[RTB:E40] After Selling $1B Online, Is eCom or Direct Response Better? w/ Craig Clemens

hey you're listening to the road to a billion podcast i'm your host stephan georgia and i'm glad to have you with me here today on this special bonus edition uh the road to a billion is a call-in radio show style podcast where you can ask myself and my guest questions about freelancing copywriting entrepreneurship mindset scaling relationships money and really pretty much anything the reason for the name the road to a billion is twofold one is because i have sold around a billion dollars worth of stuff now with um both with my own products and brands

and for clients honestly more so for the clients but either way and also the goal is to make an impact in the lives of a billion people over the next 10 years um so it starts taking calls in about about 30 minutes from now and when we do that you'll want to put questions into zoom in the q a section and myself and my guests will uh answer some of them and those will be moderated by my great friend ed ray who is our co-host ed do you want to go and say hello and introduce

yourself to everybody here hey what's up everyone my name is ed ray and uh i help people grow their businesses without sacrificing their voice or their integrity perfect thank you ed and in addition to ed we have an awesome guest today who is the legendary mr craig clemens so i'm gonna read craig's bio off a bit but then we'll jump right into it for over 15 years craig clements has been an e-commerce innovator brand storyteller and visionary builder of category leading brands as a copywriter he's run many of the biggest digital ad campaigns in history

during hundreds of millions of video views and upwards of a billion dollars in sales presently craig is co-founder of golden hippo america's largest digitally native brand incubator which under his leadership has become one of the fastest growing companies in the usa it's going to an 800 person team across five offices with no outside investor capital uh prior to going hippo craig founded breakthrough media a digital advertising company which reached three million dollars in any revenues with just three employees he's been in online e-commerce uh since 2003 as a copywriter and also is a philanthropist as

well craig and his wife sarah are longtime well members of charity water they funded over 1200 cleft lip surgeries to a partnership with the smile train and beverly hills md and they have built education centers in guatemala uh kenya through partnerships with the unstoppable foundation and pencils of promise so craig thank you so much for joining me today my pleasure long time coming i know i'm stoked i'm really excited i know you're a very busy man and um it's just wonderful to have you on so are you uh you're in la right now is that

where you are i am yes excellent cool um so craig i mean i have a lot i want to cover and i want to give people the opportunity to ask questions as well but maybe we'll start in the beginning because it's so interesting golden hippo is fairly well known in the road of uh you know digital marketing and e-commerce and um direct response and all those different worlds and uh but you know if we go way back how did you first kind of discover the road of digital marketing advertising and more specifically i guess direct

response marketing yeah well i started off as a telemarketer i feel like i've told this story a lot so i i don't wanna i don't wanna tell the whole saga again but the short story is that i was dialing for dollars interrupting people during their dinners and when i was doing that you have a script that you say to people when you call them and i would write these scripts for myself to use and they would work and then people uh other people in the company would steal them and use them to sell their folks

on the phone and that made me angry but you know i guess it was a compliment to the scripts yeah exactly i was getting swiped someone said in the comments never stopped yeah it really does so that was interesting and then i was bouncing from one dead end telemarketing job to another i was really fortunate i i met evan pagan uh through a friend and he had just started double your dating which a lot of people know and i convinced him to hire me and i go on his website and he's got this long-form sales

letter talking to men about how reading this ebook is gonna help you get dates and find a girlfriend and you know all the other fun stuff and i realized that what he had there was the same type of thing i'd been working my ass off you know making 200 calls a day to pitch to people and here he just put it up on a webpage and was sending thousands of people to it a day and the conversion rate wasn't quite as high but you didn't have to interrupt anybody during dinner and have them tell you

to [ __ ] off so it was pretty appealing to see the power of salesmanship leveraged so i went and started working for him i actually didn't start working as a copywriter that i was doing customer support at first and managed the affiliate program i bought some of the online media i was contacting other website owners to trade links if people are old school in internet marketing you'll remember that if you had inbound links would make your site rank higher in google so you know that was one of the things i did and i didn't

start writing copy there probably two years down the line but he had introduced me to gary halbert and i was reading gary halbert's newsletters and i loved gary's newsletters and i was living in san diego and i was throwing parties and when i would throw an invite up to a party i would type it in gary halbert's style and i started to get a lot of people enjoying my party invites and a lot of people would show up to the parties too so that got me excited about the idea of writing copy myself and then

evan gave me a shot uh writing bullets so bullets aren't as much of a thing today as they used to be but if you remember long-form uh static sales letters you know most of those will have a bullet section with the teaser lines in there and he had me start with the bullets and i'd sit in the back of the room during the seminars that he'd do which so for example like meeting women online would be a seminar he'd do for a weekend and we'd be making a course called meeting women online and i'd sit

in the back and i'd write down the concepts and then i'd try to shape them in a bullet so you talk about you know what your profile should say and i'd find ah the three words to add to your profile that double the amount of spots uh responses you'll get to your emails you know things like that so i try to take as big concepts turn into bullets and i remember the first seminar i did it was it was meeting women online i wrote this three pages of bullets and i was supposed to send them

to evan and i thought you know before i sent him to evan i'm going to send him to our our ceo of the company this guy named rob and asked him which were his favorite so i could cut out the crappy ones and i sent him to rob and he wrote me an email back and i was all excited to open it up and see what his favorite bullets are and it said uh craig to be honest i don't really like any of these bullets i i uh can we talk on the phone and i

talked on the phone this guy wasn't even a copywriter he told me how crappy my bullets were and how unappealing and you know not uh catchy but you know i went back and i rewrote and rewrote and then i started looking at john carlton sales letters and yannick silver sales letters and i started swiping their formulas but putting my own words into john carlton would have uh you know the the seven word sentence to add to your order page that increases your closing ratio and i'd be like well is there a place where evan said

seven words to say to a woman ah here it is you know the seven words to say to a woman in your initial email that uh make her excited to actually go on a real-life date with you you know so i was borrowing uh back then and yeah that's how it all started and i think these kids today not starting with bullets you miss a big chunk of the learning because the bullets teach you how to write very concise they teach you how to cut out the crap and they also most importantly teach you how

to grab attention in a way that's so strong i mean you know we would always say that people will buy the product just because of one bullet and you never know what that bullet's going to be uh i think gary albert is his famous story i'm probably gonna butcher this but something like he he put out this uh some health course or something like that and one of the bullets said like legal cocaine and make it in your own home or something like that and that ended up being the reason everyone was buying it so

uh you know you never know what people are gonna buy for so you gotta really tune in and make these bullets amazing so i started with straight bullets and that was all i was good at writing for the first little stretch too i remember i would then write these email promos to sell our interview series where evan would interview a dating guru every month and that was 29.95 see you kids today got it easy podcasts are free back then you had to pay 29.95 to get one interview from someone and it was quite a business

actually too reoccurring revenue so i would write the email that would sell that every month to our existing dating list and i would just listen to those interviews and i just come up with the best you know 10 to 15 bullets and the email would be really simple it'd be like hey i just interviewed a fascinating dating expert but what's more interesting is what he shared here's what you're going to learn and i just put the zingers in there and that would get people to sign up for the interview series so i think bullets are

super critical and now people go straight to video sales letters and you don't get that because there's not as many bullets in video sales letters in fact there's sometimes zero and they uh while they don't have bullets in another sense everything is a bullet if you're writing good copy every single sentence should have the purpose of making the person that's reading it or viewing it super damn intrigued to feel the effects of your product every single one needs to have a purpose you know i mean yeah there's some setups and things like that but that's

what bullets teach you so when i train writers i tell them hey go go write a ton of bullets for you know whatever this is even though you might not use them even though you might not put them in your video it'll give you some hooks that you can use in your clothes you can use it in your opening you can use it in the product copy things like that yeah that's that's awesome okay i don't remember what your question was or how i went on that tangent i don't know but it was good it

was good um no i'm just i was how did you get started but the bullet thing it makes sense i mean even for myself and when i was first kind of i always tell people when i when i feel like i first started to get good at copy it was because somebody gave me the the screaming eagle newsletter with like a clay make piece and tony forest and it was like the 21 different uh like bullet types right and it was like they were like study these different types of bullets and then first for an

info proc they were like right something crazy like 20 or 30 fascinations or bullets for each of the 21 types so it was like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and i remember thinking that the assignment was so like stupid at first and then having a lot of fun but also struggling but then realizing suddenly there was like this magic secret weapon i had that i could work in to copy because to your point it just it hooks people and even if your big idea and your lead kind of like only half hits like if you

have some bullets even in the lead right it's like i almost say it's like here's your big hook and then your fascinations and bullets are these little tiny hooks and it's like maybe the fish swims past that that baited hook here but then sees one of those other little tiny hooks that has one of your bullets and they grab onto that one that could be enough to pull them into the rest of the copy and um and all the things i've ever read that you've written uh just sort of yeah you're really good at the

curiosity element um well said i love the way you described that and that's so true thanks man yeah well a question i guess as we move forward into you know creating um going hippo and gundry md i remember when those first gun gmd offers kind of came out um like i it was funny because at first i was almost like uh jealous because i'm like well you know it's really good copy but you know he just like he took a an accomplished doctor and he made it so high production value and then you know wrote

it so that it could run on facebook and so yeah and then of course it's doing really well and then and then i had that moment of right cool and who else did that i was like oh nobody else did that craig did that and the copy itself is excellent the offers are great the products are great all of that but i had to have my ego check for a minute because it was almost such a good idea and almost i don't mean obvious in like any way offensive way it was it was such a

good no-brainer to do what you did it was so smart to do it um and you know it was a jealousy like i didn't think of it nobody else thought of it you did so i'm curious when as that came about was it really intentional just like let's create a high production value high quality sort of brand of like a great doctor you know that we're partnered with or how did you kind of conceive of uh gundry md and and sort of the style that golden hippo became one or has become well known for well

yes it was absolutely deliberate and thanks for the compliments you know when we started in this space we saw two worlds divided we saw the nicely branded supplements that you would see at gnc or vitamin shop you know that uh had no online marketing and then you'd see the white bottle that someone like you know wrote the name on and you know had great marketing but it was also uh greatly aggressive marketing for what was in it and we thought wow if this well-branded approach can be mixed with strong marketing principles you're gonna have a

huge advantage over the people in gnc because they don't know any of this and you're gonna have a huge advantage over the people that are doing the aggressive stuff and the lower quality products because we could tell what direction the networks were going in and what direction the world is going i mean you know someone only needs to buy one of those to not fall for it again you know and so we always uh you know had a at a rule that we would make best in class products and make them feel branded in a

way that would let people know that it's the same quality stuff that's on those shelves except now you can get it direct to consumer and direct from the doctor yeah that's that's awesome like i said it was just this huge hole in the market and in hindsight it seems like obvious by the time it wasn't and i think yeah well you know who else you know who else does this really well but in a totally different way is mlms so mlm's a beautiful branding the successful ones right it's amazing branding and it's actually meshed with

a very hard sales pitch it's a different kind of sales pitch because it's like hey do you want to make money and get healthy at the same time while working around your schedule right i know you just met me and you're pumping your gas you know but just listen to what i have to say and be like what the [ __ ] who's this but you know it works right i mean these mlms are huge you know so it's like it's it's you know then when they get someone's attention and they open up the brochure

they're like oh herbalife this sounds really legit it's been around for 20 years it's got these you know doctors in the medical advisory panel this is real deal stuff and there's actual people making real money here okay i might give this a try versus if someone was coming to you with an mlm pitch and they were like yeah you know this is this is the product and then it looks like i mean i don't know i don't have any crappy looking products on my desk i got some nice ones uh what if they're like you

know um you know they have a if they have some crappy looking thing you're gonna be like okay this is a total scam but if they're saying hey you can make money here and that's really healthy and they pull up some beautiful product and you're like oh interesting that looks just like the things that i saw in gnc you mean i could take that and offer it to other people oh yeah you can and it's actually better these are the reasons why because mlm people know how to build good hooks into their products as well

so they're masters of that that's a really that's an interesting way of looking at it i haven't but it makes perfect sense um one more i want to get to some other stuff to like like bitcloud and variety things and then we won't go to cover everything today anyway but um you know i'm thinking about one one interesting thing you told me when i was writing for you guys um you talked about how you're like when i try i try to write every piece so that you know somebody who's never like seen a direct response

piece before or never seen like a sales letter who's never thought about buying like what can will be engaged in this the place where they're gonna buy like you sort of the what i got from it maybe i just misinterpreted it and i've been misinterpreted since that conversation was almost that you were gonna like it's almost a pretty broad market where you almost anybody can come into like what you've created right like your your video sales letter or your funnel and get sucked in and on one hand you think well yeah sure of course but

then on the other hand you're like well yeah what about the levels of you know like market awareness and you know kind of like niching down and all that and so i was i'm just curious if you want if you could pretend you know elaborate a little bit on that philosophy of yours and how it does play into that versus really being super hyper targeted with who you go after with an offer yeah it's a great question so one thing i'm proud of at golden hippos i think we've probably gotten more people in the united

states to take their first supplement than any other company because if you think about it you know most people are not exposed to this if you're in a rural area you got your grocery store that's got you know maybe like a little vitamin section and i mean it's a lot better than it was ten years ago you know now at least you probably find probiotics in every corner of america but you know back then you didn't have much you know you might have uh your centrum and your you know flintstones vitamins maybe hydroxycut weight loss

or something like that you know uh or garcinia cambogia would make it in there but not high quality supplements and so does that mean that people don't need them just because you know the thing has got 20 different probiotic strains that are uh written in uh latin and greek that people don't know does that mean that it's only good for biohackers or the people in venice beach no i mean everyone can benefit from some of these high quality nutrients right so when i am sitting down to write a promo that's something else i think about

is what is the information gap and when there is a big information gap i i which i also call educational opportunity i think it's a good market to go into so probiotics was a great example of that i started taking probiotics myself in 2013 i'd never heard of them before i couldn't pronounce anything on the bottle but i felt a difference when i was taking it and so what's what is the difference well i learned that the stuff i was eating had added sugars and sweeteners and preservatives in it and that stuff made bad bacteria

grow in my my stomach you know and that these probiotics were good bacteria all those names were names for good bacteria so i just gave you a layman's explanation of probiotics but if you go up to someone in the street and you're like hey uh have you taken some lactobacillus coagulans because that is really what you need if you want to readjust the comp composition of your gut flora in your microbiome they'd be like well we speak english around here you know what was that right so so that's the same thing you're saying but you

gotta gotta meet the market where it's at so when we got in the probiotics market most people didn't know what probiotics were and so that was something that we would try to do and the the banners at the time would say things like um the root of all stomach problems was a good one because everyone can relate to the stomach problem right and then as most people i'm sure listening though we were very early in probiotics we were one of the biggest sellers of probiotics in the world and definitely the united states in you know

2014 and you know up up on you know the next few years and there was a movement going on so there was things like kavita soda which had probiotics in it uh all the yogurt companies are advertising probiotic benefits you know people were educated and so now you can walk down the street and most people know what a microbiome is most people know what probiotics are so a few years later a banner we were using says doctor says throw your probiotics away and be like oh interesting you know you got all this stuff that's saying

probiotic are great for you and then this one is now you know in 2017 meeting the market where it's at now where everyone is hearing about these probiotics and this doctor's saying something different you know so it's all about meeting the market where the market is and to be able to do that i think you've got to pay attention to what's going on so i never stop reading ads uh you know every six months i buy a cosmopolitan magazine in a women's world and i read it cover to cover you know i don't read i

mean all the articles you know well sometimes i'll read the you know hot sex tips and things like that but uh you know you gotta you gotta watch the market where it's at you know you got to go uh on the consumer websites in your niche you know if you're in health it might be mind body green if you're in finance it might be the reddit forums you know if or seeking alpha or you know whatever it is so you gotta know what the market is familiar with what's basic knowledge and what's advanced knowledge and

if something's advanced you gotta learn how to speak to them at a basic level to convey that message and this is exactly the same thing but you know being more granular on how you speak to someone i always love the story of how gary halbert in his lectures would say you have to write at a sixth grade reading level i'm sure everyone's heard that you know and you can now use plenty of tools to see what level your writing's at but the thing i love about this story is that back in gary's day there was

no tools it was just you guessing if it was a sixth grade reading level and so after gary halbert passed and these tools were around someone said you know i wonder if gary was really practicing what he preached because he was selling stock trading he was selling some you know advanced weight loss things like that i mean gary gary howard was selling garcinia cambogia back in like the 80s or something so uh someone went and took his sales letters and they stuck it into one of these apps and they said that gary was not writing

at a sixth grade reading level he was writing in a third grade reading so there you go that's amazing and people well i've talked about this too so uh you know i sounds like we're gonna talk about big cloud at some point i talked to a big cloud developer the other day who is building a project on the platform and i was reading his white paper which is super intense crypto defy stuff that i can't even understand and i was explaining to to him like this i was saying look you know you're smarter than most

of the people that are going to read this said even really smart people don't want something that makes their brain churn to read they want something that's easy to read easy to digest that's why a book like the alchemist is going to be popular among brilliant folks to average folks alike because it's written in such a just easy to absorb manner yeah that's an awesome point um yeah we already got the big cloud i've got maybe a couple more questions before we go there so um and before we do that craig i like to try

and remember in the middle of the episodes to uh ask how can people connect with you i mean one place sounds like probably bitcoin right um anywhere else and then also i know you mentioned that you guys are looking for writers and media buyers so i'll give you the chance to talk about that and then we'll keep going with the questions so um where do they connect and then what are you what are you looking for yeah so we are actively hiring writers and media buyers at golden hippo i even set up a special email

address for this call writers goldenhippo.com if you want to send us a resume samples cover letter you know we're a professional organization so you know while we appreciate the the personalized sales letters i got to show you some of the stuff i get man where is this oh did this this guy uh he might be on the call his name is jordan he sent me this amazing direct mail package it was you know came in this envelope but it's fast company cover with me on it it's got like some of my big goals like saving

the dolphins you know it's got like the little handwritten tag and then it had the sales letter yours free emails for golden hippos i love this stuff don't get me wrong but at the same time when it was time for me to introduce this uh gentleman to my copy chief i said okay also include your resume and a proper cover letter you know because this is a a serious environment here and you learn skills not just on how to write kick-ass copy but how to be a kick-ass business person at this company so yeah we're

hiring for writers and media buyers right now and it's it's an exciting time you know the company's growing fast uh it was one of those weird things last year you know cove would hit and you almost feel guilty talking about it but i mean the world is home they're watching videos and they're thinking about health so we had tremendous growth over the last year and this year we're up a little bit as well and so we're looking for great people to bring onto our team and i think we have the world's best training program for

writers where you get paid as you train and we have some studs and and studs on our team that uh you know are writing the most successful promos on the internet and also the cool thing about golden hippo is when you write something good it's getting seen by millions of people you know which was a challenge with some of the people i've i've mentored that aren't quite ready that you know they write something no one can see it you know and that was something i was very fortunate when i worked for evan is my first

piece of copy well it took six months before i wrote something that he would mail out to the email list because i had to get good but when i did it write something good enough it went out to a million people you know so that's great because you can actually get data quickly so uh so yeah uh please writers at golden hippo.com come join us media buyers too and it's it's uh it's an environment where you really will sharpen your knife and kick some butt yeah that's amazing um it's an awesome awesome opportunity for um

you know for writers for media buyers and when we do uh the replay on youtube put it up on itunes all that we'll make sure that it is linked in there as well so that you uh i mean again for people who are watching now or we're going to watch like i would not miss that do they need to move to la craig oh man such a great question you know it's a debate right now yeah it is a debate because we were so s uh firm on come to the office up until covid and

now we're we're thinking about these policies and what it's going to look like in the future we don't have a firm answer yet i'd say definitely send an application if you're interested uh and and you know i i think uh the world's changing so not sure but to hear applications and meet people um from from all over the place so uh yeah let us know um and you know that i i have to be protected my time these days because we're just doing a lot of new partnerships and exciting things um i think people know

we have uh tony horton as one of our our brand partners now dr gundry of course um oh man can i say this person i guess i'll say i guess i'll say i don't know if i'm supposed to say this but we're doing a survival brand with chuck norris oh nice that is amazing uh yeah so um so that's that's really exciting so i do a lot of these partnerships and and deal with people with the chats blowing up i love it [Laughter] we're so pumped about but i got to be selected with my time

but i do mentor the people that work at golden hippo i hands on personally go over their copy and work with them because you know i remember where i was uh damn it's been almost 20 years now you know and i want to i want to create the next group of a-list copywriters and as as uh you know stefan as you know there's only like what like five of us or something in the whole world you know and you know i i think uh i mean you know maybe 10 because i know i got a

few of them here at golden hippo that people don't know yet but uh yeah that's that's my uh my aim with this so yeah that's fantastic um yeah chuck norris broke the chat um okay a couple couple other questions and uh yeah then eventually we'll answer some q and a so and there's one question in there um one thing that came to mind is um what i deal with a lot you know as a mentor to many copywriters through copy accelerator and everything is um a lot of the freelancers see the the revenue numbers with

like offer ownership and so they want to create their own offer right and and because in their head they're like well i can stop trading time for money which isn't necessarily true as you know having to create an offer but um yeah there's an allure to it and then often uh justin my partner i will advise them you know not to hurry to do that because like there's a lot of headaches you know unforeseen headaches so i guess the question is just any advice you would give to a copywriter who um you know has been

for let's say a couple years they feel like they're they've had some wins they feel pretty good um they don't think they're the best in the world but they feel solid and then they want to they're tempted to create their own offer by saying that you know the health space or really whatever but especially the health space since you're in that space and that's where a lot of these varies want to go um what kind of advice would you give to them that's a great question so as you know you play you'd be better to

answer this question than i would i'd be curious to get your take because i believe you just you either currently have an offer or you recently had one is it and you did you step away from it or what's the latest yeah i was partnered in one that um there's a friends like health supplement company he already had it they were at like 5 million revenue i helped them get like 20 million but then i did step away and you know the reasons why i'm mayan were i mean there was it wasn't like we use

like real people it was real stories but it was a little bit of like aggressive stuff that i was like yeah i don't know if i really want to be doing this um but also i mean transparently that was the biggest that was the cast that made me do it but beyond that it was also like i just wasn't there's a lot of headaches right to the point i made and stuff that i was like i don't even really want to be dealing with i don't need to be doing this i'm not that passionate about

it i don't want to you know have to just all this crap of like merchant accounts and um you know just all the stuff that goes into it so yeah that's why some of the reasons i stepped away from it yeah so you know i'm fortunate i have business partners that are really good at that right i'm not i almost wrote a book called notrepreneur because i'm just not an entrepreneur i'm i'm a writer and a marketer you know so if it was me running all that stuff the company would have failed a long time

ago and we also had a huge advantage you know we started golden hippo in like 2009 2010 you know so we've been building out these systems you know so i mean i've got like uh i don't know 30 video editors or something you know uh 20 or 30 media buyers 20 copywriters and that's what it takes and the rois are not what they used to be you know so we're more about scale now than we are those quick profits and the people that i do see that are able to edge something out where it makes

money it's typically like you described where they're running something super aggressive that they can run for a year or so and then it'll get banned or slapped or just burnt out and then they have to go back to square one and start something new and it's not really like a sustainable thing it's more of a money maker than a business right so i i think it's a tough time to get into the health space right now because also too the networks these days as you may know is they don't want you to be testing your

crap ab bs like whiteboard stuff anymore they want the polished thing up front you know and so it's a lot harder to do a b testing today than it used to be you know back when you could just put words and voice and that would be good to go you know so i think it's a tougher game i think we were lucky that we started back when it was uh lucky that i had my business partners who you know there's four of us tackling these issues if it was only any two of us company wouldn't

have done as well you know there has to be these pieces come into play and also i think you need a copy advantage and when i say a copy advantage i mean i don't think a b plus copywriter is going to be able to compete anymore i think you need a stephan georgie or someone like that in a house and the reason i say in-house too is because we all write things that tank you know i i i you know i uh i don't know what my exact track record is i say i'm probably three

for four is my guess on things that work so you hire me which you know i don't freelance let's say you do let's say you get the number four but it wasn't like i tried any less on the fourth package it just you know some things things don't work you know so i've had that experience too trying to hire uh every freelancer and you know can we talk stefan openly about yeah yeah absolutely so we you know we tried to do some business together and you delivered the copy on time the first one didn't work

you did a great deep rewrite you went and did your research and it's it still didn't beat our our in-house uh guy you know which i get my ass kicked by our in-house writers all the time it's not a it's not an ego thing it's just you don't know what's gonna happen what's gonna work and that was me actively hiring the number one available person in the world you know that's just just how it goes now if i had hired you for a four package deal or something i mean i bet you know at least

one of those is going to work now probably more maybe that's the way someone could do it but yeah it's a tough game and that's why when people also ask me too no matter what type of business they're in um what they should do on the copy front and you know if they hire people i say well i say hire stefan if you can get him because he's serious about his craft he's worth every penny he'll deliver you the stuff on time um as you know stefan i've hired other a-list people who have ran away

with the money including someone whose name has been mentioned on this call i'm not going to say who it is again but that guy just literally took the money and ran away and never delivered the sales letter um and then i've gotten other people that uh you know have sent in the thing and it just like one guy took who's a guy everyone's name would know took six months to get the letter to us every month he'd write me a sales letter and why he didn't have the sales letter but you know it finally came

and it was it was 80 pages long which i was like okay it's different style than me maybe we'll put it up and we put it up and it didn't do very well and you know we finally got it working my my one of my guys like went through it like three months later he pulled it out of the done pile and like did a deep edit he got a breaking even then i spent literally i spent a full week like a focused week like at the coffee shop you know and we got to work

and ended up being a success but um but yeah that's that's like our issue you know for hiring freelancers is really tough so uh i that said there is always room for great direct response marketing i just feel like health is kind of busy so i've seen it brought to other categories like ear go hearing aids which i think just spacked for like a 3 billion valuation or something with 30 million of revenue i mean i see stuff like that and i'm like damn i'm in the wrong business russell brunson click funnels i think they

do you know uh 100 million plus not 200 million they may but i don't know something like that i think they got like you know billion plus valuation you know i mean there's all these these things where you can get bigger valuation nowadays so if i was starting over i i wouldn't get into health um i haven't seen anyone really come up in the last few years that is super legally compliant i i see that like i mean i heard research is is absolutely murdering it but i i don't see him on the big network

so i don't really know yeah no i mean i think we won't go too down the path of research but yeah i think vshred is a good one that's come up but yeah you tried one example but but yeah overall i agree i mean g plans has done decently well um but yeah but but to your point it is true so many it's like if hey if you want to play the cash grab game for like a year um and your model is you launch these things you make money for a year you sort of

sleep uneasily at night because you're worried about your dubious claims and then you you know they you offer shuts down or you get a letter from a legal agency or traffic you know dies out or whatever it is and you try it again it's like very exhausting to do that but it's very resource intensive to build a large health brand right like you guys have done it with your partners and funnily enough you know vstred people vince is a speak spokesperson nick's a ceo but then you've got um you know kevin who's basically running a

massive team of media buyers and you've got roger who's your cto doing all this tech stuff and they've got you know just like you guys a very large team um and so for like the sort of solopreneur who then wants to start an offer and make a lot of money like yeah health is is a really challenging one um and i mean dude like jason cotassion if you know jason or not great guy good media buyer uh he ran out traffic for me back in the day and he has a really successful children's publishing book

company now and one of the reasons he did that was because he's got so tired of facebook telling him no to everything that he was like what can i do that facebook's just not going to have an issue with and he was like children's books like facebook is just not going to get right if you're writing children's books and these vote it's like a really healthy eight-figure business and it they sell more books than you know an author oh yeah it's really awesome um he's a great guy if you've never met if you ever wanted

to show me a really smart guy um and they're doing awesome stuff but um but yeah i think i think that's great advice craig um yeah i mean i i always get to get the uh the calls later like hey craig do you want to buy this offer that we had that used to be doing great volume and it's kicked off all the networks maybe you can use your connections to get it back on you know so yeah yeah um okay i want to go to bitcoin one last question for you before we go to

big cloud which is um i guess just so speaking of that because we talked about it health specifically but you know in 2021 what is the place for sort of like dr and like long form because i'm i'm looking at a lot of ecom stuff that that incorporates dr elements and you know um part of me feels like oh i want to go play there like there's these people that their offers are converted at like 30 percent with like an i'm sorry three percent with like an 80 aov but they're at a decent amount of

scale on facebook and youtube and whatever and i'm like well i could come in and i think i could probably get them to four or five percent i could probably get the aov up to 120 and um you know stuff like that but but then there's issues of e-commerce i just want to make sure are you talking about like people selling pans and clothing and stuff like that what do you definitely health stuff but but even gadgets like interesting you know like like um different like consume consumer products yeah mostly when i talk about ecom

like um like so sometimes it is like supplement companies um like we were just looking at one for copying starter today that one of our rares is working on it's like an xml cream and it was like they're like basically three percent across the board with an 80 aov and um you know i'm like there's a lot of opportunity on that page right um but again i see it with uh that's a tough one to scale i can tell you i tried to do x mccree with gunnery yeah it's up to scale that's some of

these categories too right but like what if there's always like a toilet cleaner it's like a toilet cleaning invention that automatically yeah poo-pourri is like what 300 million of your business or something you know yeah and then but they use dr elements and people sort of i think a lot of times people who are on the hardcore dr side don't realize how easily applicable some of their skills are about optimization and things like that to more ecom oriented um but but i guess back to my question though yeah i mean where do you see it

you know today and beyond as far as you know long form building a brand using long-form copies that's still a good idea you know is it like on its way out um you know i'm just curious to get your take and i know other people would be interested as well yeah i mean we you know we still have mostly long form um just kind of go back to a little bit of what we're talking about earlier if you bring dr to a world that hasn't seen it before it's magic right so anyone here seen the

ads for caraway pots and pans those are amazing and they're short but they basically say your pots and pans have toxins in them these don't it's just like you know dr 101 right like problem solution type stuff and there's uh a plant company like direct to consumer plants i forget the name of it but they do some cool ads you know and the hearing aid company i mentioned earlier so uh these companies don't do long form per se long form is tough man long form the reason it's tougher now than it used to be is

because you can't launch with your crappy video and to make a shiny fancy video is really expensive and you can lose a lot of money i think that's why more people don't do long form is because they will launch their first vsl or whatever it is you know 30 minute vsl that's done well costs a lot to produce and then if it doesn't work it's hard to edit because you just had to you just made it so fancy but um i don't know is it going away i mean i hear it's once a year i

hear it's going away but it hasn't gone away you know once a year facebook calls us up and they say hey guys we're you know today we want to talk to you guys about doing some shorter formats and shorter form video i will say we use a lot more short form stuff than we did uh you know five and ten years ago and i guess it would be more of those like ecom style ads that you're used to seeing we do run those now in conjunction with our other stuff which we never did back in

you know 2015. so i don't think long form has gone away but i think it's just harder to launch long form now because the networks are so strict with how well it has to present you know if you think about it a long-form video is a network's worst nightmare and what does everybody want on their site right if you're if you own a website right you want the bmw ad that has the fancy car and the sexy couple getting it out of it that no one clicks on they stay on your site and they consume

more content right the last thing you want is some you know tricky ad with like a uh you know a penis-looking elbow dipped in a jar of uh you know red bananas that says uh you know one weird trick to detox your colon uh at home like that's the last thing people want on their website and then not only is that on the website but then it pulls someone off of your website for an hour they're never coming back you know so i think that's another like you know moat that we have at golden hippos

we built these network relationships many years ago so we still get some some leeway running this stuff um i don't know anyone who's tried to do it soon that said though i mean you guys all know the old rule of thumb is that long copy beat short copy as long as it's interesting right so if you're speaking to someone about their dreams helps and desires they want to hear as much as you have to say so it's a great question i don't think the question's going away anytime soon i also don't think the long form

is going away anytime soon but i will say we we are doing more short form now and man seeing some of the traction that these amazon businesses are getting is really blowing my mind yeah like smartypants vitamins just had a big exit to unilever i don't remember their uh i don't actually i only heard speculation on what their numbers were but it was you know mid-eight figures or something like that on amazon kids vitamins it's longer copy if you go on their web page it's longer copy than some of the competitors but you know it's

not a long form vsl so i think there's a lot of different ways to uh you know skin the cat these days and i would say that there's no wrong or right i mean there's also a completely different way if you look at vital proteins i always talk trash on influencer marketing and every time i do a bunch of ad agencies and you know influencer agencies come after me on twitter and i still hate influencer marketing um i've just spent a lot of money trying to make it work and not made it work that said

vital proteins they sponsored all these influencers to hold up the collagen powder and go to tulum and things like that and had the biggest booths at expo west when you go to the conventions you know it's like the vital proteins booth is like five times as big as a restaurant just blowing investor capital sells to nestle for 750 million bucks and a pretty pretty solid deal for the founder too so you know there's there's a lot of different ways to play this game um rich tool is another one that is uh raised a lot of

money doing a lot of revenue yeah long form they'll probably have a big exit i don't think they're making a lot of money but they're doing a lot of revenue and that's what some of these acquirers want to see and it's got beautiful branding and that's another thing too is i think people in our space think that they can't learn from these companies they don't even look at them but i'm always studying these companies and ordering their products and seeing what they do you know and and thinking about how can we incorporate some of that

stuff you know like there's there's uh brands on our portfolio that i've considered raising money for and and doing some some models like that you know i don't think you should limit yourself and i think it's been one of our secrets to success is looking at other worlds like you know the startup worlds the uh brand advertising worlds and taking the best of those and peppering them in to create a unique system yeah that's that makes a ton of sense i think there's a lot of of gold there for people who listen and um and

i think you know going back to the person who wants to start their own company i you know it sounds kind of obvious but at least i would imagine you'd agree maybe if you don't feel free to say it but it's the kind of thing about what you're trying to build and being real for yourself right because there's people who build feel like a cash flow lifestyle business like great right awesome and that's what like offers generally are and if you're and you could make lots of money doing that and then invest and whatever you're

trying to build something to sell it then you know it can be a totally different game because if you're getting you know investment venture capital or you're raising rounds and then you're uh you know basically you don't care about being profitable all you care about is growth growth growth growth and like doing it with metrics that your investors are happy with so you can get to that exit but that's a very difficult game right very few for every company that we hear those crazy exits there's like you know the other nine that sort of got

here and then fell but yeah or they have the big exit in the media but the founder didn't actually make make much more than you know a million or two million bucks or something like that you know there's a lot of those too because they raised too much money or or you know had bad things happen everywhere so i know a company that sold for like one point 1.3 1.6 billion but the founder barely got anything it's a which one i can't i won't say on this but oh crime's coming okay got it yeah i

had a friend tickets company public for 500 million dollars and you know he made like three million bucks yes it just because he raised too much money you know it wasn't it wasn't in our space at all and so you know you gotta you gotta be careful when you're doing that sort of stuff well you know the great thing about copywriting uh stefan as you know is if you get really good you make a lot of money yeah oh absolutely pretty carefree especially if you have either an in-house position or as like one good steady

client something like that you know i would hate to be a freelance game uh person trying to play that game of you know trying to juggle a lot of clients but like you know i think clayton make peace work with weiss investments for many many years it was like his only client and he was making a killing you know and so i guess it also depends like how good of a copywriter you are you know if you think you got what it takes to be world-class and you're willing to put the time in then you

might as well get there right because you'll make a lot of money on the way up you'll make a lot of money at that position and then you're probably also then you're in actually weird position because you can make a lot of money doing exactly what you're doing but then you also have that unfair advantage if you go start your own company yeah no i think that that's great advice i mean i think it's really good advice and any people yeah just think long and hard about what you really want what do you want to

do some people want to start a company for the feeling of like accomplishment and all that and it's like great but if you're miserable because you suddenly have a giant team and you're trying to manage it and you don't know what's going on and you know there's good days and bad days and then you're like or i could just have gotten really good ranked copy and you know gotten like made whatever half a million dollars a year even a couple million dollars a year of royalties with the right company and um yeah i think you

have to weigh that up but so uh two things one everyone remember if you go to writers at goldenhippo.com if you want to um you know potentially become a writer for golden hippo if you want to apply include your your resume um a cover letter samples i would assume right but that is a special email that craig set up writers at goldenhippo.com they're looking for media buyers as well and you don't necessarily need to move to la that's open for debate within the golden hippo organization so if in doubt apply i mean it's like applying

for one of the you know greatest like companies that we've got you know and then just marketing and direct response and consumer products uh craig is a great copy chief even having worked with him on that one project which uh as he alluded to did not did not work but um from i don't mind but yeah until that point it's funny because i literally just had something for another client where i wrote three things for them one double their two controls one new one but one beat the control by over a hundred percent won't be

the control by like 30 but it was that control was more established and then once it's totally like tanking right and i'm trying to figure it out but it's like you know and i put a post about too it's like i'm still batting you know like basically two out of three and so yeah that's great but like yo if you just hire me for the the one that takes right and and um no writer's gonna go 100 anytime uh just a good lesson for writers to know as well including myself yeah the other thing is

it's you know the magic is in the rewrite often yeah i remember one of my most frustrating experiences it was actually with the uh the pre-bio thrive sales letter which i'm sure some people have seen first one i put up didn't work second one i put up didn't work and these are deep rewrites you know these are like rewriting the whole intro and the body and all that everything but the clothes third one i put up just does okay and then i get this new idea and this new idea is like this is the one

you know and i i spent like another two weeks writing this crazy big idea for this thing and put that up and it loses to the third one i was so bummed but fortunately the third one because this is another thing too stefan that i think people don't understand is it's not as much about the writer as it was back when the sales letter was the only thing the prospect saw when it came to your mailbox or in the newspaper or something like that now the media buyer is a critical part of the puzzle so

my third draft of this thing our amazing media team was tweaking and tuning and doing their thing along with our amazing video editors and split testing different video and you know different uh types of buttons on the page and colors and you know headlines and all this stuff and they got my third draft working really well but you know that's that's the writer's life you never know what's going to work you know and even the things that you're most excited about can totally tank oh man i wrote a letter for dr gundry chocolates i was

so excited about this it was the first supplement chocolate it was a heart healthy chocolate i knew how big of a market heart health was and i poured my heart and soul into this letter and that one just i mean i guess the good news is it just like tanked immediately it was like no no don't even bother rewriting this one you know it was like made like two sales or something like that you know off uh thousands of dollars yeah yeah you just know like it's true again i think this is but it's good

for a writer i mean again because writers we're fragile right especially if you're you're when you're earlier on in your career and because you i think all good writers and like a-list fairs you learn that lesson so then you you're like you want everything to be a home run like i'm still pissed right one thing doesn't smash it i'm still like bummed about it um because you know there's like pride and workmanship and you know if you're excited about the idea which you should be for anything you're writing um but you you realize that that's

part of the the game too um and so yeah it's just important i think for for younger writers to understand like not it doesn't mean like if you write something that you think is great and it doesn't go well it doesn't mean that you're like a piece of [ __ ] that you're a bad writer that you're you know any of that stuff like it it just means it didn't work i mean if you write 30 things that all go live over like three years and none of them do good and so for a really

good client who has really down immediate then maybe you should consider a career change but like you know having like stuff that doesn't doesn't work that's everybody so um craig one last question for me and i think we have one question in the q and a which you guys all [ __ ] up by not asking more questions you literally have craig clemens on the call but now i don't have time for a ton of them but um [ __ ] i mean like i i was like heard about it i um was just at

the 100 million mastermind and like you know dan fleischman's talking about it and he's like i promise you big cloud it's going to be important and all these people are writing down bitcloud and um yeah i went through the website i still haven't set mine up and i need to i'm probably it's on my to-do list to do um i don't know if i'll do anything with it or not i just want to have one but i know you're on it you're doing a lot with it so can you explain to people who are you

know watching listening or will watch or listen later on the replays um you know what is bitcloud why is it important and what are you doing on that platform sure so big clout is decentralized twitter on the blockchain and everyone has a coin so when you create a profile you have your own coin which is kind of like an nft for a person if you know what an mt is you know they're calling this movement social tokens and so unlike twitter where you post something out there and you get you know random people on there

and you maybe you got 10 000 followers but you know who any of them are on big cloud you can have people who invest in your coin and when they invest in your coin they're supporting you you get a little piece of that investment in your pocket to go do your craft so if you think of patreon you know which is a billion dollar plus company that has you know artists can go on there and people can give 20 bucks a month to their favorite artists to support their work so that artist doesn't go to

go you know flip burgers or whatever bitcloud is a way for creators to monetize and it's right there on platform so it's really fascinating so i jumped on the platform just testing it out and i invested in it uh not super early but you know in the the public uh token sale and started playing around on it and i was just posting normal stuff i was like posting some copywriting things on there and things like that and then i was having a good time geeking out with all my friends who were buying other people's coins

so you can what they did they took the first 15 000 uh twitter profiles by following so like barack obama katy perry donald trump you know everyone who was on do they had to pull donald trump out of the either because they kicked off on twitter but the top 15 000 twitter followers they made them profiles on big clout pre-reserved so squatters couldn't go and claim that name you know so i couldn't go pretend to be steve aoki and have a fake you know thing and take some of the uh the coin money right so

they uh they did that with the first 15 000 and you can bet on these people and their thoughts are that you buy this coin of say like jake paul you know jake paul is a coin then he has his boxing fight if jake paul gets a knockout in theory they hope his coin will go up because he'll be a more like desirable person or if jake paul loses or you know says something uh racist at the end of the fight in theory his coin will go down because people will think he's a scumbag you

know so there's all types of ways to speculate i mean for the first time ever like everyone has a token on their head and you can make money with it you can bet on your friends you know you can uh even bet on your enemies if it's just about the money you know uh i see people like buying both donald trump and alexandria cortez coin they'll have them both their portfolio i don't care care of a political police i think both of these coins are going to appreciate as more people come on the platform so

i think it has something like uh you know i don't know a few tens of thousands of users maybe a hundred thousand two hundred thousand something like that now but it's growing really fast and all uh instagram influencers are getting on there because if you think about it if you're an instagram influencer you usually gotta like sign some brand deal and go hold up a jar of vital proteins or something to get paid right here people are just paying you because they like you it's got that patreon model they're buying your token and when they

buy your token you have something called the founder reward and that's how much you decide to take yourself so most people set that to ten percent so let's say staphon buys 10 grand on my tokens i get a thousand bucks immediately and he's got nine brands still riding in my coin so if my coin price goes up from there then later he might be able to sell that 9 000 and make a profit and i actually did the first ever sponsored post on bitcloud i made an announcement that i was going to do the first

sponsor post on my page um i randomly even though i'm not a big social media guy i became the biggest uh account on bitcloud that is active um elon musk is still ahead of me uh naval ravicon still ahead of me but of the accounts that are being used i was the biggest so i have the like highest almost the highest amount of followers besides the founder and all that so i announced a sponsored post but it was super interesting because i said i'm doing this first sponsored post it's up for auction the auction ends

on this day but here's the thing you're not gonna just write me a check and i'm gonna make the post and it's gone it's an investment into my coin so you may roi on this ad twice you may roi on people buying whatever it is or you know following whatever page it is you want me to post you might also roi on holding my coin if you think it's going to go up so super interesting model and the dynamics here are fascinating so i've been geeking out on that a lot and yeah i did uh

i had a three-way tie for the sponsored post uh steph and i had three people tie at 90 grand each investment and that's something you're not going to pay 90 grand for me to do a sponsor post i only have 6 000 followers on there you know if it was a paid 90 grand gone poof waste of money but you're also investing in me and it looks like i'm growing so it might be an investment and my founder rewards at 10 percent i decided when i first started that i'm gonna donate all that found a

reward to charity so i've raised like a million and a half bucks in a month for uh charity water and ocean conservation justin found a reward it's insane like so if someone was wanting to use it to make money like that would have been a profit in my pocket of the million and a half now here's the crafty thing though um if i cashed out that million and a half my coin price would tank because i am a big holder of myself you know because now because that foundry order i'm collecting and i bought some

my own coin too which they say you should do so you gotta think about this and people are still figuring out the best practices you know so i'm gonna be slowly selling off my coin but i'm going to talk with my investors first and then we're going to decide i'll probably sell one coin a month my coin is currently valued at about 32 000 so sell one a month and then i will give them the opportunity to buy the dip if they don't buy it i'll probably buy the dip myself which is investing myself which

might be a good investment if i believe my coins gonna go up long term right and i'll keep track of what i put in myself and how much i raised for the charity you know but that's a plan i'm gonna sell like one a month or something like that and either buy the dip myself or let my investors uh buy the dip with this i'll put the foundry reward to zero i'll say hey investors if you want to buy the dip to found reward zero right now you can buy back in and hold more craig

coin and then i'll sell that and you know uh uh it's amazing because with those three sponsored posts 90k each right you can build a well in africa with charity water that gives a village clean water for like 20 years for 10 grand and so found reward i made 9 grand on each of the sponsored posts so i'm throwing another three grand on top so it'll be 30 grand so we're gonna build three wells in africa uh uganda actually we already picked the country and they're all like getting going i think they're gonna be drilled

in july uh all cause of a big cloud this this uh sponsor post thing so it's a lot of fun because the platform's brand new so me announcing a sponsored post there was a big deal because it had never been done on there before and then it was a big deal because it was like whoa is it gonna roi because of the views or is it gonna roi cause it's an investment maybe both you know so there's all kinds of interesting things i also bid on someone else they did the first ever physical sponsored post

and i i won this this guy is the uh the owner of the israeli soccer team uh i forget the name of the team but i bid on it i bid it it was a 15 000 investment into his coin and they put up craig dollar sign which is the sign for my token in the game in the football game it was like in the stadium and they showed pictures and things like that i don't think that roid but you know i probably uh maybe roi on this guy's token because he's using the platform creatively

so i see this guy you're doing creative things i think oh i put 15 000 his coin he's probably gonna keep doing creative things which will probably get more people to buy his coin later so that'll probably be a good investment so fascinating social dynamics i love the platform um you know i'm just at craig on there and you know i uh i'm also doing a mastermind group on there i don't host a paid mastermind group right now it's been a decision for me because you know there's uh a lot of fun that can be

had meeting with great people like you guys doing the accelerator you get to hang out with smart people all the time and you know cash flow is positive the people who put in cash get a big roi thought about it for a while but i never never did it because you know just doing other things but with this big cloud thing i was just jamming out with all my friends on and investing on the platform so much and different crater coins i thought you know what why don't i invite my top ten coin holders to

be on the zoom with me and my friends and so i said okay you buy the buy some my coin if you get my top 10 you can be on this private zoom and then i reached out to jake paul and got him to come on the zoom and so pretty soon there's a private zoom with me the top investors inside and jake paul so people started buying my coin like crazy and that made my coin price go up you know just like a basic mastermind group idea so there's all kinds of things you can

do in the platform people are still figuring it out uh pamela anderson is on there if you're in her top folders you get like a signed photo of her neil strauss is on there if you're in his top 10 holders you get a signed book you know there's all kinds of interesting things you can do on there and uh it's it's been a lot of fun too so uh check it out it's you know it's um you need some bitcoin to play around on it you can't put us dollars in it but uh it's a

lot of fun and and definitely uh uh a sign of weird things to come when everyone has a price in their head yeah that's crazy man um i'm definitely gonna finish setting mine up after just but um that's cool man that's cool you're you're playing yeah i just went to big pot too i saw it was like literally elon musk and like two other people and then just like craig here's something else that's happening now too this is funny so i've been up in that spot for like a week and it was a big deal

when i got up there just yesterday one day some guy rises up above and you're like what's going on what is this guy doing he's not doing any sort of mastermind group um people are like i didn't invest this guy's coin well you can track everything on the blockchain right so he put a million dollars into his own coin oh wow and then some other account that hasn't had been active at all the platform put in another million dollars into his account like like today and you know that's a lot of money to inflate the

coin price so it's like what's going on you know and then you think about the future when nike's going to come in and just pop 10 million bucks into their coin to be number one because why not that's not a lot of money to them yeah so wild that's so interesting um damn man yeah we are in a crazy time for sure um cool okay i want to be respectful of your time speaking of time we did have some questions come in do you have five minutes of my rapid fire let's go wrap a fire

okay cool so for everyone who put a question and i'm gonna um all right do you want you want to read them off to craig i never had you but i appreciate you being here and hopefully you're just enjoying and i'm here listening appreciating craig's genius man that's all cool yeah i'm gonna read them off and we'll let craig just sort of tackle them for sure all right craig what advice from kieran craig what advice do you have for new copywriters to help them get good you mentioned studying bullets but what else i currently have

one client i'm writing emails for and i'm using the rmbc method to help write the emails with the stefan's method method i want to deliver the best email copy she's ever seen so any advice you can give me to improve my copy helps so email copy is a continual conversation and i think the best thing to do is i mean you know this is not rock good science or anything like that but study the guys that are the best at that so who i would say are like frank kern jeff walker uh stefan and justin

for sure i remember i just got so mad and uh i forget which one which one you guys launched the newsletter second i think it was you stefan i was like now you bastard now i gotta i got two compelling emails in my inbox every day i gotta read both of them uh i actually had i actually you know uh um no offense to you or justin but i actually had to filter those into my internet marketing newsletters file because i was just reading them too much like every single day i was reading yours and

justin's above everyone else so that's why you haven't gotten a response from me in a while because i was also responding like at least once a week because it would just be so compelling you know so i would just yeah say study stefan jeff walker frank kern they're all all great at that that's awesome by the way frank kern also reads my emails and responds to me like all the time which is funny because um all the best marketers out there love to read the other markers and see what yeah it's like not like you're

like to become too cool for [ __ ] you're like you want to know what's going on so um flatter though cool ed let's keep let's keep rabbit firing beautiful from michael mcgovern hey craig what should a direct response company look for in a partnership with a doctor you know i think having someone who's easy to work with is very very important and not something you would think about in the beginning i was looking for doctors with the the best credentials and you know the most uh well-spoken and and you know if they had celebrity

patients or whatever that was good but um some doctors are really tough to work with some doctors will not uh approve any sort of copy you know they'll or they'll take your copy and they'll rewrite it if it sounds like a textbook and then it doesn't convert and they won't let you change it back and so um you know i would just say someone that's that's that's friendly easy to work with that you want to hang out with like dr gundry and i we're we're boys like he calls me as uh his son he never

had you know we go out to dinner with his his wife and my wife and you know we just have a great working relationship same with the beverly hills md doctors i used to hang out with them in night clubs back you know 15 years ago that's how i met those guys you know so i would say that that'd be yeah the the thing to look for number one yeah like i've i've ended ended uh i'll get on a zoom and i'll rap within 15 minutes i can just tell if i can just tell someone's

going to be paying the butt let's be like hey listen i'm glad we got connected you know um i want to anything i can do to help you grow your supplement business let me know uh we're actually full right now because you can just tell you know so which i mean you know there has been a couple though that i've really wanted to work with that we've been more accommodating for but usually it's it's a mistake i think yeah i was going to ask because usually whenever i do that you're not just in general you

talk yourself into doing something like about a person a judgment about a person and you go against it i generally end up regretting that right i'm like i should have followed my gut or my instinct because all the stuff you tried to rationalize when you were in like the possibilities phase and like the actuality space of working of that person regularly you're like man this person just kind of sucks right like um but has it been a case where that has been the the queso where you know you somebody seemed really like i don't know

like a little bit like off-putting you know gruff like maybe difficult but you've worked with you obviously don't need to name the name but but then you ended up working with the person and we're like oh i'm so glad i worked with them if you have you had that there's one yeah that's good there is one but um this person the first sales letter that they saw they sent back was so much red on the page it was like we might have to end this relationship before it starts but the person who introduced us was

in the marketing world and so i talked to that person and said hey can you have a chat with so and so first and let them know that this is it's it's uh you know you got to communicate with someone in in nebraska who's never heard of these supplements before this is how it has to be you know right and so i had an intermediary so yeah got you cool um and i was gonna say i think eli's question is pretty similar to michael we could skip that and then other people are trying to sneak

in their questions now but let's just do santiago's and then we'll um yeah i think that's cool cool santiago asks any particular advice that you usually give to your in-house writers well actually i was i had a different one i had the one of uh you know that one's good but i had um started dan's about looking back at his his old self sorry to craig we'll go fast with two last years yeah so in-house writers you know it's it's different every time i think when you end up editing a lot of other people's copy

for a long time you get a sixth sense of what they need to do differently and so it is unique i i so i don't know if this is a good answer but i looked at someone's copy last week and i said look your copy uh is is strong and outlining points but you're just not entertaining you're not exciting so for the next week you're into you're into sports right you're gonna write a thing about the daily sporting events every day that you're really excited about and that's what you're going to write you're not going

to think about selling people or anything like that you're going to write about the daily sporting events it's going to be like if you consider like a newsletter about about sports that you're really pumped up about about an mma fight something like that you know what i gave him that assignment for a week not to write anything else you know so um i know that probably helps zero but it's different for for every person you know some people are too exciting and and making too many jokes and just aren't serious enough and don't sound like

a serious doctor talking to someone about a serious problem that's that's great and that yeah i generally see it on the side of too too dull not excited enough like people get into educator mode which is we want to educate but you want to educate while also entertaining right and um but you're right you've seen sometimes where it's just so like it's like if you have a job interview with somebody and they're just cracking jokes and almost like saying personal things about you and trying to laugh about it and you're like this is like a

little too much just a little overboard yeah another exercise if you're if you're too dull is think about your favorite movie come with your favorite movie and then write a sales letter on why it's the best movie ever made that's great cool ed you want to do damn yeah that's awesome last one here from dan if you were looking back at your old self knowing what you know now what would you tell yourself when you started your copywriting journey that's a great question i feel like i should have an answer to this question i would

say start writing copies sooner don't wait the two years i mean that was that was a good experience but uh yes go sooner um you know i've talked about this on other shows but there's this pinnacle moment where uh so i used to be a [ __ ] off like i used to be a very bad procrastinator there was multiple times when evan would pull me aside and be like look you're gonna i'm gonna have to fire you if you don't start putting out work like everyone else and then he figured out how to actually

bait me and he said look if you write 10 pages of copy every day and you can do it for six months in a row i'll make sure you're making a hundred grand a year and this is you know back in 2005 where that was a ton of money to me and you know uh smoothies weren't 22 so 100 grand bought a lot more back then um and i did and you know had i done that sooner i i would have gotten better a lot faster so there's a great book called turning pro it's written

by steven pressfield and it talks about this transition that you make from amateur to professional it's a quick read you could probably read it in a day or two i so i would say read that book and turn pro sooner because if you're going to do something why half-ass it i still could have been just as big of a party animal as i was back then you know the wasted time wasn't uh not having a social life it was just procrastinating and you know refreshing my space which was the social network at the time and

you know just delaying work but turning pro is a great book andy has another one called the war of art on beating procrastination both of those are are i think must reads and we'll help you get serious with your craft and yes i did get to hang out with tom from myspace and that was a pinnacle moment for me uh damn that's gonna be an open loop for uh if we ever have a party oh yeah someone mentioned that in the chat yeah i know no that's good i think he like added me on facebook

like a long time ago because i you were facebook friends with him and you and i became friends and then he like added me and then i'm like wait is this actually tom from mine and it was showing all his travel photography i don't know if he's still on facebook this was a year you know a couple years back but i remember um being like so star struck like tom from myspace so the fact that you got to hang out with him uh well he's the nicest guy and this was in the heyday of myspace

too so it was actually really cool oh [ __ ] yeah dude that's awesome craig thank you so much for taking the time to join us being so so giving um sharing so much incredible uh information insights about your story uh for again for everyone who is um you know watching listening or who will watch or listen on the replays on youtube and on itunes um you know going hippo if you're a copywriter writers at goldenhippo.com to apply to write with oh and uh for media buyers just on our website there's a careers section it's

just uh you just go to goldenhipple.com and there's a careers page and that talks more about the copywriter positions as well but i'd love to work with uh you know some of the folks from your group one-on-one uh stefan because the people who've been paying attention to your stuff they're going to be light years ahead of everyone else that comes in so it's it's really fun to work with those type of folks that have been studying the craft that are serious about becoming the best in the world you know and your your content is top-notch

in getting people you know uh to really step their game up so it's always fun to jam out with you be a part of it cool well yeah thank you i appreciate that and um yeah craig any um any last any final words of advice wisdom like you know asks anything like that beyond yeah craig coyne craig coin i'm just kidding you know what's funny though is uh jake paul i heard him say in a video he said they sell a lot of merch right like sweaters and stuff i heard they do like 10 million

a year in merch and one of his his things that he says is always plug and he's made it into a thing so he doesn't look like a salesperson he says always plug always plug okay it's time to plug merch merch merch go buy my merch you know but he makes it cool to be like like always pitching i thought that was a funny like meta marketing move but um but yeah uh last words i'll just say is that copywriting is the most powerful force on earth it is words and messages that have created world

wars and created world peace you as a copywriter are a part of potential world change you just got to decide how you're going to use it are you going to use it for good are you going to use it for evil i think if you use it for good and you're helping people and giving value then the value comes back to you very much so in return and if you take the time to become the best in the world you continue to use it to add value you're going to become very valuable yourself both in

your bank account and on a status level you know getting to meet people from projects that you're passionate about whether it's you know other businesses i mean like uh you know the the inbound i get these days is crazy man from there's a guy who's helping run for mayor in new york you know there's like uh you know big businesses will call me up and be like hey we're launching a direct to consumer funnel for the first time ever you know so it's just it's really interesting because we feel like there's a lot of us

here but it's not it's a really tight circle and if you can get to the top of this game the whole world is is your playground so you're in the right place with uh stefan and justin awesome thank you so much so everyone craig clemons again craig thank you uh really appreciate it and edward thank you to you as well for uh for co-hosting and and hanging out with us today you got it all right chat all right talk soon bye bye cool so that wraps up there um everyone just lost notes please make sure

that you uh if you watch on youtube that you smash the like button leave a comment let craig and i know that you enjoyed everything and if you listen on itunes make sure you leave a review subscribe all that good stuff and we'll see everybody next time thank you all so much