Ray Edwards is a renowned copywriter with a storied career, possessing a wealth of experience ranging from direct mail to digital launches. His expertise is not confined to writing alone; it encompasses business strategies, judicious use of AI tools, and advocating for personal development as the cornerstone of professional success. Ray is the author of the book How to Write Copy That Sells, is the host of the Ray Edwards Show, and is copywriting consultant.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [03:16] Ray Edwards talks about the fundamental role of copywriting in all business ventures
- [06:45] How the mindset of abundance can influence your success
- [08:02] Why knowing the history of your business is crucial for modern marketers
- [11:38] The importance of sharpening your copywriting skills through mastery of craft
- [16:45] Embracing multiplicative thinking for exponential business growth
- [21:30] How strategic partnerships can propel your copywriting career
- [24:48] Unveiling your authentic self to create a standout personal brand
In this episode…
Have you ever wondered what it takes to transform words into wealth? What’s the secret behind compelling copy that not only sells but also builds million-dollar businesses? Can letting your “quirkiness” be the key to standing out in the saturated world of personal branding?
Ray Edwards takes us deep into the heart of copywriting excellence, explaining the five fundamental masteries toward building a sustainable and prosperous career. He emphasizes the power of a peculiar personal brand—one that dares to show authentic uniqueness to the world.
Tune in to this episode of the Timeliness Marketing Podcast as guest Ray Edwards delves into the strategies and mindset behind becoming a successful copywriter. He goes through his stories and the lessons drawn from them serve as both inspiration and actionable guidance for marketers and copywriters aiming for success in today’s fast-paced environment.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Brian Kurtz
- Brian Kurtz on LinkedIn
- Chris Mason on LinkedIn
- Ray Edwards on LinkedIn | Website
- Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts with Your Thinking by Michael Hyatt
- Everything Is Copy by Nora Ephron
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Titans Xcelerator.
Titans Xcelerator is a private mentorship program for direct response marketers.
It is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business.
And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed.
As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one.
The bottom line: you don’t have to grow your business alone.
If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz, your connection to insights from some of the top direct response marketing minds on the planet.
Brian Kurtz 0:16
Hey, it’s Brian Kurtz here host of the Timeless Marketing Podcast. Today’s episode is a clip from one of the two hour calls inside Titans Xcelerator, my private mentorship program for direct response marketers. Before we get to that, I have one question for you. Do you have a marketing insurance policy? If you don’t, you need one. And that’s why I created Titans Xcelerator, which is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business. The bottom line, you don’t have to grow your business alone. And you don’t need to spend tens of thousands of dollars either. Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind. I know because I hosted a group that was over $20,000 a year. If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z.net/help.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed. As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one. Again, if you want to see if Titans Xcelerator is a fit for you with no obligation, go to BrianKurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z.net/help. And feel free to email me directly. I respond to every email with questions about this episode or just to say hi, at Brian@BrianKurtz.net. Now onto today’s episode.
Okay, Ray Edwards, I’m gonna turn it over to you. Just everybody should know Ray is one of the top copywriters in the world. He’s been that way for many, many years, I’d say decades. I don’t want to give away his age. He can talk about his age, I’m not going to talk about his age. But there’s a lot of wisdom here. As I said in the Facebook group, he went from direct mail to launches to AI to webinars, he’s written for everything, emails. So he’s such a wide scope of wisdom and experience. I think he’s got some interesting stuff to share with you. And I know he does. So Ray, you’re on.
Ray Edwards 3:16
All right. Thank you, Brian. Such an honor to be here. You all are geniuses. I enjoyed it, I didn’t know what we were starting when I showed up early. And I’ve been listening and watching and I love this group. And it doesn’t surprise me that Brian would bring together such a stellar group of individuals. So exciting to be part of what you’ve been doing this morning. So I made some notes. I thought we were going to be having a kind of what we’re doing type of conversation. So I’ve got a bunch of stuff I want to share. But I don’t really have slides and all that razzmatazz. So I came here ready to talk about copywriting as a million dollar business that may appeal to some of you. But let me start by saying this. Everything is copy. You guys know this, I’m sure you’ve heard this before in this group. Nora Ephron is the first person I’m aware of who said those words or wrote those words. She was a fantastic movie maker and storyteller. There’s a biography about her called, Everything is Copy. You should watch it. Whatever business you’re in, magicians or real estate agents or doctors or lawyers or chief executive officers. Everything is copy.
And I think all businesses are writing businesses. I don’t care what you do. I will argue with you and I will win: you are writing business. If you’re a plumber, if you’re the best plumber in town, it has no guarantee of success. If you’re a mediocre plumber and you’re a fantastic marketing writer, you can win the customer battle. So with that being said, we’re all copywriters, no matter what you ostensibly sell. And I think I’ve been teaching this class about the one person $1 million business, which is a great hook that gets people in the door. And then I tell them how to do that. And then I say, but if you stop there, you’re going to be really sad and tired. So there’s a bigger vision, which I’ll get to in a moment. So I’m giving you like the 10 minute five point version of a three day workshop.
One, number one, the most important thing to building a one person $1 million business as a copywriter is and people get turned off by this, but it’s true. Number one is mastery of mindset. Many wiser, smarter people than me, I’ve said before that success in business is 80% mindset and 20% logistics, technical stuff. So tactics. And that is so true. People don’t understand how true it is. And most of us don’t understand how much improvement is available to us in our mindset. I mean, I think I’ve got a pretty good mindset. But some things happened in this past week in my personal life that made me realize, Ray, your mindset stinks in this area, that you’ve got to work on some stuff. So I invite you to dive in and lean into the journey of improving your mindset. There’s a couple of books I recommend. One is called Minding Your Mindset by Michael Hyatt. It’s so good, it is so good. There’s another book that escaped me. I didn’t put it on my list here. It’ll come to me.
The way you think about the problem, usually is the problem. I’m learning more and more to push into things that pop up that I used to call problems. Because without exception, every time I faced an uncomfortable or painful problem, and pressed through it, I came out a better person. That’s a win. And in business today, especially if you come in with a scarcity based mindset, like many of us are of an age that we were raised in a working class mindset. And that’s the kiss of death for us as entrepreneurs because the working class mindset is effort in, money out. And as I learned from dear Dan Kennedy, you’ve got to disconnect the effort from the income. You’ve got to disengage this because look, Jeff Bezos does not work a billion times harder than we do. It’s just not possible. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, we’re looking for leverage. Today, we have digital leverage, AI, I, God, I love AI. And everybody who freaks out about it and gets people all scared. I love those people, for bringing all the attention to AI because I’m a huge proponent of let’s use these tools to make the world a better place and to make money doing it. That’s an abundance mentality. I am always looking at things intentionally from an abundance mentality. Now I’m not always looking at it with abundance, because sometimes my little automatic pilot thing goes on. And I just start wandering down the little pathways that made habitual patterns for me all my life. And those things are maybe not so abundance oriented. But I’m having less and less of that. And I’m having a much quicker response to so called problems that pop up in business and in life. And when you can shorten that gap between Oh crap, this just happened and it pisses me off or it makes me depressed, or whatever. When you can recognize No, nothing outside of me made me angry. Nothing outside of me made me depressed. I did that. That’s my response to what happened.
So this I know this is boring and you’re probably right now thinking would you get to the tactics? Tell me how to make a million dollars. This is the most important thing. You can screw up everything else and get this right and still succeed. Mastery of mindset. That’s number one.
Number two mastery of history. I’m shocked by the people in our business who don’t know their freakin history. They don’t understand who is Jean Schwartz? I know you guys know, but most of these TikTok famous marketing gurus, barely are shaving it and they pronounce themselves as experts, and many of them are super smart, like 10 times smarter than I was their age, but they don’t understand the history of our business. They don’t remember the Columbia Records club, because they’re never a member of it. They don’t remember getting the Gary Halbert letter in the mail, selling them their family crest. I remember the day we got the box my dad paid for when he ordered Gary Halbert. I read the letter and I was like, Yeah, we gotta get this. Know your history, know the history of direct response marketing. You couldn’t be in better hands than with Brian, as he leads. I know. He’s led you through lots of stories and swipe files and case studies about the historical events of our business and who is who and that’s important stuff. Especially if you’re operating as a copywriter for hire. If you don’t know, I mean, I can have a great conversation with a copywriter. And I can drop a few names. I can say, well, you know, that sounds like something Dick Benson would say. And so my new copywriter friend, a young child of 25, 27, 28, will just blithely walk by that I didn’t know what I’m talking about. That tells me something about their maturity level and about the studiousness of their craft, and do they know? This is kind of a sidebar, but I think we’ll come back to this later. I was at a Product Launch Formula live conference that Jeff Walker was putting on, I was actually speaking there. And there was this gentleman sitting in the back of the room very quiet by himself. And I just thought, nobody’s talking to that guy, because they don’t think he can do anything for them. I’m gonna go sit down and talk to him. Just to get to know him a little bit. I felt bad for it. So we started talking and I asked him what he’s doing here. And he says, I’m trying to learn about these product launches, figure this stuff out. And I asked him what he does. He says, I’m a writer. Oh, you’re a writer. What do you write? I write junk mail. Oh, so do I. Let’s talk. What’s your name? Jim Rutt.
I was like, I was a super fanboy as I was like, not the Jim Rutt. And he laughed. And I stuck to him like glue for the rest of that conference. Because I wanted to get to know this guy. I knew of him. Now I know him. I’m talking to him. And we became friends. And he was just a fantastic human. He was weird and quirky. He would call me at two o’clock in the morning and tell me these wild stories that go on in his life. I just loved him so much. And we kind of lost touch for a while. And then, tragically, I found out he passed away. And I hadn’t spoken to him recently. But he was such a powerful influence for me before I even met him. And then I’m like, You’re the guy who wrote the headline, read this or die. Yeah, that’s me. So know your history and get to know people who are. It’s so interesting to me that there’s so many people in our business who are older. Now, you might say, Well, Ray sounds like you got an ax to grind. Yes, I do. Let’s recognize the wisdom of people with gray hair. And no, because they have tons of it that we’re not taking advantage of and tapping into.
Okay, moving on number three, mastery of craft. So you gotta get good at writing copy. And right now I’m seeing a lot of people who think they’re good at writing copy because they have Jasper or ChatGPT. Or we have our own app that we built called ClarityScribe. And it’s good, but it still doesn’t work without human help. It doesn’t come up with the big idea for your promotion. It doesn’t come up with the creative nuances that you could put it in even though it cranks out great copy. Well, that’s wrong. He cranks out good copy. It does not crank out great copy. Because it can’t think regardless of what people are telling you, it doesn’t think it’s not self aware. It’s not creative yet. I’m not saying I won’t get there. But it’s a great tool, I can generate a first draft in three minutes that used to take me three weeks. And that’s the truth. So it’s a great tool. But the craft part of it, the part where I take that document that AI makes for me, and I go through it line by line, I think, Oh, I would say this differently. Oh, here, I want to tell this story. I am intrigued to know more about Tom, because I heard him talking about how important that is. So I want to learn more about what you do, sir. That is one of my favorite topics right now. That kind of stuff only you can bring to your copy. So that’s what I mean by master your craft. And when I say master these five masteries, I’m not saying you are at the level of perfection where you no longer need to learn, you can no longer be approached or nobody can gain victory over you. That’s not what I mean, mastery is not a destination. It’s a process. It’s an attitude that you approach your skill set with. So master your craft, being in a group like this is one way to hone that mastery. There’s about whatever your spiritual background is, that I’m cool with that I just happen to have grown up as a Christian. And we read the King James Bible. So people get contacted in all different worlds, because I quote from King James all the time, but there’s a proverb in that Book of Wisdom that says, As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. You being in this group, you are iron, sharpening iron, you’re easy. If we think of ourselves as a sword. We’re sharpening the blade here. That’s powerful. So that’s mastery. So mastery of craft.
And then number four, mastery of discipline or mastery of self. My biggest problem in my life is me. Now, I’ll leave it to you to figure out what your biggest problem is. Some of you, it’s me, but it’s not. My biggest problem in my life is me. And a lot of people think I’m very disciplined. I’m not. I have a lot of systems that force me to look disciplined. But I’m passenger number one of the hot mess express every day. Mastery of discipline, setting up those bumper rails, self awareness, is the skill here. Become self aware. Be able to see what you’re doing screwing your own self up, and then ask. Well, that’s interesting. Why am I doing that? That’s more gonna be the territory. Or perhaps Dr. Susan can help you. I’m just saying it’s a question worth asking. Mastery of discipline. That’s time management. That’s activity management. decision making about what to do, what matters. I’m deep into the work of Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy these days, reading and rereading it. I love what Dr. Hardy brings to the table when he brings all the research. I’m the nerd who looks up the studies that Dr. Benjamin Hardy talks about and those books and reads them. Because I want to know.
We’re bad decision makers about what to do. Most of us every day. I’m keeping a much closer track than ever of what I’m doing every day. I realized I thought I was pretty good at this stuff. I suck it until now. Now is a new era of my life, I have social media. Social media will destroy you if you let it y’all know this. I’m not talking about anything you don’t know. Here’s how I use social media to get people to buy stuff from me. I do that by spreading good, positive, useful messages on social media. I do lots of that. I publish on social media a lot. I consume very little. That’s massive discipline. And it goes back to mastery of mindset. So mastery of discipline, figure out what to do, why you’re doing it, how important it is, and stop doing all this stuff that’s eating up your time and energy, that’s not helping you. There’s plenty of it. One of my mantras these days is does this move the needle? If it doesn’t move the needle, it better move out of my way. That’s actions, decisions, people, places and things. Move.
Number five mastery of multiplicative thinking. This is a new level of business consciousness I’ve come into recently. I am not satisfied with doubling our revenue or doubling our income or sales. Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy have sold me on 10x thinking. My team and I are deep into reading that book. 10x is easier than 2x. And it’s dangerous because your people start thinking for themselves. And they start realizing, well, this is what I want to do. And you have to have meetings where people say, Okay, let’s talk about how that fits into the vision of the company, how I can help you get where you want to go, how are we going to get there, what’s the path, what’s the milestones, let’s make all that happen. And guess what my business begins to increase. We start getting more stuff done with less work. But it took work to get there and it takes work to first keep moving along that continuum.
So the the five levels of areas of mastery or mastery of mindset, mastery of history, mastery of craft, mastery of discipline, mastery of multiplicative thinking, Now, okay, Ray, but how’s that mean, the million dollar copywriter, I was talking to somebody yesterday, and he’s, he was applying for position at our apprentice program. And he said to me, so just tell me right now, what’s the plan for me to make a million dollars as a writer? I said, Okay. I can’t try to tell him it doesn’t work that way. We need to work through some stuff first. But he’s demanded answers. Okay? I’ll tell you right now, get 10 clients who each pay you $100,000. Get all the work done this year, you made a million dollars. And he kind of got mad, he got angry. He’s like, what the hell advice is that. And it’s what you wanted. There’s your system. If you want to make it harder, get 100 clients, have them pay you $10,000 each. How’s that work? He didn’t like that plan either. Then we were able to back up and have a more intelligent conversation. By the way, 10 clients 100 grand is one way to do it. And it’s possible. So I’m just throwing that out there for somebody to think about.
I believe it’s a way to get clients. This works best for me and for my students and clients is having a personal brand of a peculiar sort. And also, through strategic partnerships. I have not myself been super deep into buying ads, and direct mail. And other methods you might be familiar with list building. I’ve done all those things I’ve done very well. We’re buying ads now. We’re running direct mail campaigns now. But my specialty has really been in strategic partnerships. The chief strategic partnership in my career should be no surprise as Jeff Walker. I bought Product Launch Formula from him in 2005 when it first came out. I’ve bought every update since. I’ve never not been a part of that world. And that’s what allowed me to build my business. I started out as a guy who wrote copy for product launches. And I’m still called on to do that from time to time, but my business is much bigger than that now. We have a copywriting course and Training Center, we have a certification program, we have an agency. So there’s lots of things we have going on that are not a one person business, I want to come back to that.
I think the best way to start is to build a one person business because you can be agile, you can make decisions for yourself. You don’t have to work for a jerk. Well you might, but the jerk will be you at least you can possibly get control of that person. Every now and then. On a good day, I’ve been controlling myself. But that’s a good place to start. And it’s a great way to build a business where you can earn while you learn.
And I’ve really been working on this personal brand thing for several years with a lot of different clients. And I’ve learned that personal branding is too broad of a term. I’m looking for you to build a personal brand of peculiar sorts and this works for you whether you’re a copywriter or not as a profession. You are a copywriter, like it or not. I think you’d like it or you wouldn’t be here. The peculiar sort is be the brand of you that you’re uncomfortable exposing to the public. Lots of people will say be bold, be offensive, repel the wrong clients and attract the right clients. It’s all good advice. I love that. I think it’s all right on target but I think it misses something. That is for most people, the turn around the corner from being a mediocre also ran copycat just like everybody else in the market personal brand to being a standout personal brand, is when you start letting your weird out. You start letting your quirkiness show up. When you start being uncomfortably authentic with your audience. When you sit down at the typewriter, as Hemingway said, open up a vape. That’s when things start to happen.
Outro 25:39
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click ‘Podcast’ at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you’re interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to BrianKurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z.net/help.