How To Write Email Copy Like Pro In Less Than One Day with Jon Benson

Do you have a product or service to sell? Did you know you’ll need a good copy to sell it? Do you get stuck staring at a blinking cursor every time you sit down to write? Gear up as today we get to know Jon Benson, the man who can take all your copywriting anxiety away (well, most of it) and give you the intuitive tools to have confidence with your words.

Now the CEO of Digital Publisher, Inc. and JBF Health, Jon Benson started his online empire in 2004 with the release of his first book, Fit Over 40 which propelled him into the online marketing spotlight.

In 2007, Jon began experimenting with a new way to get products online. He combined his training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and psychology with what became the world’s first “ugly” Video Sales Letter, or VSL.

This creation propelled Jon to internet marketing fame, doing well over $12B annually for marketers in virtually every online industry. He then turned his focus to copywriting and created Sellerator, the world’s first software-driven VSL copywriting system. Sellerator became the #1 copywriting course online.

Today, Jon’s focus is narrowed down to the recent release of Email CopyPro. Email CopyPro is doing for email what Sellerator has done for the Video Sales Letter, allowing marketers without copywriting experience to generate A-List caliber promotional content and emails with a few clicks of the mouse.

Today, Jon is authoring Epic Love, a book on his experiences and study of love, sexuality and relationships. He is still heavily involved in fitness and bodybuilding training, martial arts, authoring poetry, and gigs as a bassist on the side.

To learn more about Jon and the Email CopyPro, visit: https://www.jonbenson.com/

Here’s What We’ll Cover in Today’s Episode

• Video Sales Letters: What are they and why are they so effective?
• How reading and listening simultaneously causes people to absorb 60% more and increased their probability of buying
• How to use hypnotic suggestion in your marketing
• Why selling the unique mechanism is so effective
• How creating trademarked terms and solutions can improve your conversion
• How to discover your “primary solution” and be seen as the best choice for your prospect
• The 4 Most Effective Types of Emails – EPIC
  • Engagement
  • Promotional
  • Inspirational
  • Content
• How to utilize frameworks and psychology to create more EPIC emails

About The Guest: Jon Benson

Born to biological parents in Ugasandor, Malaysia, Jon Benson began his career at the age of 4 tending sheep and fur-bearing mammals. His father, Akkmar Hollester Benson, invented the manhole cover.

None of that was true… as far as you know.

What is true is the fact that Jon started his online empire in 2004, with the release of his first bestselling book, Fit Over 40. The success of Fit Over 40 propelled Jon into the online marketing spotlight. His second book, The Every Other Day Diet became the #1 diet book on the digital landscape, landing in the hands over 200,000 customers. 7 Minute Musclecame next in 2008, and Jon became the first fitness author to have two Top 10 books on the Clickbank marketplace at the same time in two different categories (diet and fitness.)

In 2007, shortly after the release of The Every Other Day Diet, Jon began experimenting with a new way to market products online. He combined his training in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and psychology with what became the world’s first “ugly” Video Sales Letter, or VSL. This creation propelled Jon to Internet marketing fame, and has since gone on to do well over $12B annually for marketers in virtually every online industry.

Jon semi-retired from the fitness space in 2007 to focus on copywriting – a skill he wanted to refine – as well as helping other marketers create VSLs. This led to the creation of Sellerator, the world’s first software-driven VSL copywriting system. Sellerator became the #1 copywriting course online, and remains so to this day. Jon remains one of the few copywriters in history to earn over $1B for his customers.

Today, Jon’s focus is narrowed down to his latest diet book, co-authored with Dr. Anthony Capasso, M.D., The 4 Day Thyroid Diet, and the 2017 release of Email CopyPro. Email CopyPro is doing for email what Sellerator has done for the Video Sales Letter, allowing marketers without copywriting expertise generate A-List caliber promotional and content emails with a few clicks of the mouse. Jon recently opened the free Facebook group Emailers for email marketers.

Jon is the CEO of Digital Publisher, Inc., which houses all of Jon’s Internet marketing products, services, and free materials, as well as the CEO of Fitology LLC, which controls Jon’s fitness and diet empire. He is currently authoring a book on his experiences and study of love, sexuality and relationships, Epic Love, still heavily involved in fitness and bodybuilding training, martial arts, authoring poetry, and gigs as a bassist on the side (his former full-time job.) He resides in California and, intermittently, in stunning Vancouver, BC.

How To Write Email Copy Like Pro In Less Than One Day with Jon Benson

I have got a very exciting guest, a guy that I've known for a very long time, I've known for a little bit shorter and I got to sit down with him. I saw some of the absolutely insanely cool tools that he has created for entrepreneurs to help shortcut one of the most profitable but problematic areas of their business, which is email marketing.

I'm going to introduce you to Jon Benson. Some of you will already know that name. However, if something strikes you, you have a question, you've got a suggestion, you want to reach out. You can always email me at AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com. That is a personal email.

I do read every single one of them. I want to thank all of my longtime audience for rejoining the show and getting the opportunity to eavesdrop on conversations I personally want to have anyway with people I want to talk to.  

Jon is no different. I could read an introduction on who Jon Benson is and what he's done, but I'm going to keep it short and sweet. Jon is one of the most successful marketing and copywriting minds out there. He is probably the inventor of the Video Sales Letter that you've seen for years.

I first came across it back in maybe 2009 and it dramatically changed the course of one of the businesses that I ran. Jon has been on the cutting edge, not only with his own products but working with some of the absolute biggest marketing companies in the world. Has your copy officially been responsible for in the billions of sales and by now? 

Yes, I'm one of the three guys that I know of that are alive that can say that. 

Who are the other two? 

One is Craig Clemens and the other one is Gary Bencivenga.  

Jon's already piping in, so ladies and gentlemen, welcome Jon Benson to the show. 

I'm definitely the inventor of the Video Sales Letter, so it's pretty funny. 

It's funny because I remember I didn't first see it from you. I saw it from somebody else and then I remember quickly seeing some of your stuff and I'm like, “This is next level. This is good. This guy knows what he's doing.”

I realized that you were the guy who made that all happen. For anybody reading who’s like, “What do you mean by Video Sales Letter?” Let's give people a little primer on what that is.  

 

It blows my mind that this still works as well as it works now, but it does. I had a guy come up to me and I spoke at Todd Brown's event. He came up and said, “Our new VSLs I’m doing, I followed your Sellerator formula and it came out of the gate doing 2.2 ROI.” I'm like, “You're getting over 2% ROI right out of the gate coming out? It's pretty good.”

Right out of the gate on cold traffic, that's good. A Video Sales Letter, at least my version of it, what you've seen probably 99% of the time is you see words on the page. They're just texts on the page. You're speaking over the words. 

With no style, photos and pictures. It's not pretty. Sometimes they call them ugly Video Sales Letters. 

Perry Belcher was the guy that coined that with Ryan Deiss when I was showing those guys what I was doing. The ugly Video Sales Letter stuck. They are ugly but the pages that were the best sales pages and Video Sales Letters tend to be ugly. Over the years they've evolved to where people doodle on top of the animation.

Even some still video, some live video on top of them, but slides still convert. The psychology of this is pretty strong in the sense that you're forcing people to read every word of your sales letter. That was the idea behind it. How do I get somebody to read what I've written? 

One way to do that is to show it to them in one sentence and one paragraph at a time. You get a hypnotic effect from that when somebody's reading literally one sentence at a time. The idea came to me. I was a psychology minor and it came to be when I remembered a staff has said, “If you're listening and reading at the same time, you're taking in 68% more information.” I thought, “I'll read my sales letter.” 

That was the original idea. That would be boring and at the very first try, this was me literally scrolling down the page of my written sales letter and that didn't work out. I'll try this and fit this on a slide–by–slide basis. I didn't know anything about PowerPoint because I never used it, so I had to figure out PowerPoint.

The next thing you know, the first VSL was Every Other Day Diet. The second one was the Truth About Abs. I pulled up the Truth About Abs VSL because somebody was asking about it. That thing is still rocking. 

For those of you who have seen it, it is so counterintuitive when you're doing it. I know when I'm creating them, it's like, “Nobody's going to watch this.” There's that side of us that is like, “I want to make this fancier and I want to give people something to be pleased by.” 

What you said is it's hypnotic. I've told people my theory on why it works, which is exactly that, is if you're giving a picture for somebody to look at and you're talking over it, their eyes are looking at something different than what their ears are listening to.

Even though you may think it's boring, it is that trance-like effect that you're not giving them anything else to look at. If the copy is good, if the copy's engaging, it holds their attention and you hook them in, which is what you are all about and what good copy is all about, then they won't pull away.

They won't get distracted and they'll stare at this thing until they pull out their wallet. That's the whole goal.  

The goal is not to entertain, it's to mesmerize and to get some money out of their natural state of distraction. That's all we're trying to do. We're trying to keep people out of distraction and it's so hard when VSLs first came out in 2007 or 2009. 

I know that I switched over in 2009 and I immediately saw a double in my conversion. 

I think it was 2009 when I came out with the first one, but no one had seen anything like it. Now there are thousands upon thousands of VSLs out there. Even now, the market is not saturated yet. I remember when Ryan pitched his, he came up with a VSL course before I did and he pitched it.

He goes, “Text sales letters are dead.” I've never said that. People have asked me all the time. I wrote the text sales letters and in fact I'm writing the first VSL. I didn't take any clients all year. I didn't want to. I took a client, Metabolic Sherpa, and we're turning a letter that I wrote into a VSL.

We decide in the process of it, and this is something we can talk about. How email copy, written sales letter copy and VSL, they're all very different.  

Even using the same exact letter, here's the hook that we came up with. We knew the hook worked, there's a multimillion–dollar letter. We didn't want to mess with the hook. Even positioning that whenever someone was speaking it slightly changed it. The next thing you know, I rewrote 70% of that letter because it came out different.

When you think in terms of a VSL structure, your mind goes in a different direction. One reason it works is that you're forced to think modularly. You're forced to think in segments versus paragraphs. 

There are a lot of reasons why I can think that VSLs work and they still work, but saying that they're not going to work anymore is like saying a written sales letter isn't going to work anymore or direct mail doesn't work anymore. It’s ridiculous. How many times have you heard that? 

Video sales letters work because you are forced to think in segments versus in paragraphs. Click To Tweet

A million and it works like crazy.  

This is how powerful this analogy is. I have two friends of mine. One’s name is Caleb O’Dowd and he has a supplement company. Caleb lives in Ireland with his brother John. They run this $50 million supplement company where it's all based on placing ads in newspapers in the United States. 

I was telling you about a company selling $3 million a year of physical product and using nothing. They started doing Facebook ads using nothing but magazine ads for the past years and just been absolutely killing it with about a 27% profit margin. This stuff exists.

Now I'm working with this company to help bring the digital marketing strategy to the table so we're going to clean up, but it’s exactly like what you said. These other things work.

The thing is it's all how good the copy is. Ugly Video Sales Letters, print ads and direct mail, they don't work if your copy is crap. Nothing works if your copy is crap. 

People say, “Start a podcast. Start a show. Do this. Do that. Do video marketing.” If you suck on video, if you're not a good interview host, you're not going to have any success.

Quality is still important. There have always been a lot of formulaic templates, things out there, but one of the things that I've always loved about what you've put out in the world and we're going to talk about your latest thing. 

The fact that you're combining, creating a formula and a wizard, but with world-class copy elements and it's not just, “Here's something basic. Here's a basic copy structure you can follow.” This is the stuff that is world–class frameworks. 

With Sellerator and with email copy, the idea was how I could sneak in teaching you A–level copy strategies without selling you a copywriting course? At the same time that you're learning, it's doing. The success models that I’ve studied and my friend Josh was key in helping me crack the Sellerator code because he was looking at success models too.

It was always learning and doing at the same time. The models that education systems were using versus you have a textbook and you learn something, then you take a test is a lot different than if you have a textbook. You learn something, you immediately apply it to something and then you learn something, you immediately apply something else. You absorb so much more of it.  

When people are going through either Sellerator, which is the VSL course or they go through Email CopyPro, they don't realize what they're doing because I'm not telling you what I'm doing. When they watch the videos, which are short because I chunk it down to literally every single sentence, the videos are 30 seconds long, a minute long. Here's what the whole idea behind this.

I'm teaching you the marketing stuff to fill in a blank but in reality, I'm teaching you the marketing stuff so that you can use it in your mind rather than saying, “Here's some abstract course that talks about branding a solution versus branding your product,” for example. That's a concept that copywriters would like to hear about.

We're branding the unique mechanism versus branding the name of the product. Everybody wants to sell the name of the product. They should be selling the mechanism. The name of the product is simply carrying the mechanism because you can take the name of a product. 

I can write a book called Body for Life if I wanted to, but you can't copyright a title. What I can't do is take Bill Phillips’ ideas, the matrix underneath the book. I can't copy that. I can't steal that. I wouldn't steal either.

The point is someone stole The Every Other Day Diet. This girl from Britain stole that title from me. You look at the book. It even is similar, but the concepts in her book are different than the concepts of mine. They're similar, but they're different.

From what I heard, she's quite knowledgeable, so that's great. The problem is it’s an uncool thing to take the title, but there's nothing to do about that. The same thing is true of your product. If you're just marketing your product and you're saying, “My product helps you lose weight.

My product helps you build a business online,” whatever it may be, and you don't have a unique mechanism behind why that product is so unique so that you can say that the name of the product is the only place in the world you can get blank.  

That blank right there is everything. That's the trademarked term. That's the unique mechanism. It's what I call in the Email CopyPro the primary solution. That's what I call it inside the Video Sales Letter formula too.

What is the primary solution? How do we pull that out of you? If you haven't thought through what your primary solution is, whether you know it or not, when you're watching these videos and filling in these blanks, I'm forcing you to think through it and you to name something.

The next thing you know, you'll come back, you'll think about it. You'll stick it in your subconscious mind when you are in the shower. You'll go, “I thought of that. I can name it this.” The next thing you know, you've got all these different avenues and leveraged to market stuff, especially with email marketing. 

One of the most well-known examples that I can think of to help any of the audience is muscle confusion. Who did that? P90X. The product was called P90x, which is a weird name of a title. Nobody would probably say, “That's a great brand name.”

It's not even that memorable brand name, but it's because of the fact that they had a primary solution. They had a unique mechanism that they called muscle confusion around the entire thing. Everybody started to believe that muscle confusion is the key and then the only place to get muscle confusion is P90x because they invented the term. 

 

Joe Weider had that many years before that. There's a whole Weider principle called Muscle Confusion Principle. Weider was a genius at that in the fitness world. Everything was the leader of so and so principle. He coined everything.

If you're wondering why this guy built the major empire, in this case magazines, when the world turned digital they fell off the map. The principles still work and they work now. Inside Email CopyPro, we have inbox branding. The one that everyone knows inside that is EPIC email. There are four types of emails and you can remember them by the word EPIC, Engage, Promotion, Inspirational emails from content and Consumption.

That's it. That's the only four types of emails. In Email CopyPro, we create emails that blend. There's a reason why there are four strategies. When you engage somebody, there's a psychology behind engagement.

If you're meeting a girl at a bar, you walk up to her and you go, “What's your name?” It’s probably not the best way to come up to somebody. Even worse is, “Do you come here often?” There are lousy levels of engagement. 

What's your name is the most generic. You're not going to do any harm. You're not going to do any good. 

We get clever. You sit down and you say, “Not to be rude, but you stole my seat.” They go, “I've been sitting here for hours.” You go, “No, I was sitting here before you for hours.” Now you've got some weird curiosity. You’re like, “I'm messing with you. My name's Jon.” That's a pattern interrupt. “You stole my seat.” 

All of a sudden, everything she's currently talking about goes out the window. Now I'm not trying to get into pickup lines with women. That's not what this is about, but you are literally picking up a client in the same way that you're seducing a person in a bar. It's seducing in a nice way, not in a Harvey Weinstein way. 

You've got that going, but the psychology of that engagement from a potential customer perspective is completely different than the psychology of selling. Take my analogy of coming up to a girl in a bar and let's say that you did use a clever thing like you're sitting my seat or you come up with another line that is clever.

What if you came out to her and said, “I'd like to give you my phone number so that we can go out tomorrow?” That's the direct sales pitch right. If you are a super stud or if you got a serious game or if you feel the energy between the two of you and you handle that right, I've done that before and had that work.

That is rare. That's the 10% of your list that will buy anything that you sell because they will buy anything that anyone sells.  

The 90% that won't do that need some engagement. I'm very liberal with that 10%. The psychology behind a clever sales pitch is completely different than the psychology behind an engagement pitch, which is completely different than in the psychology behind an inspirational pitch.

Taking the girl at the bar, if you come into some girl at the bar and say you introduce yourself and the very first thing you say is, “I'm not trying to blow smoke or anything, but I want to say a lot of girls come in here and they have a very generic look. Your look is so unique.” 

Now, I'm going into more of a content pitch. “Tell me about your look. How did you get this look? Where did you come up with this?” I'm asking questions, I'm in engagement, but before she can say something and I can turn that into content, I can start talking about, “I've got this interesting story about how I developed my look,” so you get into a conversation, but the psychology there is completely different.

That psychology is built on rapport. Engagement's not rapport. Engagement is how do you say hello? Inspiration is about how do you keep building rapport. Selling is about how do you make a compelling offer and then consumption is all about how you get somebody to follow through on that offer. 

How do you get somebody to use the product or service they just bought? Those are the four types of persuasion within all emails. There's only four. Remember the word EPIC, Engage, Promote, Inspire and Consume. Those are the only four types of emails in existence.

In fact, I would argue those are the only types of persuasion in existence, especially email. You engage, you promote, you inspire and inspiration is huge because that's content. I hear this all the time, people say, “I need to send more content to my list.” What if you changed the perspective of that? You say, “I need to send more inspiration to my list. I need to inspire my list to do X.” 

What do you want to inspire them to do? There are three ways that you can inspire someone. You can inspire someone to believe in themselves. You can inspire someone to believe in you. You can inspire someone to take action. Those are the three main ones. 

There are probably others, but those are the three inspirational models that we use in content. Rather than saying content, what is content? I'm going to give you stuff. “Brad, here are five ways you can write a clever headline.”

If I count that into the model of inspiration, I can say, “Brad, believe it or not, you can write killer headlines. Trust me, I've taught this to rabbits. If a rabbit can pull this off, I know you can too because you're a lot smarter than a rabbit.” All I did was coax in a silly inspirational framework. 

I've got clients that can't write a grocery list and they've written headlines that have pulled in millions of dollars. I'm going to tell you this formula. Now you're inspired to learn the formula. If I say, “Brad, we'll give you five ways to write a clever headline,” there's no inspiration there.

You have to be intrinsically inspired to want that to happen. You have to say, “I want my headlines to work.” If I say, “What if I showed you something that could help make you a lot of money that anyone can do?” That's an inspirational framework for that same content piece, but now someone's going to listen to it.

That's a huge thing. Engage, Promote, Inspire and Consume. Consume is customers that buy things and you get them to follow through like, “Here's what you do first. Here's what you do next. I'm checking in on you.” There's a lot more to consumption than that.  

Here's the tricky part. There are four modes of psychology and they're completely different. We went through the funny pickup line. If you try to do consumption like you'd come up to a girl at a bar and you try to consumption pickup line like, “How was it last night? Was it good for you? That's funny. Would you like to do this again?” She's going to look at you probably like you're a freak from another planet. 

The psychology is completely different. If you were with her the previous night and you saw her at the bar and you came up to her and you went, “How's it going? How was it? Did you enjoy last night? Did you have fun?” “I had a great time.” “Would you like to do it again?”

That's consumption. She consumed you in that way. What if you could combine all four of those psychological elements into virtually every email? In other words, the only four psychological elements people use to get persuaded to do anything are interact, build rapport, buy something and use what they bought all in the same email.  

Copies should be more on selling the mechanism because the name of the product is simply carrying the mechanism. Click To Tweet

That'd be powerful if there was only somebody who knew such a way to do this. Do you know somebody? 

I do. I have worked with him every morning with a lusting, longing gaze. That is the basis, the unique mechanism of Email CopyPro. That is what makes it so incredibly powerful.  

I was in a mastermind with about twelve guys who are awesome, super level entrepreneurs. Jon was in town here in San Diego and he stopped by. Jon, you shared some of the stuff you're working on, which is exactly this.

You shared this Email CopyPro. We talked about your Sellerator program where it's software that uses all your principles in this framework for creating highly–converting Video Sales Letters.

You've taken it to the next level and you're going to talk all about this. I witnessed behind the scenes of this tool that Jon's about to talk about, Email CopyPro, which blew me away with how much time and mental energy it can save. 

I'll even preface it with this because I was told to share this on my show by a friend of mine, my buddy Brad Spencer. I was revising a webinar copy for one of my clients that I help out and I decided to roll up my sleeves, get in there and do it. It felt like I was wrestling with a bear.

At one point, I was on the floor with a pillow over my head kicking and screaming into this pillow because I had the hook of what I wanted to talk about. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't quite get it right. It's like that puzzle piece where you've got one piece left in it and the pieces don't fit. 

I'm screaming because I'm trying to do this using my own creativity as opposed to using a framework or using something else. I realized how painful it could sometimes be to create good copy. Email is the exact same.

I was doing this with a client for a very high–ticket offer. I'm sitting there thinking, “What do I say? How do I say it?” I've got to draw on all of my years of experience to do this. I remember when Jon was showing me this stuff going, “There’s got to be an easier way.”

I wanted to preface this with why it's so cool what you're doing because those people who have not ever tried to write copy don't understand this. Those of us who have realized it is literally as painful as giving birth if you're not doing it the right way. I'm sure you've pulled your hair out and many times over this. 

The idea is this. Brad and I are sitting in a mastermind in San Diego. There were all these marketers in this room. I'm shot all day long with Mike. I'm exhausted. I come in and go, “I have to go see these guys.” It gets around to me and I'm going, “I don't have anything prepared. I'm just going to show you this.”

I put it up on the screen and go, “Here's what this does.” Everybody is looking at it and go, “When can we buy that?” It’s like, “What is that? Come again?” When marketers see this, every high–end marketer gets this. 

If you've ever written copy in your life or want to, you’ll get it.  

To give you an idea, what we did is to templatize email. You can do that in a cheesy way. Cheesy tools have their place, but you can also do that in a way that takes more effort. There’s no lying here, it takes a little more effort. You have to spend a few hours setting this up, but you’re getting copy from 30 of the best copywriters on the planet.

It's not just one guy, it's me and Todd Brown and Ryan Deiss. Because I wrote VSLs for these guys and sales letters and I made them lots of money, I reached out and went, “Can you send me some of your best campaigns?” We were able to take their sequences and campaigns and retool them and rewrite them every single time we want to rewrite them.

In other words, we have a feature called Regenerate where you click a button and the whole thing rewrites. Everybody gets fresh examples of these emails. That epic sequence is in these emails and at least three or the four in every email except for the short ones like, “You're five minutes away from a webinar,” or something. 

My thought was what if we could combine this into a system to where once you fill out your niche, once you tell the system about your business, that the system literally is like an AI system that integrates with our minds. Our minds infused with yours and out comes these emails that sound like you and I wrote them together.

That was the goal. They're not emails. There are some scripting tools that would come out like, “Are you wanting to lose weight yesterday?” This is the general reaction.

I was sitting down with Perry Belcher from DigitalMarketer and he said, “Show this to me. I want to write a promo for Survival Market.” I go, “I'm going to preselect our survival niche.” I've never seen it before because I didn't write it. I said, “I'm going to select these three promo emails and plot them randomly with a click of a button.” I generate them and he looks at it. He goes, “Yeah, but you wrote that.” I go, “No, I didn’t.” 

For those of you who don't know, Perry Belcher is one of the best copywriters out there.  

He and I are in a constant war with each other, but the point is he goes, “That's a good starting point.” I go, “Do you think so?” For him, that's a starting point.

In other words, he could start with that and tweak it here and there and get a complete Perry Belcher-ism email out of it. For other people that will never be Perry, which is 99.9% infinite number nines of us, don't worry.  

They don't even need it as a starting point. It's a finishing point. 

 

There will never be a pro-level copywriter. You will take this as it is and send it out. That's the goal. I wanted to have emails that if you wanted to put your personal touch on it, it's even better. It's even better to start a paragraph saying, “My wife and I were at the movies last night,” and stuff that we can't do with a machine, but the content is so powerful that you could literally send it out as is. 

In promotional emails and solo emails in entire sequences, if you have a webinar coming up, we have the best webinar promotional sequence ever because Jason Fladlien is the best webinar guy. 

Jason is the monster. He’s amazing at that. 

Jason gave me the webinars sequences that he used. 

That alone is like gold. 

We took those structures and then rewrote it around the structures, put them in there and now dog trainers can use it. Fitness guys can use it. The cool thing about it is it doesn't matter what niche it is. 

I love that because there are other copy wizards out there. You mentioned ScriptDoll. I've used that. I've used Funnel Scripts. Russell Brunson has his and I still use that. They're very handy. However, there is still a lot of work that goes into it.

It's much more geared for people who have absolutely zero-copy experience and it is a great starting point for a lot of people. One of the things I love about yours is you went to the next step. It’s garbage in, garbage out.

At the same time, if you put gold in and you take these top people who are writing formulaically and they have sold millions of dollars and then you're breaking down what they did and using their stuff. 

That’s your primary solution. I got this concept and this changed my business when I learned this from Richard Lindner, one of the guys over at DigitalMarketer. Has he ever told you his 10-80-10 concept?  

I remember I was sitting with Richard having drinks at Traffic & Conversion Summit. I'm a good copywriter and yet I hate it because it is so painful.

Any copywriter knows that the worst thing you can ever do that is most painful is to sit down with a blank piece of paper and it's like, “Go from absolute scratch.” That's one of the things where he said, “Here's how I do it and here's how I outsource copy and whatnot.” It's my job to come up with the first 10%.

This is the hook, this is the offer, this is the general structure. These are the big points that I want to cover and this is the hook and the big idea. He'll flush that out, hire a copywriter, give them that to fill out the rest of the 80% and then he'll come in and refine the final 10%. 

When I started doing that, it removed 80% of the pain away from writing copy, which was amazing. Things like this, it even takes what Perry Marshall says 80-20 squared. Now you may only have to do 4% and the top 2% and the bottom 2% and yours does the rest. It’s those two pieces alone.

I'm a huge believer in 80-20. I'm a huge believer in that 10-80-10 and I love the fact that the solutions that you've done both for VSLs and for email copy seem to fit plug and play right into those strategies that I've used and some other brilliant marketers have used to get high-quality stuff at a fraction of the time. 

That was the idea. To expand on it further, for example, a guy wanted to promote one of my fitness offers and he goes, “I want 30 days of emails.” I didn't have 30 days of emails. It's a lot to write. I said, “I do have this machine.” I got one of my staff guys who didn't know the product. I said, “Here's the sales letter. Read over the sales letter and create 30 days of emails.”

He went into Email CopyPro and was able to do that within less than a day. That includes learning products. He didn't even know probably if he even would have known the product if he would have had the niche done. He could have done it in 30 minutes. 

My point behind is do you want to try to mess with this? It's so funny because I was reading the emails. I know where they came from. I'm like, “This is Jason's. This is Brian's. I remember Ryan sent me that. I remember this one's Perry's. This one's mine. This one's mine too.”

I was able to go through and go, “Here's where these are,” and shot them over to the guy. He was able to turn it into an affiliate version. 

Going back to garbage in, garbage out, it's not you download it, pushes a button and the copy is out there. There is some upfront work. Let's say I've got a client in the how to invest in real estate market, whether it's a client or whether that's my company.

Walk me through what the experience is from the customer's standpoint. I get access to Email CopyPro. How long is it going to take me? What am I going to do? Paint the picture. 

We're releasing what we're calling the light version of it, which is still infinitely more powerful. It uses 85% of the emails we use in the elite version. It doesn't use things like that. We get granular in the elite version where we're drilling down into solution tips and how that solution ties into your primary solution and this complicated stuff.

We get marketers and guys like you and agencies want to use. The vast majority of people don't need that so we stripped it down into a light version. With a light version, it used to be you could set up what we call the EPIC email setup, which is going to get you started in 90 minutes, but the rest of it would take you probably a full day of work to do. 

Starting to populate your entire niche to go through 380 fields, we have 380 fields and now it's down to 90 fields in the version of this. Unless you need a live event and all that stuff, then you can add that on and you can literally go through the entire thing in about 90 minutes. Setting it all up is about 90 minutes, but it's the quick start.

You can set up in ten minutes. You're just off to the races. That's from scratch. If you choose a niche that we've already built, for example we have a real estate niche, you choose the real estate niche and 80% of it is done. You fill in the details that we don't know, like your first name, your last name, your specific URL, things that aren't too difficult to fill in. 

You go through the niche and you can do that on a per email basis. You can say, “I want to use this email when you use this sequence,” and you can see where the fields aren't filled in. You click on it and you can populate it. You can have more than one entry because we want you to add more than one version of everything.

The next time we create another email for you, we'll pull in a different version of the same thing that you just said. If your goal is to make more money on real estate and let's say that's been one of your goals, you can also say you can cash in on real estate. Learn how to liquidate and flip offers. I'm going through how I would structure those verbs like learn, grow and get. 

Next thing you know is you've got an email that has multiple ways of saying the same thing that sounds like a human being versus, “If you want to make money in real estate and you enjoy making money in real estate, this email will help you make money in real estate.”

That's how these scriptures sound. Ours is like, “If you want to make more money in real estate and enjoy the life that you deserve, I want you to read this email right now because you'll learn how you can flip real estate.” Now it sounds like a copywriter's writing. 

When you engage somebody, there's a psychology behind that engagement. Click To Tweet

That's a huge difference. There are a couple more questions coming to mind here. With your background, you've done a lot of work in information marketing and helping people sell products that help them have better health, wealth and relationships.

There are whole other types of other businesses out there, service-based businesses, eCommerce, physical products. Does yours typically work? Do you have something for everybody, every primary industry, or is it more heavily focused on people who are in the one niche or another like information? 

We have a B2B section. We have eCommerce. Those are applicable niches. It's simple. If you send an email to sell anything, this works. 

The nice part is stuff like eCommerce is infinitely easier than selling information and how to improve your life, health, wealth and relationships. “I've got a physical product, here's a picture. Do you want it?” 

In B2B, we have this whole thing where we took from a buddy of mine that writes copy in the chiropractic nation. We thought if we could take a chiropractor, a sequence, all it is four emails. This guy says, “Here are the four emails that I give to these chiropractors,” that's all they need.

They start getting people in the door and they've tripled their revenue because they use this sequence. I said, “That would work for dentists and lawyers. That would work for any local B2B business. It also worked for B2B.” We started thinking through this and what if you use this and this.

The next thing you know, we have this campaign that is built around the idea of looking at your competitor’s case studies. 

We walk you through it. The email itself is the strategy of the marketing and that's what I want to emphasize here. It's one thing to give someone a template and I kid around with ScriptDoll and Funnel Scripts and all that stuff. Those are functional tools for certain people at certain times.

It's a different thing to say, “I'm going to sneak in a marketing strategy within this email.” You don't know I'm teaching you how to market something, but by forcing you to answer certain questions or by finding a certain image, you’ll say, “You'll see below is the results of the case study we did.” “I'll get a case study.” The next thing you know is, “I never thought about sending a case study email out to somebody.” That's all over email copy for it. 

That's one of the hardest things to think about, “What do I want to send these people now? I don't know. I've got to come up with something.” You've got to come up with ideas and I liked that it has that.

There's a whole other angle that I know you've probably thought about that we haven't discussed, which is how people can use copywriters. People who are trying to have their own freelance service business, who can use this as an amazing tool that they can go out and sell copywriting services to any type of business because people do need this stuff.

There are some businesses who will never come across Email CopyPro, but they may come across Joe Smith Copywriting Consultant. They can come in and know, “I can charge you for copywriting services. I can do X, Y and Z,” because they know they can fulfill it using your systems.

It creates a very legitimate and potentially lucrative business opportunity for somebody who's either out there doing it now or wants to and knows that they have the ability to go hustle up and get some business. I think it's a tremendous piece of leverage that folks can do. You couldn't say, “This is going to put some copywriters out of business.”

No. It's going to make a much more powerful and it's going to make more copywriters out there. 

 

I had Dean Graziosi's copywriters saw this and he was freaking out about it. He bought it on the spot. At first, he was watching us use it and he's like, “This is making me nervous. I just turned down a job. A guy offered me $5,000 to write emails.” I said, “I wanted time. How fast could you do it with this?” He goes, “I could do it in a day.”

That includes setting it up. I go, “What if it was set up?” He goes, “I could do it in ten minutes.” He went back and got the client and paid me the pins that we were asking for this thing. We're doing a certification for copywriters that we're calling CopyPro Certified so you can become certified working with me in a small group. 

Over a course of four weeks, we teach you how to take both the light and the elite versions and how to take that and make that make money for your clients. You'll be certified to use it for copywriting and you'll be able to generate sales letters and Video Sales Letter. You'll be able to generate emails, you'll be able to go out and sell that service with what we call the 20% alteration.

All you have to do is alter 20% of the email. If we've given you that 80-20 Rule, we'd given you 80% of it. Put 20% of your own individuality on top of it. That will make it your unique thing. Because all of our emails are regenerative, the odds against you coming out with the same email, even in your direct competitive space, are slim. 

We still want you to individualize it. That's going to be a certification course. It's definitely for people that are serious about wanting to get into copy and you'll leapfrog it. The way that you get into copywriting to begin with is you go out and look at the top copywriters and start copying. What's even better than that is what if we gave you all their swipe files and had you fill in the blanks to make you think the way that they already think?

In other words, this is the verbs. The way that we think through things is in terms of verb action. When I talked to you, Brad, “I want to help you blank. Brad, would you like to leverage your power?” What am I doing? 

Verb, pronoun, subject. This is how copywriters talk. We talk this way all the time. The average person might not talk that way. Email CopyPro is built that way by default. You have no choice but to use those kinds of verbs and pronouns. We force you into it. As you're learning to write copy, you're learning, “This verb is cool here.” Like the word automate.

I never thought about that. “Automate your,” instead of, “Make more money online.” “Automate your online business. That's even better, but I wouldn’t have thought about it. Maybe they didn't see in the drop-down list of verbs to you. 

The other nice part about this is it is a double–edged sword. It will probably make a lot of lazy copywriters out there who never become true masters. At the same time, it will probably turn enough people onto copywriting who never probably would have pursued this and who go down the path and start reading this stuff and going through the questions.

Once it starts to click like, “This is how a copywriter thinks.” I could see it having the ability to give people enough taste of what real copy is like and have them go down the rabbit hole and become true masters of the craft. People who might not ever have discovered that they've got a talent for this stuff because there is a degree of the natural tendency to be a copywriter or not. Some people hate it and don't like it. Some of us hate it but are good at it.  

There's a love–hate relationship. I've never met a copywriter who didn't have that. I'm sure there's somebody out there like that, but Carlton definitely has a love–hate relationship with it.  

What I like is it allows me to do the thing that I liked the most, which is off the cuff. I turn on a recorder and whiteboard and I come up with the big ideas and what I want it to be. I may be brainstorming the primary solution and think about all that other stuff.

The things that I absolutely hate is filling in all the little blanks, writing every single sentence, second–guessing myself, writing something, looking back and thinking, “Who was that, that just wrote that? I'm an idiot. I hate it. Cross it out.” 

You’re second-guessing. The damn blinking cursor is blinking at you. It's mocking you. Jonathan Cronstedt called me and he's a client. He used to be the CEO of DigitalMarketer and now he's the CEO of some other big freaking company. He's like, “I'll never have to go through that goddamn blinking cursor again. It's mocking me.” It’s the mocking cursor effect. We can save you that.

If all I did was help you get started with something, I give you an idea that you went, “That's a great idea,” that alone is worth the cost of admission times 100. That's the value that we want to bring. The goal is 100,000 marketers out there. 

This adds to the other tools that you've got. I might be missing something, but I know you have Sellerator, which is for Video Sales Letters. 

VideoSalesLetters.com is easier, but this goes to the same place. That's the machine for VSL. Here's what's interesting. That system has over $1 billion a year for my customers because that's just lucrative. This works out well, but we're taking that same formula. People that want to accelerate it better get it now because we're going to have it only available inside the CopyPro.

The cool thing about that is once you fill out your entire year, there is the elite and there's the light. Once you fill out the elite niche, we already write an entire sales letter. That 6,000–word sales letter comes out of it. Likewise, an 8,000–word Video Sales Letter is coming out of it. It's intense.  

It sounds like all of this stuff is going to end up being integrated into one large system called CopyPro soon. 

Yes, exactly, CopyPro.ai. It literally is AI. It's what we call level one AI, where a human talks to another human, but she combines the elements. Rather than a machine going out and trying to figure out the elements, a machine is not going to be able to go out and find a persuasive language.

It can find things that you like. In the future, the email is so robust that we'll be able to send out I know that Brad likes coffee in the morning and that Susie likes tea in the afternoon. You can say, “Brad, I hope you enjoyed your coffee this morning. By the way, I've got something.” Susie's email will read differently. That's going to come in the future. That'll be on the cutting edge of that. You still need the copy that follows that stuff.

That's what a bot can do. Human beings can still do the rest of this. For people who are interested in selling anything online or copywriters or especially copywriters or agencies, this is going to be a default tool I hope that people can use. Use it to generate the whole thing or use it to get ideas. Think of it as the ultimate swipe file.  

It is, only times 1,000-plus. 

Swipe files are great, but swipe files don't interact. 

You still have to read them and pull elements out manually and I'm doing that all the time is thinking, “I want this piece in here and I like this piece.” This starts to become a Frankenstein mess. I love how this creates speed and take away the pain for one of the most excruciatingly painful parts of all marketing because it is also the single most important aspect, your sales copy.

All the traffic in the world doesn't do you any good if you can't sell. Along with email, one of the things that I've been doing for myself and for some of my clients is part of this is out of laziness because I hate creating sales pages and videos and everything else. I want to see how much I can sell with email alone more and more. 

If you do a good enough job there, you don't have to worry about design and production. I know I've literally bought very high–ticket programs off somebody sending me the right email.  

Andrew Sheppard does a good job of that. Another guy is Travis Sago. He does a great job with that. Before Video Sales Letters, I came up with that idea myself. I don't think I had created it. I came up with the idea to do it and I promoted my third book entirely through email because I was too lazy to create the sales page. That worked in. That whole sales letter email format worked because I completely forgot about it.

When I was creating Email CopyPro, I got an email from BioTrust that was 1,500 words long, 2,000 words long. I'm like, “That's a long email.” It was a sales letter email. I texted Joel, I go, “Joel, is this something you guys are doing now?” 

He goes, “Yes. We always send out a sales letter or email before we go send the actual VSL. We liquidate the hottest customers. It works well.” I go, “That's awesome.” I'll put it in Email CopyPro. The whole sales letter is in there and now we're dividing it out in how I sent it originally, which is over five days. If VSL is broken into five parts, so you send it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and it's a week-long, it's a seven–day power sale.

Day one is all about an introduction, rapport–building and day two is all about telling the story. You break it into those elements. You’re going to have that inside of CopyPro as well. 

The pricing for Email CopyPro, what are you charging for this? What can people get in if they want to try this out? 

$997 is to get you in the door and that is to give you what we call the acceleration system, which is where we put you through the EPIC email set up. You get set up super-fast within 90 minutes where you start and you start sending out your first emails literally that same day. It's $97 a month from that point on. We want skin in the game for our customers because we also give you 21 days of coaching calls with us.

You get 21 days of unfettered email access to our team, plus you get three days every Thursday, where you do live coaching calls with the team. Any questions you have regarding setup, you'd get that for 21 days. For people that come on before we hit critical mass, we're going to extend that 21 days indefinitely. 

What if somebody wants to spend a little bit more money and hire you to privately write a sales or email copy or a Video Sales Letter for them, what would you charge them? 

I can show you an email. It’s $100,000 for a VSL. This guy is emailing me back and forth. He goes, “If I can sell this and get a commission for it, do you still want that?” “I want $100,000.” It’s $1,500 an email. If you go to any copywriting place that has a lot of copywriters, it's in my webinar for Email CopyPro. “I'm looking only for A-listers. What do you charge per email?” The lowest that anyone was charging was $500 an email.

Harlan Kilstein was at $2,500 an email plus 30% of the profits or something outrageous like that. Those are what A-listers are charging. I'm at $1,500 an email plus 5% per email. 

I'm so hesitant even to release this show because I want all my audience to pay me $1,500 an email and I'll be like, “I got it done in a day. That's why you’re paying me so quick.” 

I make one sale and you make a fortune.  

As much as I want you to go to BaconWrappedBusiness.com/emailcopy, I don't want you to do that. I want you to pay me money and let me do that for you.  

Pay him a lot more money and that's it. We'll keep a lot more money.  

You're doing some awesome stuff with this and I know I'm excited to jump in and check that out, especially I've got a client that I'm doing the email copy for. Hopefully, he's not reading this. 

 

Clients only care about results. This is what cracks me up. A copywriter was like, “I use this to make copy for my clients. What if they find out about it?” “What are you doing right now to make copy for clients?” He goes, “I'm writing.” I go, “No, you're not. Do you have a swipe file?” “Yeah.” “You're studying other people's copywrite copy for your client.” That's what this is. The only difference is this spits out what you're trying to think.

In other words, it teaches you how to think through it and it spits out different ways for you to say it and then you can change it whatever you want. You're cutting that research time down enormously. There’s an enormous decrease in research time. It's a different way of looking at it.  

Jon, what's a nut you're trying to crack right now? It’s to look to get more people to hear about CopyPro and to try it out. Is there anything going on in your world, whether it's business, personal that you're trying to crack and that might be people you're trying to meet, a skill you're trying to develop, the money you're trying to raise? It doesn't matter, but help jog the minds of myself and some of my readers. 

My passion for this past year–and–a–half has been Email CopyPro. I do things in the fitness world as well. The fitness time is coming up here pretty quickly. I'm working on a couple of the fitness offers I have with one of the guys from BioTrust and a couple of other guys. My passion right now is getting Email CopyPro out to mass numbers of people.

I've talked to guys, I've talked to Russell, I've talked to the Russell team. They were there at ClickFunnels and a couple of other guys to try to get to see if there are some partnership opportunities so we can get this out faster. In other words, if I can give away a percentage of this and this gets a mass volume, it's worth it to me. 

That would be the one thing that I'm the most interested in whether it be financial capital. I've been talking to some VC guys or it's somebody coming on and saying, “I can take this to immediately 10,000 members and I want X percentage for doing it.” That's awesome. That's the one big itch that I'm trying to scratch right now. That is big. I'm writing a passion project that's been in the works for a year that's coming out in 2020 on love and relationships.

That's the thing I'm fired up about as far as outside of copywriting. That's already got me talking on a stage and talking on podcasts about it. JJ Virgin's book publisher, I don’t know if it’s a marketer or a publisher, came up to me at her event and said the name of my book to me. She looked at me and she goes, “I have to work with you.” I’m like, “Cool. Done.”

That's exciting. It's my favorite topic in the world, even more than copywriting. Those are the three big things. 

If there's anybody out there or things that Jon has mentioned that jogged something for you, what is a good way for people to get ahold of you? 

I like to be accessible. My email is JB@JonBenson.com.  

This has been fantastic. This is a no–brainer. If you sell things online, if you help people sell things online, you need a persuasive copy to do it. Email copy almost always even comes before, especially if you have a list, even a sales page and everything else because you have to build the relationship with them and this is one of the absolute best ways to do it. 

One thing that we didn't even talk about is I would imagine that a lot of the email copy, depending on which templates and whatnot you're using, could also be repurposed as social media posts and Facebook posts. A lot of it's the same overall structure. 

People do that all the time. We have an ad generator in Email CopyPro, a bullet generator. You can use those headlines as ads, banner ads. It's very flexible. I want to impart one strategy that someone can use if they want to liquidate this thing quickly. If you're a copywriter or if you want to make money in copy, then you approach somebody and say, “Pay me $1,000 to write you three emails.

If those three emails don't make you back far more money than that $1,000, then don't hire me. If it does, hire me to write a sales letter for you.” You can use emails as an intro to get a sales letter job where you're making $25,000 to $75,000 to write a sales letter. If somebody wants to hire you, think about it.

If you want to be a copywriter and you want to write a sales letter and they don't know you and they say, “I want to see how good you are.” “Pay me $1,000, $1,500 or whatever that you want to charge and let me write you three emails. Send those three emails out and tell me how they do.” 

Engage, promote, inspire, consume. Click To Tweet

You could even say, “Normally I charge $1,000 an email. I'll charge you whatever.” I've heard of somewhat of a similar strategy with giving out for people who have a Facebook training course. Let's say it's a $500 course or whatnot or $1,000 course. You can go to people to say, “I'm happy to run your Facebook ads for you.

In fact, I'll do it for free for the first two weeks, but there is a startup fee. I'm not going to charge a management fee, but there is a startup fee of $500 or $1,000 because there's a lot of heavy lifting on the front end and you literally use that to buy the course. I'm not saying that this is the best thing to do because you might not be a good Facebook advertiser and you’re just learning how to do it.

There's a difference here, but yours quite literally is if you have $1,000, you can go create the output in a day and it's ready. It's such a cool concept and I'm going to make sure that I shine some light on this because that's such a no–brainer.  

I appreciate that, Brad. 

For the audience, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I always do my best to bring you the best and the brightest and the strategies and the topics that I am working on wanting to learn about. I’m always demonstrating how I am trying to sharpen my skill set with the people who come on the show.

Jon is no different. I've learned quite a bit from this. It's not just a show and tell, but I would not have had Jon on here if I didn't think that he would absolutely floor you with the stuff that you can learn and go out there and apply.

I highly encourage you to give Email CopyPro a shot. It's BaconWrappedBusiness.com/emailcopy. Check everything out. Give it a try and let me know if you did. Send me an email to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com. I've got a special surprise for you. 

Send me an email after you've purchased that. Maybe send me the receipt. If you have liked this episode and you think more people need to hear about it, share it on social media. Tag me, tag Jon on social media. Let us know how bad acid was and how much you've gotten out of it. If you're not a subscriber to this show, go ahead and hit that subscribe button on iTunes or Stitcher or on the website.

I thank you very much for your time in reading what Jon and I have talked about. I hope it helps you grow your business. If you have any questions, need help, need a second opinion on what is working or what's not working so well, email me at AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com. Until next time, talk to you soon. Thanks a lot, Jon.  

Thank you, Brad.  

Important Links:

• CopyPro.ai 
• Jon Benson 
• Sellerator 
• Email CopyPro 
• DigitalMarketer 
• Funnel Scripts 
• Russell Brunson 
• VideoSalesLetters.com 

About The Guest: Jon Benson

Born to biological parents in Ugasandor, Malaysia, Jon Benson began his career at the age of 4 tending sheep and fur-bearing mammals. His father, Akkmar Hollester Benson, invented the manhole cover.

None of that was true… as far as you know.

What is true is the fact that Jon started his online empire in 2004, with the release of his first bestselling book, Fit Over 40. The success of Fit Over 40 propelled Jon into the online marketing spotlight. His second book, The Every Other Day Diet became the #1 diet book on the digital landscape, landing in the hands over 200,000 customers. 7 Minute Musclecame next in 2008, and Jon became the first fitness author to have two Top 10 books on the Clickbank marketplace at the same time in two different categories (diet and fitness.)

In 2007, shortly after the release of The Every Other Day Diet, Jon began experimenting with a new way to market products online. He combined his training in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and psychology with what became the world’s first “ugly” Video Sales Letter, or VSL. This creation propelled Jon to Internet marketing fame, and has since gone on to do well over $12B annually for marketers in virtually every online industry.

Jon semi-retired from the fitness space in 2007 to focus on copywriting – a skill he wanted to refine – as well as helping other marketers create VSLs. This led to the creation of Sellerator, the world’s first software-driven VSL copywriting system. Sellerator became the #1 copywriting course online, and remains so to this day. Jon remains one of the few copywriters in history to earn over $1B for his customers.

Today, Jon’s focus is narrowed down to his latest diet book, co-authored with Dr. Anthony Capasso, M.D., The 4 Day Thyroid Diet, and the 2017 release of Email CopyPro. Email CopyPro is doing for email what Sellerator has done for the Video Sales Letter, allowing marketers without copywriting expertise generate A-List caliber promotional and content emails with a few clicks of the mouse. Jon recently opened the free Facebook group Emailers for email marketers.

Jon is the CEO of Digital Publisher, Inc., which houses all of Jon’s Internet marketing products, services, and free materials, as well as the CEO of Fitology LLC, which controls Jon’s fitness and diet empire. He is currently authoring a book on his experiences and study of love, sexuality and relationships, Epic Love, still heavily involved in fitness and bodybuilding training, martial arts, authoring poetry, and gigs as a bassist on the side (his former full-time job.) He resides in California and, intermittently, in stunning Vancouver, BC.

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