Copywriter and hypnotist Jesse Gernigin joins The Copywriter Club Podcast to talk with Kira and Rob about his freelance business, creating an online summit, and how knowing how to hypnotize people helps him know how to attract customers and sell more products. In this interview, we talk about:
• how Jesse went from magician to hypnotist to copywriter
• what it takes to bee a hypnotist
• the #1 thing he did that made him a successful hypnotist
• what he sent potential clients when he was cold contacting
• how often he succeeded (and failed) when he was cold emailing and how he increased his chances of success
• how Jesse works with clients to get them what they need (not just what they want)
• what he did on Upwork to succeed
• acting as a strategist in addition to working as a copywriter
• what it takes to assemble an online summit and what has surprised him the most from putting on a summit
And while talking about his summit, Jesse let us in on the tools he used to get his summit online and we asked him about the two best speakers he included in his summit. Finally Jesse told us what he thinks will happen to copywriting in the future. To get this one... click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Sponsor: The Copywriter Club In Real Life
Geoff Ronning
The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy
Vander Meide
Ramit Sethi
Chase Jarvis
Paige Poutiainen
Danny Marguiles
Joanna Wiebe
Thrive Architect
Rainmaker
Wordpress
ConvertKit
Teachable
Vimeo
Natalie McGuire
Lianna Patch
Hillary Weiss
Entrepreneur on Fire
Live Gold Rich
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
Intro: Content (for now)
Outro: Gravity
Full Transcript:
Rob: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 71 as we chat with copywriter, marketing consultant, and hypnotist Jesse Gernigin about trading his magic act for high paying copywriting gigs, how he finds and lands freelance clients, what goes on behind the scenes of an online summit, and how hypnotism helps him become a better copywriter!
Kira: Welcome, Jesse!
Jesse: Thank you guys so much for having me! It’s great to be here.
Rob: It’s great to have you.
Jesse: Yeah, it’s cool to talk with you guys on this end after having you both on my summit, so this is great!
Kira: Yeah! So we’re going to talk about your summit in a bit; you’re a first hypnotist on the show!
Jesse: Okay! Yeah.
Rob: Yeah, we’re waiting for you to say something like “look into my eyes”—follow the watch...
Kira: (laughs)
Jesse: (laughs)
Kira: I’m actually a little nervous now! I feel like you might hypnotize us and make us say something ridiculous. I don’t know.
Jesse: No, no, no. (laughs)
Kira: All right, Jesse, a good place to start is just with your story. You know, who are you? How did you get into copywriting? Especially with the magic background? Tell us a little more about your story.
Jesse: Oh, this is funny. So we’re going to go back to the days of copywriting books—Dan Kennedy’s, I think 1993 book—The Ultimate Sales Letter. So, I graduated college in 2007, so I came out right at the heart of the recession, and nobody was hiring for anything I had a degree in. And I’d been a magician and a hypnotist, and I’d work, you know, shows and make five or six thousand dollars a year just doing it on the side. And my buddy told me, you should just do this full time until a job opens up! So I went out, found an agent, and I was a really great performer.
I don’t like to toot my own horn, because I wasn’t necessarily more talented than anybody else, but I have a great personality, which is big as a freelancer, big as an entertainer. It makes up for a lot of shortcomings. So I got on with a couple agents and my whole process exploded! And I was making an extra fifteen thousand dollars or so a year, and since I had scholarships for college I didn’t have any debt. I didn’t live very well; I was getting by on maybe twenty two, twenty five thousand dollars a year, but because I had little debt, and I spent most of my time traveling for shows, I lived pretty well. I realized I wanted to grow my business and there was this big opportunity to become a successful entertainer because the market was just not served by quality entertainers. So I decided to market myself.
I had a really great mentor—his name was Geoff Ronning, and he was this amazing stage hypnotist marketer. Which was funny, because he actually left the business too and he runs an online group, I think called Stealth Seminar? But at the time, Jeff was really big on direct response copywriting. And he mentored me to study Dan Kennedy. He told me, “Look. Right now, everyone is moving everything online. And this is the biggest time for you to go into direct mail.” So I actually got my start copywriting, writing for myself, doing direct mail. And so I did postcards, I did—I think they’re called puffy mailers? Where you would send like things in envelopes so people would open them. I would send these massive, massive press kits with all kinds of stuff in it. White paper, reasons you should hire me, and it worked!
And as my business grew, I started experimenting with different types of copywriting, different types of sales letters. I moved into corporate speaking, so I transitioned all the clients I had from hypnosis into relaxation therapy, which I did through NPI. I became NPI’s co-chair of communication, so I access to this huge network of people, and I just had this great business! I was hitting between 85 and 105k and that gross, not net. And I was living a great life. But I’d also kind of hit the ceiling. And that’s when I transitioned to copywriting full time.
Rob: So I want to ask about the copywriting, but before that, you know, I remember as a kid I remember going to see the Amazing Vandermiede—the magician, or the hypnotist, and seeing that show, and I even bought the book that he sold at the time, you know? Learn How to Hypnotize People. Maybe I thought that I would get my little sister to cluck like a chicken—I don’t know what I was thinking. But, Jesse, how does one become a hypnotist?
Jesse: So, now, it’s really not as safe as it was when I started. I actually took three years of training and I became a certified hypnotherapist. So I took two years of training, and then I did a year of mentoring under another expert. So although I never did any hypnotherapy, I could. I could do everything from smoking sensation, weight loss, to this really interesting thing called hypno-birthing, where the woman’s hypnotized for a couple of months before she has the child, and then has the child under hypnosis with no pain medication.
Kira: What?!
Jesse: Yeah.
Kira: Sign me up.
Jesse: Yeah, you say that, but it’s an expensive process because you have to see the hypnotist twenty, thirty times, if you figure you’re paying them 125 dollars, 150 bucks a session…
Kira: Oh my goodness.
Jesse: …but yeah. I started out taking a couple years of classes. Now, I’d hypnotized people before I took the classes—I learned to do it in high school just by reading a couple books. But I realized if I was going to do it for a living, I had to get insurance, I had to be certified. So I became a certified hypnotist, I took the training, I got all the certificates, and now you don’t have to, which is scary. I’m not a big fan of it. That’s one of the reasons I transitioned out of the business, too.
Kira: Wow. Okay. So, can you still hypnotize people?
Jesse: Yeah, actually, I’ll give you guys a cool tidbit. If you’ve seen a stage hypnosis show, you’ve seen like the hypnotist will invite people on stage, he goes through the process of hypnotizing them, and then he touches them on the head and says, Sleep! And then they go like a ragdoll. The reality is, the people that are going to be hypnotized on stage are hypnotized the second they walk on stage. The hypnotist could sit everybody down, walk down that line of people, touch each of them on the head, and say sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, and everybody that’s going to be hypnotized would go out like that. The reality is, the audience can’t believe that because they don’t have the knowledge to understand how it works. So you actually have to put on the theater of hypnotizing somebody for the audience to believe that the people are hypnotized.
Rob: I’m one of those guys that’s not believing that.
Kira: I know—yeah. (laughs)
Rob: I need to understand the why behind that. Tell us more!
Jesse: So, hypnosis is really an instant state. We go in and out of hypnotic states all day. You just kind of get in this pattern, we get in this focus. And what’s really great about the internet is, especially when I was coming to the fro, it was really easy for people to use YouTube to see hypnosis shows. So before, when I started, not a lot of people had actually seen a hypnotist. They might’ve seen them at the comedy club, or at a state fair, but most people didn’t know what happened. So less people than normal would get hypnotized. But when I started doing shows, YouTube was popular, so people would look up hypnotists before I did these shows, so by the time I showed up to do the show, they’d already been programmed to know what to expect and what to react. So when I would go onstage, I didn’t have to explain it to them. They understood, they could read about it, they could listen to lectures, so they had done a lot of what we call “priming”. We had primed their mind to react to the stimulus. And when I showed up, it was already all done.
