I don't know about your product that's going to make my life better, I will never get that product and my life will not get better. Whether it's to fix my financial situation, help my business, help me groom my dog better, train my dog, or whatever it is, if I don't know it exists, I'm not going to know that I can get it and it can help me.
If I even know it exists, but it's in a market where there's a lot of competition or lots of other choices, or I'm not sure how to make the decision, then that's where the art of persuasion comes in. It is salesmanship. If that word bothers you-and I encounter more and more people who are bothered by the idea of selling-I hate to say it, but they're suckers for people who market their salesmanship under a different banner. They'll say, "Sell without selling," or "How to sell naturally."
That's fine. I think it's great. However, if you're married, you sold yourself to your spouse. If you've ever convinced somebody to go see a movie that they weren't otherwise going to see, you sold them on that. We sell ourselves constantly. If you've gotten a job, you sold yourself to your employer along the way. We sell ourselves to our friends when we first meet them, to get on the team, and to do things.
It's an act of taking somebody who doesn't know anything about you, maybe has the wrong idea about you, or maybe is not in the mood to be talking about this stuff. Almost all ads, even to your house list appear out of the blue, so if you have a salesmanship, if you have something to sell me or something to offer me for an exchange of money, and I didn't know it existed five minutes before I got your message-whether it's an email, a video, whether it's an ad I popped onto through pay-per-click, I didn't know it existed, I didn't know you existed, or I didn't know this offer was out there just a couple of minutes ago-now I know it's there.
This has set up a problem in my life because I thought I had a problem. Maybe it was unsolvable. Maybe I was just looking into it. Now here you arrive. If you're doing a good job of salesmanship, you're presenting a new problem in my life, because now I'm not in research mode anymore. I'm actually starting to think, "You may be the guy I need to deal with. This may be the product or the offer I may need to jump on. I may need to jump on this now."
Whatever I thought I was going to be doing at this time in the afternoon now changes because you've grabbed my focus. You've readjusted the way I'm actually thinking right now. All of these things have to happen. When you think about the process, even before I reach into my wallet and pull out my credit card or cash, or I go to PayPal and make the arrangements for the payment, that process that I'm going through is a very complex, internal brain chemistry thing that happens.
I didn't even know this was available a few minutes ago. Now I really want it. I'm questioning myself. I'm full of doubts. I'm not sure. You're countering all of this and you're moving people along. Whether it takes one sales letter to close the deal or a series of videos, or maybe somebody is on your list for a year getting your newsletters or reading your blog and then they make the sale, whatever that process is, that's the process of persuasion and salesmanship.
RIC THOMPSON: That's one of the key takeaways to understand. The basic principles that we're talking about and that John's sharing apply to everything that you're doing. He gave you some great examples right now: your blog, your newsletter, your site, your emails, and your tweets. Everything comes back to clear communication, which is what copywriting is.
John, I introduced you as arguably the most ripped-off guy on the web. The stuff that you have done has been phenomenal. Therefore, of course, imitation being the most sincere form of flattery, you've been imitated a lot, or at least your copy has. Can you give us any kind of a good story just to illustrate that?
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