Brian Kurtz 04:57
I was going to say that, you know, you’ve done but then you’ve branched out into becoming a, you know, a personal development guy from that and also a marketing tactician. So you’ve kind of done it all in a way. I mean, you have a very impressive career. I got to tell you.
Matt Furey 05:16
Thank you.
Brian Kurtz 05:19
And also now I think you’re going to talk a little bit today about copywriting and I guess how it relates. You know, you’re a big fan of Cybernetics, which is one of the books that Dan Kennedy was always talking about. And I think either you have the rights to it now or you have the rights to some of it, and you also have Theater of the Mind, which I think you have taken over to some degree. So you have this whole Psycho Cybernetics, which is a business in itself for you. And something that you’re passionate about.
So I’m going to leave it up to you how you want to structure this presentation. I don’t know if you have slides or you want to share a screen or if you want to, you know, me to just, you know, queue you up. But I’ll do whatever you want me to do. But I’m really interested in anything you have to say as are the Titans Xcelerators, Matt.
Matt Furey 06:15
All right. Well that’s perfect. I don’t have any screens because this is spontaneous copywriting techniques. I have my PowerPoint presentation and everything to talk about spontaneity and zen and so on, it really doesn’t fit. So I’ll just make it up as I go along.
Brian Kurtz 06:38
And there is something in the chat someone said, if you can talk about the breathing aspect, which I think was a book, you wrote One Breath at a Time that you can maybe work that into, because that’s another aspect of how you work and how you develop your career.
Matt Furey 06:56
Yes, I’d be glad to. Let me start with the Psycho Cybernetics part of it. I was picked by Dan Kennedy to be the master licensee of it in 2003. And then I took over the entire business in 2005 by writing a check to him. And so it’s been almost 20 years I’ve been at the helm as president. I started with fitness and martial arts books back in 1996. And I really started to hit my stride in 2000 with the book Combat Conditioning. But where I really got going was sending out daily emails back when not many people were doing so. I also had a little discussion board on my site, which I got rid of. And my emails were basically, if you go back to the old days of Playboy or some other one of those magazines, when I was reading as a teenager, and they always had the guy or the girl next door, this type of theme. And I started thinking about this and having a relationship and a bond with my customers, I’m not just a sales person who’s sending them a message to buy, buy, buy. I decided that this was what I want to do, is just talk to people in a spontaneous way about anything and everything, not just about fitness. And over time this increased my sales. It wasn’t an immediate bump in sales because I wasn’t immediately going for the sale. I was forging this relationship with my base.
And after about three years of this, Dan Kennedy asked me to do a seminar on information publishing and so on. And one of the things he mentioned to me was, you’re one of the few who’s making money on the internet other than porn and gambling. This was his view in the early 2000. And it may or may not have been accurate, but, or they were shovel sellers, meaning there was more money made selling shovels to pan or mine for gold than there was people who got out there and found gold. So I started thinking about this. And one of the other things Dan mentioned to me is you’re selling real products to real people. So I put together a sales letter for a seminar. My first one was May of 2003 and I was nervous about it. I was thinking, I’ve made my mark with fitness and with martial arts, and now I’m going to be teaching how to make money on the internet. How is this going to go over? And the first event, I had 37 people during that time. It was 2000 bucks a person. And I was just amazed that this didn’t destroy my base. They didn’t all scoff at me and laugh at me. I thought, man, how much more could I branch out into then if I can do fitness and martial arts, now I’m teaching how to make money on the internet.
That then branched into how to make money writing emails, and I had a seminar in 2005 that Ben Settle always referred to as one of his go to courses. He calls it the original Matt Furey email copywriting course. That’s not the title I gave it, but I now call it that because that’s what he’s always talking about in his emails.
Brian Kurtz 11:05
Ben says that it’s true.
Matt Furey 11:06
Yes. Yeah. And he’s said that he’s listened to it dozens of times while going out, walking and so on and I think, man, you’d listen to it dozens of times. I haven’t listened to it once. The only time, the only time I heard it was when I delivered it. And so there’s a lot in there. I have listened to snippets of it over the years, about 15, 20 minutes here and there, and it’s just loaded. But anyway, in that, in that original course, what I began teaching people is how to write emails the way I write them, but not a carbon copy, just the framework. And the framework is as simple as you get an idea and then you immediately go. You don’t sit and think about whether or not the idea is any good, or whether people will buy or any of that. You just start writing. And in the beginning I would give people the ideas because that would help, and we would and this is all recorded, and I’d give them ten minutes to write their email. That was it. As soon as I said, go, whether you’re done or not or you think you’re done, we’re stopping. And then each person would read his or her email to me, and then I would give my analysis of it, where they’re missing the mark or where they’re spot on. And it was amazing to see people who had really never written emails before get it in a relatively short period of time.
This then led to me teaching people how to write in story format and how to write with contrast. One of the things I often teach is contrast is king, but that doesn’t have a contrast. So contrast is the king and the queen of great copywriting. And how when your words have a poetic type of flow, even if they don’t rhyme, it pulls the reader into an alternate universe where he can’t stop reading what you’ve written because of the contrast. And this was taught to me back in 1992 by a guy who was an artist, a musician, a playmaker, a videographer, a movie maker, and his worst skill of all, he would say, was writing. He said he didn’t really have much skill in writing, but he learned the tricks and he’s thinking, well, tricks. There aren’t any tricks in writing. You either can write or you can’t write. And I learned from him. His name was Robert Fritz, and I was amazed for him to say that he’s not skilled at writing, because when I would read his writing, I couldn’t stop. So I thought, man, people are already telling me I have a great writing style. What if I add this to it? And that Really was the beginning.
And so many people, when I look at their writing, it doesn’t have the contrast. It doesn’t suck you in. This is the phrase was it needs, whatever you’re doing, whether it’s cartoons, whether it’s a painting, whether it’s a drawing, whether it’s a story, whether it’s an advertisement, it needs to pull people into an alternate universe where they forget about the one that they’re currently in. They’re just, they’re pulled in and time doesn’t even exist. Nothing else exists. It’s just you and that ad. You and that story, that cartoon and so on.
So I started thinking about this, and if I can teach this to people with the same method, it’s ten minutes. And I didn’t realize at the time how powerful it was or how easily it could be taught. I just was, you want to learn how I do it? I’m going to teach you how to do it. And that then created some of the people that you and I both know. Ben and Ryan Lee got the course many years ago, and he told me that he listened to the whole thing driving from Florida. He was living in Florida at the time. He drove all the way back to Connecticut, and he had the CDs. Now it’s digital, but he had it playing the entire time, man. And of course, he’s made a big bundle of money. And he told me that this is going to make him a lot more. So man, got something really good here.
The whole thing is in order to be spontaneous, you have to go with the words that you’re hearing in your head. And without filter at all. And it doesn’t matter if they’re any good or not. You can always make adjustments, but just write what’s coming through. What do you hear in your head? And if you don’t hear anything in your head, then I probably can’t help you. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t hear himself talking internally. You go out for a walk and you’re by yourself. You’re having a conversation with yourself. You’re thinking and you’re hearing words.
Now, the key is to turn those words into pictures that pull people in. And what I do with this method is not judge what’s being written yet. You can always judge it later and you can throw it out and start over, or you can make tweaks. But I got so good at using this formula myself that many, not all of my emails, many of them at the end in the PS, I would write this email was written spontaneously without correction of any kind. And that can be something that’s hard to live up to. I don’t try to live up to it. So why did I put that at the end? Because it was true and it came to me. That’s what I was hearing in my head. So just type this in. And that created this wow factor. This guy doesn’t even look at his email after he’s written it. He just hit send without any editing whatsoever. So this must be a real guy. He’s authentic. He’s not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. He’s being himself. And what then transpired is that my sales letters were written the same way. My books were written the same way. It was all the same. And no matter whether you’re reading my newsletter or an ad, it’s almost the same. It’s virtually the same.
So I began working in February with a man who wanted to have a newsletter that he sells. He was doing done-for-you products for people for many years, getting $10,000 a month plus royalties. But he had nothing of his own. He wanted to have his own line. So I started with him and he would send me his first newsletter, and then he’d send the sales letter and so on. And he was an electrician before he got into copywriting 20 years ago. And he started to walk me through his formula, and he had this long checklist. The headline has to have this, and the subhead has to have that, and then you have your opening and it should be this. And where are the testimonials, where’s the proof, where’s this. And he would look at his sales letter and oh gotta have this in here. And he’d look at his outline. I gotta have this. Gotta have this. Oh, it’s missing this. Oh, put that in doing all of that. And it would take him a week or two to write a sales letter for a client. I looked at it, and I just asked him one question. Don’t you think after 20 years of doing this, this should be relatively spontaneous? Don’t you just, why not just sit down and write a sales letter without your checklist?
It floored him. He’d never thought of anything such as that before. As even a possibility because he’s an electrician. And, well, I have electricians who’ve come to my house and they’re not looking at a checklist, they just go to work. They know what to do. They’ve been doing it long enough. Well, he decided to give this method a whirl. And he sent me his next sales letter. And it was riveting from start to finish. It was incredible. And his newsletters began to show the same character. And he said he’s never going back to his checklist, that this is so much easier time-wise, efficiency wise. Well, first of all, his clients started making more money from the spontaneous sales letters. That’s a big plus. But second of all, instead of the sales letter taking a week or two, he’d knock it out in an afternoon. Well, how much more work can you get done for clients if you can knock a sales letter out that quickly and have it pull in more than the ones that you spent a week or more on?
So that is the key, is shrinking the time frame, trusting the mechanism and Psycho Cybernetics. You have the goal in mind, you know you want to write something, you have an idea of what it is. You can make notes. I make notes by hand, and I’ll look at them, and then I’ll just go and at some point I’ll stop and go for a walk and do something. Take a nap, take a shower.
Brian Kurtz 22:03
Do you use a version of the Pomodoro method?
Matt Furey 22:05
A version of it, yes. But not always. Sometimes you go straight through. Sometimes you’re in a groove and you just plow through it. One of the books that I have finished recently is called Psycho Cybernetics 365 and this book started of, the goal was 50,000 words. That wasn’t my goal. That was the publisher. And I was to take a quote from Dr. Maxwell Maltz. To start each day. So it’s 365 day, not meditations so much, but sit there and read this, ponder it and reflect on it. So it’s reflections. Take a quote from his book and then explain it. Well, if I’m just going to explain it in dry language, nobody’s going to want to read it. We need stories here. And we need metaphors and we need examples from my life and other people’s lives. How this works.
Now, the 365 quotes of what someone else said, and I have to break this down and explain it to you in a way that’s palatable. This is a gargantuan task. I talked to my agent and said, I can’t do this in 50,000 words. It’s got to be longer than that and I need more time. So he got me a little more time, and they bumped it to 70,000 words. By the time I finished the manuscript, it was over 100,000 words. And he said, oh, great, they’ll love that. They can charge more for it.
But how did I get myself? If I thought about how enormous that project was, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t be able to sit my butt in a chair and write. But if I can think of this as daily emails, as each of these is similar to an email, what’s the quote? What am I going to say about this? Now I’m stuck because I got other people’s words I have to comment on, and what I did is say to myself, Furey, just write the first sentence, whatever comes to mind, just type the first sentence. And by doing that, I found I couldn’t stop after the first sentence, I just kept flowing and then at other times it was even harder than that because I felt I didn’t even know what to say for the first sentence. There’s nothing coming through.
So this became just look at the quote, just stare at it. Don’t think anything. If you’re thinking something, that’s fine. But now just write whatever you hear in your head. Write it. I just, no, this is terrible. And then I’d finish the entry, and I’d go back and I’d read and go, wait a minute. This isn’t terrible, this is actually really good. Then on to the next entry.
Then there’s this principle of momentum I talk about is that once you get on this path of doing things this way with small goals, not with gargantuan goals, what you do to write the first sentence, I got 365 complete entries to do, what’s writing the first sentence going to do? Well, it’s going to narrow my focus, and it’s going to be the low hanging fruit I’m picking. And there’s power in thinking small. There’s power in thinking big. There’s extraordinary power in thinking small. Think of the atom bomb. We take an atom, we split it. It’s got more power.
So by narrowing it down to the first sentence or just whatever comes to mind, no matter how ridiculous. I finished that book. It’ll be out in July of next year. And of course, there’s going through all the edits and so on. But remarkably, there weren’t a whole lot. And that’s a compliment to the method as well.
Outro 26:39
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 are 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 [dot] net [forward slash] help.