009. “Blind Man Driving” With Kevin Rogers — Comedian Turned Copywriter

I am a 45 year old male who is very bald. By the way, I shaved my head and I was very compelled to buy a new shampoo slash conditioner called wen at two in the morning just the other night because I couldn't resist the the infomercial. It was so well done. I I seriously almost ordered this thing just to see what it felt like.

 

Ash Roy

Well, you have almost convinced me, Kevin. And I'm bald too.

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Hello, everyone. Today I'd like to welcome a very unique guest who has an interesting combination of talents, and that is Kevin Rogers. I met Kevin at the Superfast Business Life Conference earlier this month in March 2015, where I had the pleasure of watching him speak. Kevin beautifully combined his talents as a comedian to revive a flagging audience.

It was a last leg on the second day of a value packed conference and Kevin delivered some spectacular insights into copywriting. Kevin just cracked me up. He used the art of surprise repeatedly in his talk to drive the point home about how surprise plays an important part in copywriting. He used solid examples to demonstrate what he was saying. He got quite a few belly laughs out of the audience and even got us to write down his four by six framework, which is pretty impressive considering it was the end of the second day. All this done in 50 minutes and delivered in a very, very entertaining and engaging manner.

Kevin is the author of the 62nd Sales Hook and has a website called Copychief.com where you can learn all about copywriting. Kevin's a friend of the legendary copywriter John Carlton and the legendary marketer Dan Kennedy. John Carlton even managed to get Dan Kennedy to join him and Kevin for dinner recently, which I believe is quite a feat. Kevin?

 

Kevin Rogers 

Yes. Thank you. Wow, what an intro. I appreciate that. I appreciate your feedback on the presentation.

 

Ash Roy

You're welcome.

 

Kevin Rogers

That was an amazing conference. Hats off to James for putting it on. And I don't know if you went surfing, but I went surfing twice that week, which at 45 is something I'd never done. And I was only sad towards the end of last week when the scabs on my knee began to fade because that was like my last physical connection to that beautiful Pacific water. So it was just a great time.

 

Ash Roy

It was an amazing conference, wasn't it? And for the listeners, the James that Kevin is referring to is James Shramko, who's a common friend of ours.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah. Good man. Yes. It was actually John Carleton who prodded Dan Kennedy into dinner.

 

Ash Roy

That's right.

 

Kevin Rogers

Which is I'm glad you mentioned that, because that is no easy task. If your listeners know anything about Dan Kennedy, they'll know that he is amazingly efficient with his time, does not suffer fools, and is only reachable by fax machines, if you can imagine. And so, literally, John prodded him via fax into agreeing to that dinner. And it was a fabulous time, a real treat.

 

Ash Roy

Yes, I remember you saying it was a series of faxes that were sent back and forth and that just cracked the audience up. That was one of the icebreakers you used, I think.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah. Sometimes the truth is the funniest thing.

 

Ash Roy

So truth. Okay. So, Kevin, you're an expert in copywriting, and you have a very unique ability to combine your other talent, which is comedy, with copywriting. And you delivered a fantastic talk at the Superfast Business Live Ten conference. Let's start by talking about what we mean by the word copywriting.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah, sure. So copywriting, it actually jumps a few industries, but when we talk about it in regards to our business, which is marketing, selling primarily online, but certainly offline as well, we mean the copy, the text that goes into an advertisement. So a copy writer is somebody charged with making any piece of written material get results. It might be an opt in for somebody to join a list, or it very often is the sale, or it very often is a series of events that lead to the sale. So copywriter is probably the most significant form of writing in that it is immediately measurable on dollars. Important distinction, Ash, is what's the difference between the way we market and the way big corporations market what we call image advertising, Madison Avenue stuff. So Coca Cola, for instance, doesn't need to write a take out a one page ad in a magazine and convince the reader to go buy a soda at the end of it because people have already experienced their soda. They just need to make their product continuously relevant in the world and remind.

 

Ash Roy

The reader or remind the audience of the product.

 

Kevin Rogers

That's it. Yeah, just remind them that Cokes are good. They're fun to have every once in a while. Maybe I'll grab one on the way to work. Or, hey, look, Coke is doing this thing. Coke cares about the holidays. Look at these cool polar bears. Just staying relevant, staying in the public eye, and then making sure their product quality is good and very accessible. Right. So what we call direct response copywriting is what I do. That means that we directly want our reader or viewer, if it's video, to respond to the ad. So think about those infomercials you see on TV late at night. Why is it sometimes you cannot look away from those ads? I actually have a 45 year old male who is very bald by the way I shaved my head, and I was very compelled to buy a new shampoo conditioner called Wen at two in the morning just the other night because I couldn't resist the infomercial. It was so well done. I seriously almost ordered this thing just to see what it felt like.

 

Ash Roy

Well, you've almost convinced me, Kevin. And I'm bald, too.

 

Kevin Rogers

My wife accuses me all the time of sleep ordering stuff. I play a game called what came in the Mail Today? I totally forget ordering stuff and just like, hey, what's in this box? I wonder? So, direct response is an ad written to really engage the reader, inform the reader, sometimes even entertain, and ultimately get them to take action at the end of it.

 

Ash Roy

Kevin, I have to share a couple of points here because they're so relevant. First one is, I was walking down the street the other day and I saw one of the best bits of copywriting, a scene on the back of a truck. It said, Blind man driving. Now, it turns out that the guy who owns the truck has a business that installs blinds on people's windows. I was just like, wow. So I took a photo of that thing and I uploaded the image to Facebook. A couple of months later, we needed to get our blinds replaced. And I actually pulled up that photo from my Facebook account, got the phone number, which was just under the words blind man driving, and called the guy up. So that's the power of good copywriting, isn't it?

 

Kevin Rogers

It sure is. That's a great example of not taking yourself too seriously, having a little fun if you could get somebody. As my friend John Carlton says, a copywriter's job is to be the thing your prospect will encounter that day that wakes them out of their zombie state.

 

Ash Roy

Beautifully put.

Kevin Rogers

And so there you are in traffic, just really wanting to get through it, get to your destination, and all of a sudden you see something so clever and amusing that it inspires you to take out your phone, snap a picture, and just a couple of days later, that turns into money for that clever blind company salesman. So that's bravo, man.

 

Ash Roy

That's just an amazing piece of copywriting. The other point I wanted to make was in my interview with Chris Garrett just a few days ago, coca Cola came up in the conversation, and Chris was saying something really interesting about how Coca Cola comes from a background of the whole Mad Men era, where it was very top down advertising and they used a lot of above the line kind of advertising. If they don't change their style of advertising, they have the risk of becoming irrelevant because people no longer want to be marketed to. People want to be part of a conversation which happens between the buyer and the seller. And copywriting is such a critical part of that because copywriting can invite the buyer into a conversation like nothing else can.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah, good point. Yeah, I'd say that's an interesting observation. I'll never say too big to fail. You know, there are certain brands that feel that way. But I will say this. If you look at things like candy bars, if you go into any health food store or any Whole Foods or something, you'll see a whole rack of designer candy and specialty candies. And if you look at the way that those smaller companies market themselves, you do feel like you're a part of something when you purchase one of those bars compared to, say, a Hershey bar. So I think it is very relevant. This is what I call the unfair advantage of the small business owner. Ash this is what I love about the industry. We're in direct response marketing is that because we are typically, as entrepreneurs, the only filter between how our message reaches the audience, we get to say and do whatever we want in a way that inspires attention. Right. So, for instance, let's just take your example of the blind man driving, right, and guessing that's a small business owner. It is. And so if that was a big corporation, they would have a team of lawyers and a board, and somebody would come up with this great idea and say, hey, what if we wrote Blind man driving on our vans? Wouldn't that be clever? Well, then there'd be 20 meetings around it. And then they'd survey, they'd hold a focus group, and somebody would mention that that could possibly be offensive to blind people, even though blind people probably shouldn't be in traffic driving to read it, or how would they read it? And then they discussed, should we put it in Braille in case then they could be offended that it wasn't in Braille. And by the time they were done dissecting every possible bad thing that could happen from that decision, that nobody would find it clever at all anymore and it would die.

 

Ash Roy

I couldn't agree more. Kevin, I've worked in the corporate world for 15 to 20 years, and I can totally validate what you're saying. They would have 20 meetings about it, the legal guides would have something to say, there would be all sorts of risk assessments, and by the time they're done with it, they've just torn the damn idea to shreds and it's all over.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah. And who cares anymore? Just move on to the next thing that we're going to slowly suck the life out of.

 

Ash Roy

Exactly. And back to automaton land.

 

Kevin Rogers

That's right. Yeah. It's like that movie Wally, where everybody goes to that planet where they just sit in those carts and stare at a screen and fly around all day and get fat. Right?

Ash Roy

Right. Exactly.

 

Kevin Rogers

So the unfair advantage is that we get to decide how to communicate. And while on one hand that can feel like a daunting task to do our own copywriting and come up with our own creative, oftentimes all it takes is being sincere telling a good story, sharing a little bit about yourself and your struggle. That is the key to bonding is to share your struggle, your journey and a lot of stuff that big corporations just would never let through because they'd be so afraid of any legal or social ramifications or even just to let down their guard enough to say hey, guess what? We're human too.

 

Ash Roy

Great discussion, Kevin. In fact, we've touched on a second point. Why should business owners seek copywriting as a critical business tool? You've said it is a way in which to engage the reader and give you this unfair advantage which large corporations don't have the luxury of because they have so much red tape. Are there any other strong reasons why a business owner should look at copywriting as a business tool? As a critical business tool?

 

Kevin Rogers

Oh, yeah, so many. I mean, the most obvious one is that it leads to the sale. For instance. There's a major obsession with traffic in our industry. And rightly so, because it's always changing the rules on how you can get traffic and how you can run ads. So it's always a hot topic. However, the fastest way to increase your profit is to convert more effectively the traffic you have now. And that's the copywriting. Right? And so a lot of people, rather than test what they've got or seek help from colleagues or professionals to improve their copy and their conversions, they stay very focused on getting new and more and bigger traffic. And it's a quick way to lose a lot of money.

 

Ash Roy

Yeah, it's a great point. I would rather have 100 visitors to my website with a 50% conversion rate than a thousand visitors to my website with a 1% conversion rate.

 

Kevin Rogers

That's the truth, right? Exactly. And there's the countless stories out there of small business owners, entrepreneurs making incredible amounts of money with lists of 1000 people, 2000 people even less. It really is about engagement. That's another reason to focus on copy. And the other reason is something I also touched on a little bit is that it can be very hard to tell your own story. Even copywriters will tell you ash that they're their own worst clients. It's always the most difficult to write about you and your own products. We all get very myopic because we live in it every day. And when you bring in a fresh pair of eyes that you can trust to give new perspectives and come up with new creatives, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

 

Ash Roy

That is such a good point, Kevin. I actually hadn't thought of that. But you're absolutely right. We do get myopic. We have a lot of noise in our heads about how we see our own product. We have a lot of assumptions that we think that the rest of the world can see but actually can't. And this is where having an independent copywriter helps immensely. I believe that you have a website where you actually have a fantastic community where people can learn copywriting and collaborate with each other. Is that right?

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah, that's right. It's sort of my dream come true. It's called copychief.

 

Ash Roy

Copychief.com.

 

Kevin Rogers

That's right, yeah. Copychief.com. And my dream was to create a community where we could solve this very problem because I've been fortunate to have some success in my career as a freelance copywriter, and as a result, my dance card would stay full. My clients would constantly ask me who I could recommend if I was not available. I had a very small list of writers that I first of all knew, even of second, felt I knew them in their work well enough to give them my endorsement and recommend them. And then on the other hand, I had many copywriters who would love to have some more success themselves, find more clients, maybe just get their first client. And they were coming to me asking for advice and coaching and apprenticeships. I'm a person who really likes to help when I can, and I certainly remember what it was like to be starting out in this business and having no idea what it turned to find success. So I thought, problem is, all these people need each other and nobody knows how to find each other, right? If you go on Facebook or if you go to some free forums, you'll quickly be frightened to death at sort of the language and the posturing of a lot of quote unquote copywriters. It seems like the loudest people in the business are also the most fresh. And those people spend a lot of time, oddly enough, ash they have many hours in their day to do nothing else than to criticize and bully and argue. That bummed me out to think that a business owner who really needed the help of a good copywriter would only see that as representing what a copywriter is and how they think and behave. So I said I'm going to create a community where only all these great copywriters who have big hearts and love to help and are very passionate about their work can come and hang out and business owners can come and post up copy just for review and get good feedback and get lots of help in the community and the forums. And to me, that was the ultimate way to vet a copywriter who you may want to hire is to see them show off for you a little bit, be helpful. You get to go look at some of their other postings. What if we all lived in the same neighborhood, right? You'd know, where all the copywriters hung out? And then you'd go over to that section of town and kind of mingle with those people and say, hey, who do I resonate with the most with? I know where this guy lives. I know what he's like. Let me hire this guy, rather than just take it a stab in the dark. That's essentially what Copy Chief does. It's become a really active marketplace. And I'm really excited that so many quality people, many of which who I'd never heard of even before I opened Copy Chief, come in and really take it over the place in a very positive way.

 

Ash Roy

Cool. Well, you have a very powerful why for establishing Copychief.com, Kevin, and I think you've just got yourself a new member.

 

Kevin Rogers

You'll love it. You will absolutely love it. You'd be the perfect addition. And it's cool as the business owners help each other out as well. Not to make this into an infomercial itself, act now and you'll also receive but I do want to mention that another great part of it is that every month I do a new training. And so that sort of puts everybody on the same page as far as the language we're speaking. So if you feel like you don't know anything about Copy, you have no idea where to go to get better at it. It's also a great place to do just that.

 

Ash Roy

Cool. Sounds really good. I'm going to check it out. Okay, let's move on to the next point, which is how Copywriting applies to businesses that are looking to leverage the online channel. Now, I already have some ideas around this. If I can just imagine that blind man driving sign, you literally take a photo of that truck and stick it on Facebook. There you go. An opportunity right there to leverage the online channel. Copywriting allows small businesses to take advantage of the level playing field that the Internet offers and approach the mass market through very good quality copywriting that is unfettered by all the crappy red tape that exists in the large corporations.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah, well, it's interesting. There's obviously limitations, right. You're talking about running an ad campaign on Facebook or just any use of social media.

 

Ash Roy

I'm saying just any use. It was just a general throwaway idea. But I agree that Facebook has these restrictions where your print can't be more than 20% of the size of the photo.

 

Kevin Rogers

Right. So there are those limitations to work around as an outlet, as a tried building tool. It's incredibly powerful. And what's an interesting thing to me, Ash, about Facebook is that I always find the smallest intricacy can be the difference between a post that sort of goes viral within your own little universe there meaning it gets some shares, it gets a bunch of comments and likes or one that just gets completely ignored. Right. And one of those things is that if it at all looks like you're trying to manipulate the medium, people will just gladly ignore you. Right. And so one of the counterintuitive things that I found about social media is that my longer posts tend to get the most attention. People would think, well, it's built for short attention spans and people want to click and move on to the next thing. But if you're very strategic about how you phrase those first couple of paragraphs and draw people into a personal story, I think you'd be amazed at how much you can get read. And the longer people read, the more engaged they are and the deeper connection you're making. Yeah. It's an amazing tool that I think everybody's still figuring out within the guidelines and just within their own personal relationship with it.

 

Ash Roy

Yes. I think that length of copy doesn't matter as long as it's keeping the reader engaged.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah. Another way, the phrase that is, as long as it needs to be to make the sale, that's it.

 

Ash Roy

That's it.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah. And that's exactly what it is. I mean, people will say, who would read all that? And I've said it myself. You'll notice the times you're thinking that you're probably not very engaged in the topic that you're seeing the sales letter about. Right. So for me, that's like finance. It's just not my thing. My brain doesn't work well with finance and numbers. Some of the best copywriting the planet is financial copywriting, but they have some of the greatest attention spans. But I scroll through some of those sales letters that I just think, my Lord, I couldn't imagine reading all this. But believe me, it does get read. And it all really relates to the level of pain of your reader. Think about the problem you're solving for them and put yourself in their shoes and say, gosh, how many questions would I have around this if this were my problem? That adds up to a lot of words very quickly.

 

Ash Roy

Absolutely. A hungry audience. Right?

 

Kevin Rogers

That's exactly right. Right. And it's a very important thing in your life, really. Nothing else is taking up your mind when you've got that going on. Same with divorce. Any kind of illness, any news from the doctor is going to get people reading a lot, a lot of copy. And so, yeah, you got to think about that. A lot of us live in the middle where maybe not solving a life or death issue for people, but we're really trying to help them over a long existing hurdle. I think of weight loss as a common one. Most people who buy weight loss products are not buying their first weight loss product. So then you have to start thinking about positioning yourself against other products, things they may have tried and failed with. Right. Think about the level of severity of the problem you're solving for your prospect and how saturated is the market, how likely is it that they've tried and potentially failed with similar products? Because you need to make sure they understand that yours is different and unique. And again, that's one of those things that it's easy to forget when it's our product and we're very close to it. What makes it unique and what makes it so interesting and not like everything else.

 

Ash Roy

And that's where the copywriting talent comes in. Understanding your audience, being a word artist, coming up with exactly how to phrase and frame the proposition really cuts through to the pain point and solves the customer's problem.

 

Kevin Rogers

Yeah, it does. But I don't want people to feel intimidated that they have to be a wordsmith or even enjoy writing. Because the truth is there's a great phrase in our business, the way I say clarity trumps persuasion. And very often just making sure you're clear about the solution you're offering and why it's different and better for your best prospects is enough to make the sale.

 

Ash Roy

Great insight. Thank you for that. I've actually written that down. Clarity trump's persuasion. That actually is a great segue into the next point, which is what are the main objections people have about getting started with copywriting and how can they overcome them in your experience?

 

Kevin Rogers

Getting started? Yeah, so if it's for themselves, I think they probably feel like it is complicated and that they need to know some kind of verbal wizardry. Nop, if you're familiar with that term, neuro linguistic programming comes up a lot when people are exploring what copywriting is. And again, go back to that phrase we just used, clarity trump's persuasion. Sometimes just start with the basics, be clear about your offer, then you can get into the exactly how to phrase things and stuff later. Another thing is people tend to get caught up on things like headlines. One of the first things you'll learn about copy is when you start to read about it, you'll see people saying that the headline of the ad could be responsible for up to 40 or 60% of the success of the ad. I guess that can be true in some cases. I don't know that you could put such an exact number on that. But because of that, what people will tend to do is because the headlines at the top of the page, they think, well, I better write the headline first. And that's one of the hardest things you could ever do. In fact, it's the last thing you should probably write in your ad. Because when you've written everything else, you've written the offer and you've written all your, what we call the bullets, all the little short sentences that talk about the benefits of the product. When you've done all that, oftentimes the best headline will come out of a bullet and you won't have to sit and toil over what the headline should be. But when you start with the headline before you've got the rest of the ad in front of you, it could be really daunting. And a lot of people just throw their hands up and say this is too hard.

 

Ash Roy

I see what you mean. When you have the full ad in front of you, you have that perspective and you can look at what you're trying to say holistically and then pick out the piece that drives the most clarity and simplicity in what you're trying to express and make that the headline. Is that correct?

 

Kevin Rogers

That's exactly right. Yeah.

 

Ash Roy

Okay, so just our last point. Now, what actions can a listener take to get some quick wins and just get started with Copywriting and implement some of the ideas that we've talked about in this podcast?

 

Kevin Rogers

I know the one thing that could help them the most is to you mentioned my book, the 62nd Sales Hook. It's available two ways. It's a whole $5 on Amazon if you like paperback books and to hold them in your hand. I prefer that. What I'd like even better is if you went and downloaded it for free at 62 ndsales hook cool. And read the PDF because it will give you immediate access to it and it'll put you on my list so that I can offer you even more cool stuff. And over at the blog at Copy Chief, I'm constantly updating new stuff. You know what I love to do, Ash? I love to teach people to see what I call the sales influencers all around them every day. Anybody that's in marketing or is an entrepreneur really loves that kind of stuff. I find that the most inspiring. There's so many things we react to all around us all the time that we don't even really realize we're responding to. And once we start to tap into that almost like secret language going on all around us, it makes it much easier to sell our products without feeling creepy or overbearing. And so inside the 62nd Sales Hook, you'll find I spent my 20s as a stand up comedian touring the United States and telling jokes and nightclubs for a living. And I used that experience and took a joke formula that anybody who reads the book will quickly recognize cool. And turned it by changing just the last part of it into a sales hook that's just four sentences long that anybody can use to quickly explain who they are, what they've got, and why somebody should want it in about 60 seconds or less.

 

Ash Roy

Okay, so to get this $5 book for free, they need to just go to 60 secondsaleshook.com. Is that right?

 

Kevin Rogers

That's it. Yes.

 

Ash Roy

Awesome. That brings us to the end of our interview. Kevin, thank you very much for being on the podcast.

 

Kevin Rogers

It was my pleasure, ash, it was great meeting you. And I love what you're doing with this podcast. I know it's going to be a huge success for you, so thanks for doing it.