Former copywriter and current business advisor, Jay Abraham is the guest for the 100th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast with Kira Hug and Rob Marsh. Jay is the perfect guest for this milestone episode because Jay teaches the importance of pre-eminence—and what is more pre-eminent than appearing as the expert on the 100th episode of this podcast? And Jay delivered. Here’s a look at some of what we covered:
• how he went from copywriter to business advisor to thousands of companies
• the expert authors he learned from when he started out
• how he accidentally got into the seminar business
• the business ideas (USP, LTV, Risk Reversal, Allowable Cost) you should know
• how to deliver continuous breakthroughs for our clients
• copy versus concept and which one matters most
• why you shouldn’t offer stuff for free (and what you should do instead)
• the biggest challenge you have to overcome with your audiences
• why achieving pre-eminence is so important (and how you do it)
• the shortcuts to engineering a continuous stream of breakthroughs
• how to get mindshare for the clients you’re working for
• a few of the places copywriters should do research in order to be great
• what it takes to be an “original synthesizer” (versus a plagiarist).
• who the client you’re really working for is (it might not be your client)
• the thing that bugs Jay the most about list building
Jay also shared a ton of bonuses for listeners to the podcast. Check out the links to those resources below. Then, click the play button to listen to the interview, or scroll down for a full transcript. And of course, you can find this episode on iTunes, Stitcher or in your favorite podcast app. Go get it!
The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Dan Rosenthal
Claude Hopkins
George Hotchkiss
Victor Schwab
Robert Collier
Entrepreneur Magazine
International Living
Scientific Advertising
My Life in Advertising
Albert Lasker
Tony Robbins
Steven Covey
Brian Tracy
Mary Lou Tyler
The Deming Institute
A Technique for Producing Ideas
The Three Bonuses (The 100 Greatest Headlines, 37 Million Dollar Headlines, and Copywriting Formulas)
50 Shades of Jay
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
Intro: Content (for now)
Outro: Gravity
Full Transcript:
Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits and steal an idea to inspire your own work. That's what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Rob: You're invited to join the club for episode 100 as we chat with Jay Abraham, the founder and CEO of the Abraham Group about how he solved business problems for clients in more than 7,000 industries, thinking strategically about copywriting and what we offer our clients, the importance of preeminence and what we can do to find new breakthroughs in our own businesses.
Hey, Jay.
Kira: Welcome, Jay.
Jay: Thank you very much. It's a distinction and an honor to be podcast number 100.
Rob: It is. In fact, we were talking to Sonny, who's on your team and she's in our group. She suggested, ‘Hey, you know, I don't know if you're doing anything interesting for your hundredth episode, but maybe we could connect with you.’ We thought, actually would make perfect sense to have you come on for number 100 because of how you talk about preeminence and to have a super special guest like you on episode 100. We're thrilled to have you here, so thank you so much.
Jay: It's my pleasure. As I told you, at a certain point in one's career, you become very focused on being privileged to impact people's thinking lives and the impact they can make on multitudes of others. It goes both ways.
I am taking the gloves off. You guys have access to whatever you want. I don't know where you're going to take it but I like surprises.
Rob: Cool. We like to start with people's stories. I wonder, Jay, you started as a copywriter, I believe. Will you tell us how you went from copywriter to the kind of an advisor to thousands of companies in thousands of industries, literally. How'd that all happen?
Jay: It's all tied to an accidental event which I wouldn't recommend for everybody but it had a profound positive, ultimate outcome. I got married the first time — I've been married a total of three times and I'm not recommending it but I'm just giving you a background — at 18. I had two kids by that time I was 20. I had no formal education. I had the needs of somebody about 40 and nobody cared. The only jobs I could get weren't really jobs. They were crazy, created on the spot situations that entrepreneurs would give me where my purpose was to create value where it didn't exist, develop a new distribution channel or figure out how to sell a ton of their product without any marketing budget or persuade 1,000 radio stations and TV stations to run ads and only get paid on results. They were very interesting.
I went through a constant, I guess I'd call myself transient, transitory process of jumping from industry to industry when I was younger. After about, I don't know, seven or eight totally different industries, I realized that people who operated in one industry pretty much all followed the conduct of the crowd. It was basically interesting to me that something that was common sense and foundational in industry A was totally and remarkably and stunningly newfound in industry B or C or D.
I started borrowing common approaches from other industries, combining them into hybrids and applying them to the new industries I was in. They could be anything from ways of communicating, ways of starting relationships, means of reducing risk, bonus-based offers, trial offers, all kinds of things. Between strategy, marketing, business model and observed modeling and emulation and hopefully innovation of different copy approaches that could be totally translated to different industries, I was the equivalent of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. I just killed it for people.
As I started doing that, I was able to do it really in spite of even knowing exactly what I was doing because I had this power of continuous breakthroughs that distinguished my clients. I didn't really have to be as aware of what I was doing but as I got deeper into it and I started initially writing copy with an inherent appreciation for the empathic hopes, dreams, and uniqueness of the market. I was always very aware, sensitive, appreciative, intrigued with the consumer I was targeting.
But I didn't really know exactly what I was trying to do until a couple of years later when I met a fellow that you may not know of. You wouldn't know him because I don't think he is alive but he's not here anymore. Dan Rosenthal, and he spent an intense day with me. He gave me the lifetime shift of teaching me basically what a USP was, what benefit verse feature selling was, what real advertising was, which is salesmanship multiplied, risk reversal, testing, bonusing, allowable costs, all those things.
He gave me bibliographies to read when you didn't have the internet. I had to spend every dime I could to try to find these out-of-print books particularly Claude Hopkins and people like George Hotchkiss and Victor Schwab and Robert Collier, before all those books were available. I was just massively and unrelentingly absorbing all this understanding of predictable human nature and immutable tendencies of how a human being responds to stimulus and ethically, not as a manipulative, diabolical, Machiavellian person but just, I understood the human condition.
Then, as I started evolving, I went into niches. I did Entrepreneur magazine when it first started. We did Icy Hot first before anybody knew what it was and grew it. Then, it was sold to two companies before it got into the one that everybody knows about now with … Who's the spokesperson?
Rob: I can't remember.
Jay: Shaq! Shaquille O'Neal. Yeah. We did Entrepreneur magazine when nobody even knew what entrepreneur even meant and our marketing had to be started with an external excerpt from Webster's Dictionary, where we had to not only produce the phonetic pronunciation but also the real definition because no one knew what an entrepreneur was.
From there, I got deeply into the investment newsletter business. Today, if I say, the advisory … I knew the founder of Agora when he had one newsletter, which was called International Living. His colleague, I knew him as a protégé to one of my partners in another business. Back then, I got into the newsletter business big time because there were these passionate economists and financial advisors and ideologists in Austrian economic, free market thinkers that were very brilliant at articulating an economic or an investment viewpoint but they were really miserable at selling the real value of intangible information, expertise, knowledge, foresight, high-viable predictability, et cetera. I was able to be the voice and the advocate of 21 of them.
From there, this is a protracted answer, I created the marketing. I created the renewals, the re-activations, the lifetime, the semi-lifetime, the partial lifetime, the special high-level services. This is all before anybody else understood it. Before anybody ever did it, we created inserts. I had to figure out how to articulate them all.
There was a point where I was writing an honest-to-god 1,000 different things a year for different clients, a lot of it we could repurpose, renewals, ancillaries, but I was just creating all kinds of different copy, front and back end, renewal, ancillary, upsell. I was very deeply immersed in the mindset of an investor. These were real investors. I mean this not to be derogatory but if you look at a lot of people who subscribe to investment publications today, they're more opportunistic,
