Outsell The Competition Without Using The Phone: Tony Rush’s Email Conversion Formula

Hey, folks, this is Dave Wood, and I'm talking to you actually from San Jose in Costa Rica. It's been actually really interesting last week. Hope everybody here had a Merry Christmas, by the way. My wife and I had a fantastic Christmas. We've actually had a fantastic month.

We just got to travel down to Florida and get a mastermind with, honestly, some of the most badass people I've ever met in my life. I just want to be honest with you guys. I've worked with a lot of people over the years, and one thing that I've learned is that like attracts like. You know, when you've got to go to heart and you really want what's best for people, and what you're there for is to serve them, what you're there is to help them get what they want, you attract the same kind of people around you. And what I thought was different, and we could have, you know, I'm going to bring Tony out here in a second.

We could have him confirm. We could have other people on the webinar talk about it, was the synergy that I felt when we got around Empower Network leaders, the respect that I felt for each other. It's something that, you know, I've never seen. Not in the same way, not in the same level. And what we have here, guys, it's really, really, really, really unique.

I want to just start off with a couple of thoughts for everybody here on the webinar, and then we're going to get into the subject of what we're really talking about today. Guys, you know, as we're recording this webinar, and of course you might be seeing the recording if you're watching the 15-day formula, you guys who are on the webinar, you're here live. As we're recording this, it's the end of 2012, and we're headed into 2013. We're headed into the new year.

We have an event coming up, you know, in Austin, Texas. And of course, if you're seeing this later, just get to our next event. But we really have a chance to change your destinies in 2013. What we've done over the last year is just a start. It's just a beginning.

It's not an end. Every month we have people's incomes that are just increasing across the board. You know what I mean? And what I've seen happen in people's lives within Empower as an affiliate opportunity has been amazing, just an affiliate opportunity. What I've seen happen from people taking these strategies and applying them to all kinds of businesses has been amazing.

And I just wanted to say, for all of you who have contributed to our community, for all of you who have been a part of the vision of what we've done, I really appreciate you guys, and I'm just looking forward to taking this to a new level. Now, what we're going to talk about today, we were going to go on some paid traffic strategies for a while, and then we were going to get to this, and I decided that it's important to get to this now. And here's why. If you look at what we've taught over the last six webinars, what we've taught you how to do is, number one, be really clear and think through how to do what you're doing. We taught you that webinar number one.

Webinars two and three, we taught you how to get traffic through blogging. Webinar four, we taught you how to get more traffic through blogging. So we've been talking about traffic. Webinar five and six, Shakir came on, he showed you how to get leads through solo ads. Now, those solo ad webinars, they're significantly better than the ones that we did last year, and I'll have Tony come out here in a second and talk about solo ads.

And so you guys have literally got all the lead generation techniques that you need to at least get started. We're going to get into some more later, but here's where a gap can come in for you. Because after you start getting leads, even in large numbers, there's good ways to work your leads, there's bad ways to work your leads. There's good follow-up, there's bad follow-up. All right?

There's people who convert extraordinarily well, and people who get an eighth of the results converting the same traffic, right? Now, I've always got extraordinary conversions for my traffic, and I've met a few people in my life that have been able to replicate similar results. Tony's one of them. Dave Sharp's one of them. You know, Rob Ford's one of them.

You know, where they take the leads that they've got, and they convert an extraordinary amount of the leads into paid sign-ups. And that's the next key to really take your business to the next level. So, if you look back over what we've taught you over the last six weeks, guys, you're going to get some sign-ups anyways just doing that stuff. But when you apply what we're going to teach you this week, and we'll probably continue it into the next week with some other people, probably bring out Rashkin, probably bring out some other people that are just extraordinary at conversions, when you really apply this stuff, this is the magic.

Because the magic is in the follow-up. Now, I'm not talking about phone follow-up. I'm going to encourage you guys to put down the phone and pick up the paychecks, actually, because today the email is just dramatically more effective. There's a million more effective ways to follow up than the phone today. But I'm going to encourage you to take this information and immediately apply it.

And I want you to realize something. The man you're about to listen to here, okay, for this webinar, is not only just one of our, he's one of our top earners. He might even be, he's like, I think he's right behind Lawrence, actually, as far as all-time total earnings. And he's done it entirely by taking the money from the phone. He's done it by taking these strategies and applying them last year.

He's extraordinary at conversions. He's an extraordinary trainer. Every training he's ever done, we've had an unbelievable amount of compliments. And the best thing is he's building a business while he's having a life at the same time. So what I want to encourage you guys to do is just pull out your, you know, pens, right?

Pull out your, pull out a piece of paper, okay? And just get ready to take some information that has been some of the most transformational stuff that I've ever learned. And apply it towards making money in your business. So without any further ado, Tony, man, I just, I appreciate you, brother. It was so fun hanging out with you and Jessica the other week and flying you guys out and doing our best to treat you first class.

And I just want to tell you, man, that you're just a rock star and I just love working with you, man. And I just want to help you make millions of dollars a year for the rest of your life. It's really my only goal. Well, while you're not picking up the phone, I don't want you to have to pick up the phone to do that. I want you to do it without the phone.

But in any case, I appreciate you, brother. I think you're awesome. And without any further ado, man. Hey, man. Thank you.

I appreciate the kind words. And it was great hanging out with you and Ashley down in Tampa a couple weeks ago. Fantastic. And we're just thrilled to be here. We'll have time, other times for me to share part of the story.

But for those who don't know my story, I'll tell you what, David Wood and David Sharp came along at a time when I needed a change. And I always grin a little bit when David says, put down the phone and pick up the paycheck because, man, I was grinding. And in part, the information we're going to cover tonight was a big, big, big change. And of course, I couldn't have done it unless I was in an environment with other people and a pay plan that would reward the kind of activity that we're going to talk about on this call, this webinar tonight. So, David, thank you, man.

I appreciate the opportunity to share a couple of ideas tonight. Right on. Very cool. All right. We're going to jump into it because we've got a lot of ground to cover.

So, here's what you're going to get in this module. And by the way, congratulations on being a 15K member. You're a badass. So, here's part of what you're going to get. Number one, how to create cash on demand by sending emails.

Subject lines that make your emails immune to the delete key. We're going to talk about that. How to structure your email so that you don't make the one killer mistake that most people make. How to deliberately use hot buttons to capture your prospect's attention. How to steal Hollywood's best stories to make money.

And what Stephen King and James Patterson know about making money that's hiding right under your nose. Does that sound exciting? I had fun writing this slide actually. It does sound exciting. But before we get into it, stop for just a second.

I want you to stop for just a moment right now and sort of step outside yourself. We just read through some bullet points. Very first slide, right? Do I have your attention? That's the question, right?

If this were an email that I'd sent you, could you delete it right now? You know, after reading those bullet points off, or wouldn't you have to keep going? And can you really say why that is? Even now, you probably can't quite remember what I said on that first slide. You just know that something grabbed you by the brain and made you say, huh, now that's what I want to know.

And this is the guy who can show me how to do it. Did you feel like when I was reading through those bullet points of what you're going to get in this module, did you feel like it was just you and I just having a conversation, that I was getting ready to reveal the secrets of the universe? Right? And if you do feel that way, then that's good because that was my intention. And now it means that you've got this itch, right?

An itch that needs to be scratched. And that itch was created by using some really simple and completely learnable techniques that I used on that first slide. I'm using this as an example. This is how you want your emails to make your prospects feel. Okay.

Can you see the difference between how you might feel if I'd started this module tonight like this? I mean, that's boring, right? So the first slide is, hey, here's what you're going to get out of this module. And I ran off about seven or eight different things in very hypnotic language with lots of colors. But what if I had started the module tonight like this, where you don't have your pencil out looking at this thing, right?

Or what about this? Another boring slide, right? Make more money marketing with email. Tony Rush, very boring.

This would have been better. This would have been a good slide to start with, right? How to give yourself a big raise with email, the simplest and most powerful training you've ever gotten on email marketing. Tony Rush, one of the better looking people in the 15K formula curriculum, faculty, whatever. Okay.

So my point is that first slide is all about grabbing people's attention. And what we want to do in this module is we want to show you how you can do the same thing with email. And by the way, that first slide, if you want to just look at it real quick, there was a lot of stuff that happened in that first slide. It was very fast. Don't expect you to get it all at a glance.

We're going to go over it, but there's some hypnotic language. There's bullet points. There's some pop culture. There's some emotion in there, fear. We had some color.

So we're going to talk about how you can encapsulate all this kind of stuff, but do it in emails. Like I'm doing it tonight in a webinar, and I wanted to grab your attention very quickly, right out of the gate, and kind of set the table for a powerful conversation. And that's what we've done. And I want to show you how to do that with emails. Okay.

So email marketing is basically creating cash on demand. My buddy Shakir has done two, three fantastic modules. Hopefully you guys have attended those, and certainly they're in the 15K formula already. I like what he talks about, vending machine money, the ability to just execute a simple process and get money. Email marketing is very much like that.

I like his phrase vending machine money. The beautiful thing about email marketing is it's fun. There's nothing more fun than sitting down, writing an email, pushing a button, and then just seeing sales come in. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. And you're going to have the tools to do that with.

At the end of this module, you're going to have a whole new perspective on what it takes to create that kind of experience. And you're going to actually know exactly what to do, ABC one, two, three, to sit down tonight or tomorrow morning and actually craft your very first email with the method and the technology that we're talking about here, push a button and actually see a sale come in because you did what we're covering in this module. So it's a lot of fun. It's a beautiful thing to be able to, and this pay plan too, by the way, it's a fantastic thing to say, you know, I've got an anniversary coming up in a couple of weeks.

Maybe I'll just sit down here and write up an email and see if I can't pull an extra couple thousand dollars off the money tree. It's a beautiful thing. It's a lot of fun. It's simple. Okay.

You do not have to be a Pulitzer prize winning writer. It does not matter at all. If you've got an A in English, you know what? It probably won't really even help you. I was talking to David Sharp in Tampa.

I was sitting across his kitchen counter, Kevin Connect and I were sitting there doing something. We were talking about Stephen King, which I won't mention Stephen King again in a few minutes, but we were talking and I said something about adverbs as a part of language. And Sharp just tickles me to death because the guy's made millions of dollars. And he looked at me across the counter and he said, you know what, dude, I write copy for a living. And I'm not too sure I could tell you what an adverb is, which I thought was hilarious.

So if you don't know an adjective from an adverb, you're going to be totally safe here. Okay. If you do know what the difference is, that's fine too. But you do not have to be a wordsmith to be able to do this, right?

The skill it takes to make money with email marketing is not the same skill it takes to get an A in Mrs. Woodham's 12th grade English class on the term paper or something. So anybody can do this.

Anybody, literally, if you can talk, you can write, because that's part of what we're going to cover tonight, how to do that. And email is extremely, extremely powerful. So one of the things that I like most about email is it's personal. There's a lot of talk nowadays about social media, which is powerful. You know, Facebook, Twitter, all kinds of things out there.

Tumblr, Instagram, you name it. There's tons of Pinterest, tons of different social media outlets out there. But here's the thing about it. Email is the most intimate marketing medium. And I'll give you an example.

You take Facebook for just a moment. Facebook gets a lot of press, you know, and Facebook is a place where a lot of people sort of pay lip service to being authentic and being themselves and being out there, just laying it on the bottom line and hanging it out there. But the thing about it is it's not really a personal or intimate place. Like if you've got something going on in your life and you want real solutions, chances are you're probably talking to your friends and family about it in an email. Now you may be having phone conversations too, but there's also some things I've had conversations in my life that I couldn't actually have on the phone with someone.

It was just too personal. It was almost too sensitive of an issue. And it was much easier for me and the other person to have the conversation over email. So email is a very personal thing. And when you've got the ability to actually drop a message in somebody's inbox, let me tell you something.

That's like having an ATM machine. I would rather have one email address than have 10 people go to my Facebook page and click the like button, because if I've got somebody's email address and I've got their permission to come to their inbox anytime I want to and share something of value, then that to me is money in the bank. So I love email. Now, laying out this strategy, we're going to kind of talk around three points tonight, and I've kind of got to lay it out as a triangle.

We're going to cover the structure of writing powerful emails. There's a few nuts and bolts things, I think you'll like that for your note taking. And then there's this third thing that we're going to talk about, finding your voice. It's kind of a slippery thing to talk about, but I think we've got a couple of ideas around this concept of finding your voice.

It'll kind of clarify. So if that looks a little fuzzy to you right now, don't worry about it. If you don't quite understand what I mean, I'm going to define what I mean by your voice in a few minutes. But first off, let's get into the structure.

So basic email, the nice thing about emails, there's not a lot of moving parts. It's just the ability to fire out a message. So the basic structure is you want a captivating and compelling subject line. You've got an impactful and personality-driven email body. I'm going to break these down, talk about them individually. Usually that body of that message is going to have some bullet points, some attention getters.

You'll have some colors, maybe some graphics, things to just make it more readable. And the most important thing about the email that you're sending out is a simple and clear call to action. And this is one of the things that I mentioned on the first slide about the mistake that a lot of people make, and we'll touch on that because it's about the all-important call to action part. So let's look at subject lines. One of my favorite things to talk about when it comes to email marketing is subject lines, because let me kind of set the table this way.

So I'm 42 this year. So some of you guys on the line are my age or older, and certainly direct mail, the kind that shows up in the mailbox down at the end of your driveway, it's still around. But some of you may remember, like I do, what it was like before there was an internet, and there was a lot of this, you know, home business, network marketing, affiliate, this kind of stuff was taking place in the mailbox. And, you know, if you go tomorrow, well, when I point this out to you, if you have never noticed that, you'll notice it tomorrow when you go to the mailbox. You pull out a letter from some type of a marketer, and you'll notice that it's not just a plain white number 10 envelope. There's always some writing on the envelope, and the purpose of the writing on the envelope is to do one thing: to get you to open the envelope.

It's not to sell you anything. It's not to tell you about the product or service or the opportunity. It's none of that. The only purpose of the writing on the outside of a direct mail piece is to get you to open the envelope, because in 21st century society today, we sort our mail over the trash can. True or false.

It's true, right? I did. I went to the mailbox today, pulled out a handful of mail, walked back to the kitchen, stood over the garbage can: drop, drop, drop, keep, drop, drop, right? That's how we do it. Okay, well the digital version of that is the subject line.

The subject line is the digital version of that. The fact is today, people look at their inbox with one finger on the delete key. It's why you have to have a captivating subject line. You know, if you have a boring subject line that just kind of, it's like a little cockroach behind the refrigerator, you know, it's just kind of laying there on its back and kicking its little feet in the air, and it's just laying there. Nobody's ever going to open it.

You're going to be a victim of the delete key, and it's a fact, and you can back up what I'm saying by looking at your own experience. By the way, a little sidebar, I find that people are more aggressive about deleting emails on Monday mornings than any weekday morning, but especially Monday mornings, because they've been busy over the weekend. They tend to let things pile up sometimes. So, if you're sending it, for instance, I don't send a lot of email on Monday morning because I want to dodge that whole aggressive delete key. But it doesn't matter what time of day or what day you mail, you've got to have a compelling subject line. Otherwise it's just like standing over the kitchen garbage can, right?

This will be me tomorrow morning, and we're talking about regular people here. It's not like there's a group of marketers and then they're on a whole separate planet from a group of prospects. No, the rules apply to us too. We'll do it ourselves tomorrow morning. When you wake up, you'll open your Gmail or your Outlook or whatever, and boom, here's 50 messages.

And you're going to put your finger on the delete key, and you're only going to keep the stuff that you absolutely know you want, like maybe an update from your insurance company, maybe a bank statement or something like that. But the only other stuff you're going to keep is stuff from someone whose name you recognize. Okay. And that goes to how often you email, which we're going to touch on tonight too. But also what does that subject line say?

What does the subject line say? Because if you can't grab their attention there, it doesn't matter how incredible your email is. It doesn't matter how well crafted it is. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter how many of the other things that I'm going to show you about the body of the email, doesn't matter if you do them all perfectly. If your subject line sucks, the prospect will never see it. Okay. So the subject line has one job, just like that envelope copy. It's to get them to open the email.

That's it. And if it does that, it's a good subject line. So let's talk about some captivating subject lines. I'm going to give you guys some samples here. If you want to jot these down, these are all samples that I have used myself.

Also, one of the things that we do here too, is we encourage you to build a swipe file. I'll take a quick sidebar to mention this because I don't have a slide about it. One of the cool things that you can do is subscribe to marketers who are very successful at whatever they do, not so that you can buy what they're selling, but so that you can observe them, so that you can watch them. So all the subject lines and the email bodies that I'm going to show you tonight are things that I've used personally in my business to get fantastic results.

But at the same time, I'm a big fan of observing what other people do. I read everything David Sharpe sends out, David Wood. Obviously I read stuff from Aaron Rashkin, Lawrence Tam, Chris Doherty, Tracy Walker. The list goes on and on.

So I like to pay attention to what very successful marketers are doing. So just a tip, building a swipe file, which is basically nothing but just a little text file on your computer of subject lines and little bits of language that you'll pick up that you think, that's a great bit of language, I can use that down the road when I'm writing an email. Okay. So what is a captivating subject line?

There's different ones. I'm going to give you a sample tonight of a couple of categories. The first one that came to mind for me because it is so powerful is emotion. Anytime you can write a subject line that includes emotion, you're probably going to grab the prospect by the throat: different kinds of emotion, obviously anger, curiosity, surprise and humor. So here's a couple of examples.

I'm just going to run through them real quick, because I know you guys are probably going to take a couple of notes here, but you're going to be able to come back and get this stuff too. "This ticks me off, rant enclosed." So this is a combination of anger and curiosity, right? What's Tony mad about?

What's ticked Tony off? Let me open this up and find out. "I hate when this happens." And then there's an embedded command there called open up, tells the prospect to open the email. "This will be the funniest story you hear today."

Matter of fact, I sent an email out, the time of this recording, I sent an email out this week that said, "This is the weirdest video you will see this week." It got a great open rate. "You might as well just set fire to your bank account." And again, this is the sale that we're making here.

We're not trying to sell people on Empower Network. We're not selling them on $25 basic packages. None of that. All we're doing is selling them on: keep this email.

Don't delete this one. Open it up. "Somebody just asked me a silly question." That's a great one from Chris Campbell. Here's one, a little long, but really effective.

"Then he looked at me and said, I'd rather you just punch me in the face." And obviously that is a pull quote from a larger story. And if you don't have that story, then you think of some equivalent story in your life where somebody said something that just slapped you in the face, and you take this really impactful statement and make a subject line out of it, because when the prospect gets it, obviously the curiosity is there. There's apparently some anger.

There's certainly some surprise. You grab the prospect's attention. What is this story? What could possibly this guy be talking about that says, "I'd rather you just punch me in the face"? So anything around emotion is generally going to be a subject line that'll grab somebody's attention pretty quickly.

Content indicators. We do these a lot at Empower Network, because we have some regular calls that are of immense value to our list. A content indicator basically is an announcement of sorts. It actually goes ahead and tells the prospect what's in the email.

So you actually lose a little bit of the surprise element. This is not a curiosity approach, but instead you're swapping out the curiosity part in exchange for giving them a direct clue about what they're going to get if they just hang on to this email and open it up. So examples: "On Mondays" — say Monday night for our regular Empower call, live at 9 p.m., "How to get more leads." It just tells them right up front this is about an event that's taking place today at nine o'clock.

We did our masters retreat in Costa Rica and I shot a video on my balcony on the last day that we were there. And so that's what I sent out. This is the subject line: "Video." Video's huge. Anytime you shoot a YouTube video, you need to repurpose that. Don't just allow it to sit out there on Facebook or on YouTube.

Actually send out an email about it, make a blog post out of it. Do all the stuff we show you how to do, but make sure this is in your arsenal as well. Any subject line that says "video," you're probably automatically going to get a pretty good size bump out of the response rate just because you've got the word video in all caps in your subject line. Same thing for "PIC," back in the early 2000s.

Before bandwidth got as good as it is now, before YouTube was really high quality, we didn't do a lot of video marketing. So the big thing then was PIC, B-I-C. You make an abbreviation that says, hey, there's a picture in this email I want to show you. And the beautiful thing is you can embed the picture right into the body of the email, so they don't have to open an attachment or anything.

They can just open it up, and boom, there's a picture of you and your office, or you at the beach, or a screenshot of some commissions that came in, screenshot of your inbox, whatever. Pics are great. At the time of this recording, we've got a new coaching thing, and that's the first subject line in my autoresponder, so when people fill out the form to learn more information about Empower Network, the very first email that goes out is "Your login, RE: your login instructions," and I want to say it's like 40 or 41% open that right away, so pretty cool. So those are content indicators, and I'm not deliberately going slow, but I want to give you guys enough time to take a couple of notes here. I like this one, Relevance is another great one. There's a guy named Matt Basak over in Marietta, Georgia, he's the first one I ever saw do this. He would deliberately wait until about 10 or 11 o'clock at night on the East Coast, and he would send a note that says, "You still up?" With a question mark, which is funny because I always get the email around 10, 10:30 at night when I was making one last sweep of my inbox before calling it a day, and here's a note from Matt saying, "Are you still up?"

And I just felt like he was talking directly to me. Brilliant. So you can send that one out late at night. "Around the election time, it doesn't matter who gets elected, here's why," and again, this is an example of things like current events, pop culture, time of the day, time of the year. You can do back-to-school stuff, you can do tax time stuff. So again, anything that's going on in the world right now can potentially make a really good subject line.

"How to make the new year better than last year." "How to make the next 12 months better than the last 12 months." Anything along those lines. At the time of this recording, this is a fantastic week to send that sort of thing out.

And moving into just a few more examples for relevance, current events, and popular culture, subject lines can play off whatever's happening in the news at the time. It's still a very good week for that kind of thing.

Kevin Connect got all ticked off over one that he sent out: "Newsweek magazine's run by morons — what is this about?" Got a great open rate off of that one. "Why you should not shop at Walmart if you want to be rich" — once again, kind of taking a swipe at a brand name. In terms of relevance, these are just big popular brand names, so it's kind of fun to take a bit of a swipe at them, because it's such a big popular brand name that certainly nearly everybody either shops at Walmart or knows somebody who does, and they're going to want to know, okay, why should I stop shopping at Walmart if I want to be rich? So relevance, current events, time of day.

Lists — people love lists too. I like lists as a good subject line: top ten, top five, whatever. "Top screw-ups to avoid in home business" — and you know what, there's so many ways to screw up in a home business outside of Empower Network, you could literally make that a top twenty list if you wanted to.

Chasing friends and family, drawing circles on the back of a napkin, prospecting, buying leads, buying genealogy lists — I mean, it's easy to come up with three, four, five, six, eight, ten things that you can do to waste time and money in the home business industry. So there's a great email right there: just pick five, write a little thing about it, and then of course the punch line of your email is how all those five things are solved here at Empower Network. "Ten ways the wealthy think differently from average people" — this is actually a book by Steve Siebold. Melissa Connect, Jessica and I were having lunch up in Atlanta a while back with Kevin and Melissa, and she mentioned this book, and it's just got a fantastic title.

I don't know if it was the ten ways or what, but anyway, it just stuck in my mind as I was making this slide, because there's so many ways the wealthy do think differently. "The one thing to do to become wealthy" — this is a good, quick one, and it also implies a short email, doesn't it, because it's just one thing. "My favorite three methods for creating an avalanche of leads." "What did Donald Trump, Richard Branson, and Bill Gates have in common, other than being richer than God?" And here's the thing, I'm not saying that you have to know for sure that's true — Richard Branson and Bill Gates both dropped out of college, for instance — but it doesn't matter, you can come up with a couple of things they have in common, and the whole point is you just want the subject line to get them to open the email, and the email talks about a few commonalities of wealthy people, and then you segue over into a conversation about how they can use those same commonalities in their own lives so they can get more financial results.

The video, here's the point: pay attention to what you keep and what you throw away tomorrow morning when you go to your inbox. Just be aware, as your finger's on the delete key, what grabs your attention, and think of the subject lines you would open, and go write that. Okay, don't be afraid to experiment. You can't break this stuff. You can't screw it up. How do you know when a subject line is good? Your open rate is the best indicator, and I don't have a slide for this, but I'll tell you where to go. If you use AWeber, GetResponse has the same thing, but there's a reporting section in there. You can look under Messages, and then click Broadcast, and you can see a list of all the broadcasts that you've sent out, and over on the right-hand side you'll see a column that tells you what percentage of people, and the number of people, who opened a particular email. There are different things that affect the open rate, but as far as subject lines go, it's your best indicator.

If you have really low open rates, write better subject lines, and we will talk about bodies and click-throughs in just a minute, but if you have really low click-through rates, then it's the body of the email that needs to be tweaked. But just for this part of tonight's module, if you go in and see really low open rates, it's probably because your subject lines need to be tweaked. You need to sexy them up a little bit, spruce them up, throw some emotion in there, throw some controversy in there.

Don't be afraid to get out on a limb a little bit. Don't be afraid to be bold in your writing. Come up with creative ideas. And it's amazing how the very same, just a little tweak like that, like David Wood was mentioning in the email that he sent out tonight and what he mentioned at the top of this webinar, you know, if you can go from a 3% open rate to say a 13% open rate, you've basically multiplied your leads, your productivity by four. And it doesn't take any more time, effort, or energy to make more sales than it does to make small sales.

So if you've got a 13% or 14% open rate on an email and you've been getting 3%, well, that's huge, you know? And you'll see, by using this, you'll be able to get, depending on how big your lead list is and what quality of lead you've got, open rates of 20, 30, 40%. And if you segment your list, which we'll talk about a little bit later, you'll also be able to get much, much higher open rates as well. And we'll show you how to do that. Okay?

So that's open rates. Now, so you've got them to open your email. Let's say at this point that you've got your subject lines dialed in, man, you're working it. You've got relevant stuff. You've got timely stuff.

You've got emotion. You've got current events and all kinds of stuff. So they're opening the email. So the next piece of the puzzle is what's in the email. What are they actually going to get when they open it?

Okay. Now the body of the message — remember when I said the subject line, the only job of the subject line is to get them to open the email? Well, the job of the actual body of the message is to get them to take a single action. Okay. The email is not about presenting.

It's not about explaining. It's not about convincing. It's not about any of that stuff. It's the purpose of the email is to get them to take one very simple action, and making that action very, very attractive. So what is that action?

Well, it could be different things. It could be, hey, click my join link. It could be, click here to watch this YouTube video. It could be, click here to get your 15K formula right now. Maybe it's an email that you're sending to your team, which is another layer of marketing.

It could be, hey, I'm doing a special bonus this week for everybody who gets started in the next 24 hours. You're going to get some special bonus. Click here to get started now. And here's the thing. Whatever email you send out is about one piece of action.

You never mix this stuff up. You don't want to complicate things by sending out an email that's got a bunch of different links going in different directions. Okay.

You want to send out an email that just sells the prospect on doing one thing. Okay. So the entire body of the message, no matter what it is, is to point them in one direction. And that's this action. So what should the body consist of?

I would say, if this concept is entirely new to you, I would say stories. Stories grab people's attention at an emotional level. Tell stories every chance you can. David Wood is a master at this. If you've ever spent more than 10 minutes with David Wood, I mean, I'm barely exaggerating, if at all — if you spend more than 10 minutes with David Wood and he doesn't say, "Hey, let me tell you something that happened one time when I was in this other company," or "Hey, let me tell you what happened one time I was at this event" —

And before you know it, he's captured your attention. He's irresistibly attractive when he's telling stories. And it's not accidental. I think a lot of it is part of David's personality, because he's such a great storyteller. But at the same time, he has deliberately conditioned himself to always look for meaning in stories.

And the greatest teachers of human history have been the same way. Whether it was telling parables or Aesop's fables, the list goes on and on of people who have illustrated incredible truths and different kinds of concepts, but they've done it through a story. So even if you're sending a straight pitch, even if you're sending something like "here's why you need to get started in Empower Network right now," or "here's why you need to buy my widgets," or "here's why you need to get this new vitamin or this antioxidant" — even if it's just a straight pitch, wrap it in a story or some other type of personality-driven message. And I'm using that term deliberately, personality-driven. We're going to touch on that in a moment.

And then of course the body should also end up with the call to action. Tells the prospect exactly what it is you want them to do. Now, before I leave this slide, stories are not the only thing you can do. Sometimes I've sent stuff out — I'm thinking of one, I sent out an email whose subject line said, "Rich people suck," which got a huge open rate for me.

I just think it's funny, because obviously rich people don't suck, but it is a story, and it's also a miniature lesson on prosperity thinking. So it's sort of wrapped in a story, but from the standpoint of, like, when I was younger and broke and struggling, I believed that rich people sucked. They're just a bunch of greedy capitalist pigs who don't care about anything but the almighty dollar.

And they had no spirituality, and they're a bunch of evil, mean, nasty people. And of course I want more money, but I'm mad at these people because they do have more money, right? So it was a combination. It wasn't a pure — it was more or less, the story was a springboard to make this larger point, that if you want to become wealthy, you've got to make friends with money, and you've got to make friends with the concept that it's okay to want to be rich. And so I'm not saying that everything you send out has to be a story.

I'm saying a story is a perfect springboard into whatever else it is you want to talk about. So you may occasionally send out a little bit of training or a little bit of content. Everything doesn't have to be a pitch. Back at Thanksgiving, I just sent out a little something just to connect with my list and say, hey, I just want to tell you, I couldn't do what I do without you. And I appreciate that you're on my list and that you opened my emails and I hope that I'm a value to you.

And whether you're in America or not, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving. And it was not even content. It was just a genuine, authentic, heartfelt message of gratitude. It got a huge open rate, and I've got more responses from that than anything, and I think it probably helped my business a lot.

So, but just to keep things simple tonight, if you're ever sitting there thinking, what should I send out, and there's any question about what you should send, I would reach for the story, reach for a story before you reach for anything else. Stories get read, stories get remembered, and stories get repeated. And stories also create an emotional connection that you can't really create any other way. The old cliché is true.

Facts tell and stories sell. Okay. So, that last point, by the way, a call to action that tells the prospect exactly what you want them to do — that cannot be overstated. This is the number one killer, by the way, I mentioned on the first slide, the number one issue in most poor sales communication is the marketer not telling the prospect exactly what they should do next.

I mean, they just leave it hanging out there. I saw this when I used to be in alarm sales. I used to, this was years ago, I actually knocked on doors for a living and trained people to knock on doors, to make it even worse. I was not just stupid, but willfully and deliberately trying to stupidify others, making them knock on doors.

And so, you're in the house, right? I'm in the living room. I've counted the number of windows in their home and scared them to death with a few stories and facts about fire alarms and smoke and burglaries and breaking and entering and home invasion. And now, you know, we're at the kitchen table and we've got the agreement out, one thing and another. It was amazing when I would sit with people who — there was a guy, his name was Frank, really good presenter, really good.

And he said, "Dude, I just can't make sales lately." And he said, "Would you mind coming into a couple of houses with me to see what I'm doing wrong?" And I said, "Sure." So we're walking around this neighborhood looking like a couple of doofuses, blue ADT security shirt, carrying a little octagon ADT home sign, knocking on doors, and there's a little spiel that goes with it.

And anyway, so I watched Frank do two or three of these little appointments in this neighborhood in Greensboro, North Carolina. And the first time he did it, I knew exactly what the problem was, but the second time he did it, I knew that curing him of the problem was going to be the easiest thing in the world. And I hadn't even seen it three times in a row. I said, "Frank, it's easy. I can tell you exactly why you're not making any sales."

And he said, "Well, you've got to tell me." I said, "You're not asking for a sale. You're not asking for a sale." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You're not asking for the sale."

"You've spent 95% of your money doing this dog and pony show. And you're going around and you're showing the windows and you're talking about the motion detector and how the small dog won't set it off, and how it's got the away button, the panic button. And it comes with a key fob that you can keep on your nightstand like a panic button. And you're doing the whole thing. It's as good —"

"It's as good a presentation as I've ever seen. But when it comes down to it, you're not asking them to buy, you're not closing the sale." And we see this all the time in internet marketing. I can't tell you how many emails I get from people who are trying to sell me something and they never actually get around to asking me to buy anything.

They don't even tell me to click the link. The link is just kind of hanging around the bottom of the email. And I'm like, well, it's hanging there, like it's just being dragged along like a little five-year-old walking down the sidewalk, dragging a yo-yo behind him.

It's just there, but not deliberately there, not in my face, not "click here to see this amazing" — no, it's just hanging there. And I see this happening a lot in our industry, in this business of internet marketing. You've got to have a clear call to action. And the best way to do it is just say, here's what I want you to do.

Right. Now click here, and this will open the order page. Number two, on the order page, fill out that form, select your username and password. Click next. Number three, fill in your credit card information, right?

Hit submit, number whatever, number four, welcome to the team. You'll receive welcome instructions. I mean, you have to lay it out. You have to. It's like you're talking to Homer Simpson. Everybody likes to think, by the way, that their prospects are more sophisticated than everybody else's.

Let me tell you, the sooner you start communicating like every person is Homer Simpson, the better off you'll be. And I'm not saying you've got stupid prospects, or that I have stupid prospects. I'm just saying it's like — I think I heard a preacher say one time about putting the cookies on the bottom shelf where everybody can reach it. Don't assume that people know what they're supposed to do.

Don't assume that link dangling around at the bottom of the email is just going to magically click itself. You've got to say, okay, here's what I want you to do right now. Click this link and get started. Whatever, right? So tell them exactly what to do.

That cannot be overstated. So we've spent four minutes on this slide and it probably deserves a full eight. All right. So all of that's under structure, right? So you've got your subject line, you've got your body, and you've got your call to action.

Now, these are a few mechanical things that I do. And this is the stuff that I think you'll probably appreciate some notes on, because I think a lot of times this is the stuff that makes the difference between emails that work and emails that don't. It took me a long time to figure some of this stuff out, because I've never really seen it taught in a lot of places. Some of this is just a collection of tips and tricks that I've picked up over the years, trying it different ways. But I think if you'll take some good notes here, you're going to change the way your emails look to the prospect, how readable they are.

And no matter what you're saying — we're going to get to your voice, what you're actually saying in the email, in just a moment. But let's look at the actual nuts and bolts here. These aren't written in stone, by the way. There's always some times when you'll make an exception, but they're a pretty good rule of thumb. The first thing you want to do is make your emails narrow.

Okay. On the screen here, you see there are two different — these are the same email, the exact same email. One of them is written in a narrow format. The other one is lengthy. You guys, like me, you may have a big monitor on your computer.

A lot of people do. I meant to look before we did this webinar tonight to see what the most common monitor size is. I suspect it's probably still hovering somewhere around 15 inches. I have a 27 inch. Jessica's got a little 11-inch MacBook Air.

I see a lot of people using 15-inch Dells, and some people have the big 17-inch things, and there's 21 inches. So here's my point. Look at this bottom email down here. Can you see how difficult that is to read? It's got these big long lines.

Both these emails say the same thing. The one at the top here, that's the one you want, not this one. This one, on the left — let me see if you can see my mouse — this one is far easier to read. You avoid that whole side-to-side head motion.

And it seems like a little thing, but you know what? When I open an email and it looks like this one down here, where I've got to read 12 inches of text horizontally and then bring my head all the way back to the left — it seems like such a first-world problem, like, oh dear, my life's so hard, I have to move my head 12 inches to get to the next line. It seems weird, but the bottom line is it is tiresome and it is annoying to read wide text. So what you do is you actually deliberately make all of your lines only about 50 to 60 characters wide. So you can see here on the email at the top, it says, "This may be one of the more candid emails I've ever sent."

And you hit a hard return to create a new line, and then the word "out." Double space. "I'm not sugarcoating anything." New line.

Lots of new lines. Okay. There's a guy named James Patterson. The guy's sold — I mean, I think the last time I saw, it was close to 300 million books now. The last statistic I saw was about 260 million books this guy has sold.

He's a monster. And if you ever go to Barnes and Noble or Books-A-Million, you'll see the main table up front. The guy may have two or three hardcover books on the front table at any given time. Whereas a lot of authors only have one book out a year. This guy is writing with co-writers, and he's got children's books.

But here's the thing. Anybody that sells 260 million of anything, I want to know what they're doing. So the guy sells 260 million books. I want to know why is this guy doing so much better than somebody like, say, John Grisham, who may churn out a book once every three or four years. Okay.

And check this out. If you've never picked up a James Patterson book, next time you're in a bookstore, go check it out. I'm going to show you a sample of actual pages. Okay. Here's what a James Patterson book looks like.

Now, I want you to look at this really closely. I know it just looks like four pieces of paper here, but stop and really look at what he's doing. They're narrow pages for one thing. And it looks like each paragraph only has about one or two sentences before he creates a new paragraph. But check this out.

This is the entire first chapter. So I have four pages on the screen. The one on the left, the second one, and the third one make up all of chapter one. That's pages five, six, and seven in the book, that's chapter one. And on page eight, he starts a brand new chapter.

And by the way, look at how that chapter starts. The fourth page over here: "I jolted up right in bed, gasping, my hand over my heart." My God, what a great sentence. I mean, it's almost like you could just pick some of these paragraphs. "I couldn't help checking my nightgown, no red laser dot, no bullet holes."

"I fell back on my bed, limp with relief." "What was that?" One, two, three, four sentences in the paragraph, but only two lines for that paragraph. Now here's a big paragraph for Patterson: one, two, three, four, five lines.

And then a two-line paragraph, a three-line paragraph, a two-line paragraph. But check this out. All of his books look this way. Every one of his books looks this way. So here, here's for your notes.

Learn to write in chunks. Okay. Write in chunks. Sentences in your emails should be anywhere from one to ten words. And again, this is not written in stone.

You'll find that I have some sentences that are five or six words long. I have sentences that are 15 to 20 words long, whatever. Right, so sentences are short, paragraphs one to two lines long. Sometimes three, rarely four, but I tend to write paragraphs that are one to two lines.

And then I skip a space and I write a new paragraph. Each line should be narrow, about 50 or 60 characters, and that includes spaces. So you're not writing these big wide lines. Well, it's white space.

You notice here too, in the layout, chapter headings — I mean, this chapter heading here is barely over half a page. He's got this enormous section of white space at the top of the page. It just makes the book more readable. And by the way, don't be afraid to send ultra-short emails.

Some of the best emails I've sent out were literally four or five paragraphs, and each paragraph was only one or two lines. I think the shortest email I've ever sent out was something like: "Get this," new paragraph, link, new paragraph, "You can thank me later," new paragraph, "Tony."

There's like four lines I sent out. And what's funny is the more you do that, the more you train your list to expect that your emails are going to be short and easy to read, which is a big deal that affects your open rate. When people see your name in their inbox, they're like, "Oh, that's that lady that sends those really quick and easy-to-read emails." So you couple this really easy readability with really sexy subject lines, easy to read, attractive, emotional, controversial, curiosity-dripping subject lines. It's a one-two punch.

You can't beat that. Nobody can beat an easy-to-read email with an attractive subject line. It's the one-two punch of marketing. Okay.

And remember, you're not trying to get an A in English class. Okay. So don't be afraid to write like you talk. When I got this, I just started making money hand over fist, because I would pour over emails.

Like it was, "Oh my God, if I don't get this right, it's the end of the world, it's going to be so hard, Miss Woodham's going to give me an F," or whatever, right? And when I finally got it — what people want is just for you to show up in their inbox, just quick, powerful, on-purpose communication. So, like this left-hand email here, missing words.

There's some open punctuation. I'm a big fan of the dot-dot-dot, by the way. If you look at this left email, see the last two lines, it's already going dot-dot-dot. It's called an ellipsis. Fancy people call it an ellipsis. I call it a dot-dot-dot. Last line just says, "sneak in..."

So I love that. "Want to eavesdrop on a private Empower Network mastermind?" That was about a Monday night call or whatever, right? It's a members-only meeting, but you can peek over the fence. See, that's the kind of thing people talk about.

That's how people that I talk to talk. So we're not writing Shakespeare, right? We're not trying to win a Pulitzer. It's just really simple and short, impactful, bad-grammar email. Not, no misspellings in there.

I don't think, although some people I've heard say that dropping a misspelling in an email is not a bad thing, I can't quite bring myself to do it, because it's a pet peeve of mine. I don't criticize those who do, but when it comes to sentence fragments and missing words and things like that, I do it all the time. Over here on the right-hand side —

There's a question I get asked sometimes: dot-dot-dot. There it is. I do the dot-dot-dot, just a little sidebar. I do that because it creates a feeling of incompleteness.

We're going to talk about this in just a moment when we talk about bucket brigade copy, but the dot-dot-dot creates a tiny little unconscious itch, because people don't like reading part of a sentence — they feel incomplete. And so you create a slight little bit of tension every time you use a dot-dot-dot, and you break it up, and the next thing you know, you've gotten them to read on, because the next line starts with dot-dot-dot. "And I don't think I should answer it."

And then once again, new paragraph. And these are again narrow lines. That's the third line. Notice it's a sentence fragment. It's not a correct sentence.

Just that dot-dot-dot. "Well, it's better to hear it from someone else." I see the word "well" in there. It makes it more conversational. It sounds like something you'd hear me say if we were sitting at the barbecue shack and we were having some sweet tea and a barbecue sandwich and just talking.

So again, you're writing like you talk. Lots of white space, indented. Even if somebody just glanced at this email — if you could roll back and see what you looked at first when you looked at this right-hand email, you probably looked at the italicized paragraph before you read anything. And the next thing you read, you probably looked at the yellow highlighted part. And then you went back to the top and started reading the actual email.

It's funny. We think that people sit down and read things from top to bottom, and they don't. Not when it's an email. A book, yes. A magazine article, absolutely.

But we're talking, we're managing seconds here. You've got about two, three seconds to grab somebody's attention with a subject line. And once you've sold them on opening the email, well, you better get to the point. Quick. You've still got their attention, but you've got to keep it.

And so we're going to talk now about how to break your message up using some of these attention getters and some of these formatting styles so that you can not just have that attention, but keep it and direct it, because you've got to get them all the way down to the call to action, even if it's a very short email. Okay. And by the way, while we're talking about authors, one of the things that I learned from Stephen King is something that I think ought to be a law: avoid the passive tense. And I promise you, this will be the only thing that sounds like Mrs. Woodham's English class in this whole webinar tonight.

But it's worth talking about. The passive tense is when the subject of the sentence is having something done to it instead of doing it. Okay. It's a nasty-sounding sentence. It sounds a lot like what you see in legal contracts and terms and conditions of companies. Have you ever read through somebody's terms and conditions, or a legal or rental agreement, or a property agreement, or any kind of thing that's got this whole air of legalese?

If you've ever wondered why that kind of stuff reads so dry, it's because of passive tense. And I'll give you an example. "The body was dragged by him from the living room to the kitchen." That's passive tense. And it sounds like something Stephen King would write, except he would never write it in passive tense.

Right? No. "You get paid every Friday" — that's the difference between passive and active. And I had to throw this in here because we were already talking about best-selling authors, and Stephen King has probably killed more trees than any other living author I can think of, and he was the first one, by the way — he's got a great book called "On Writing," just two words, and the first half is a fascinating autobiography about how he got into writing and how he became a great author and sold millions of books, but the last half is this kind of how-to on being more readable, and seriously, if this is of interest to you, I definitely recommend that you pick it up. You won't do everything in the last half of that book, because he's talking about writing fiction and novels, but little things like avoiding that nasty passive tense are worth learning, because you can avoid the pitfall. So, you know, I would rather see you say "you get paid every Friday" than to see you say "commissions are paid out every Friday." See, that just doesn't sound right. Don't do it.

All right, well, I knew we were going to talk about features versus benefits somewhere in here, and this is as good a place as any. So, features versus benefits, jot this one down real quick, because this is important. I'll give you a corny little acronym one of my mentors years ago said. "Tony, all of your prospects are tuned in to radio station WII-FM." WII-FM, which is "what's in it for me." And this is something that I actually enjoy talking about, mostly because people in the internet marketing and network marketing world do such a wretched, ungodly, awful job around this topic.

It's awful. If you've ever been to any other company website, like just say a vitamin company, you go to their website, it's all features. That's why corporate websites suck so bad.

They're awful. You can totally tell that marketers do not create the corporate websites, because they suck. Product catalogs, same thing. If you've ever had a chance, back in the day, of seeing an MLM company's brochure —

You can tell that brochure was not created by a marketer within 50 miles of it, because the brochure was awful. I mean, if you had a bunch of them, probably the best thing you could get some value out of would be if you put them all in the fireplace and lit them on fire. You could get a little bit of benefit out of them that way. But as far as selling something, it was awful.

And the reason why is because of this very simple concept — I don't know why it's just so hard for people to get in corporate America — features versus benefits. So a feature is just something about you, your company, your product, or your opportunity. It's a feature. TV has a 42-inch screen.

That's a feature. A benefit is what your prospect gets from having your company, product, or opportunity. So a benefit would be like, you can see this TV from across the room. So it's a subtle thing.

So I guess some people can be forgiven for confusing them. But not really, because it's so simple that this ought to be in, like, Marketing 101, first slide probably, right? So customers are interested in benefits. Now, they will justify their purchase on features. You ask the guy, "Why did you get that LG?"

"Why did you get that LG 42-inch?" "Oh, because the LG is this, and it's that, and it's this." And that may be true, but that's not what initially got their attention. What got their attention was the benefit, not the feature. Okay?

And I'll give you another example. So let's say that Hawaii Airlines was buying some ads. Now, which would you rather hear about, your prospect going to Hawaii? They can talk about one of two things.

They can talk about, you know, this is the Airbus 300, and the jet engines on the side are 22 feet in diameter, and the wheels have a 36-inch rubber wheel, and it's got this many cubic feet of space in the luggage compartment. All these are features, and they may be true. So Hawaii Airlines could run an ad about how, I mean, it's an airline company, for crying out loud.

They're airplanes. That's all they do, right, is airplanes. Shouldn't they be talking about airplanes? No. The answer is no.

You do not care. Not really. I mean, you care that it's a safe airplane, but you don't care what color the tail of the airplane is painted. You don't care about that. What you care about is white sand.

You care about volcanoes, and you care about hula girls, and luaus, and surfing, right? You get to hang out in the land of Magnum P.I. and Hawaii Five-0. Telling my age a little bit there with that Magnum P.I. comment.

I know. But you see what I'm saying? If you want to sell me on going to Hawaii, you best not be talking about how big the wheels are on the plane, because you'll lose me. I'll go over to Delta, where Delta's telling me about luaus. And it's the same thing with our prospects.

It's the exact same thing. They do not care. Because I'll tell you, and I don't know what it is about it, but network marketing companies are just the worst. Here's some examples of stuff that we've all heard network marketing companies do.

"Our company is debt-free and operates in 150 countries around the world." And that sound that you hear is your prospects slipping into a coma, because they don't care. Not really. They like the idea that the company is secure, they like the fact that it's a big company. But they really care about benefits more than features.

And I'm going to show you how to flip these over and turn them into benefits in just a second. "We've got a 200,000-square-foot warehouse in Provo, Utah." This one's not on the list, but I was in a company several years ago where the main presentation, I swear to God, this was in the first five minutes of the presentation, a guy named Dale and a guy named Tom were doing a presentation. And they'd say, "If you go up highway so-and-so in Utah, and you look over to the west, the left-hand side of the road going north, you can see our manufacturing complex. And you can see the windows there."

"The machines on the other side of those windows can bottle up to 400 bottles of product per whatever, right?" And you're thinking, why in the world did I send my prospects to this presentation? They don't care about the bottler, you know?

It's like those old MLM brochures too. I don't know what it was about it, but they always love to show a picture of the home office and the big air handlers up on the roof. I don't know what that was about, but anytime there was a brochure, and of course nowadays it's all a website, they always love to throw in a picture of the home office, I guess to prove that they're not working out of somebody's basement or something. Maybe, I don't know. "Our multivitamin contains 14 different antioxidants."

Again, it's a feature. "We use a 128-bit encrypted shopping cart system." These are all examples of features. Now, you can flip these things over. Here's benefits on basically the same topic.

"You can have people from all over the world paying you 24 hours a day." See, that's a benefit, because that's something that I get by being part of whatever it is you're offering me. "You'll always be able to get your favorite products anytime you want them. No backordering required." Now, see, that makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

That makes me want to buy something, because I'm the guy that's on the Amazon Prime membership, and I just can't resist whipping out the extra $3.99 every time I want to buy something at Amazon, because I want it fast. So this will be right up my alley. Now, I'm going to go back a slide. Don't tell me about the 200,000-square-foot warehouse. I don't care.

I don't care at all. Cannot possibly care less. But you tell me that I can get my products anytime I want them, fast shipping, and they're available anytime — now you've got my attention. I don't care about the antioxidants, but if you tell me that I can lose weight, feel great, and look sexy, hey, I'm on board.

Credit card's out. Where do I sign, right? "You can safely place your order online instantly." So the trick here is, whenever you're talking to prospects, keep in mind — and you're the same way, by the way, these prospects don't live on another planet.

I'm talking about us too, because we're prospects for home cleaning products and pet supplies and all kinds of things. And when it comes to us looking at marketing messages, we're tuned into this cheesy WII-FM acronym too. We want to know what's in it for me. And you want to know what's in it for you. You don't care about the size of the warehouse.

You just want to know, can you get your product or whatever. So as you're communicating to your prospects, keep in mind you always want to lead with the benefits and you substantiate with the features. "Hey, you'll never run out of product because we've got a big old fat 200,000-square-foot warehouse just jammed to the ceiling with your favorite product," right? Or, "Hey, you can safely place your order."

"You can make money 24 hours a day around the clock. And the reason why is because Empower Network has an automated sales system that's constantly making sales on your behalf," right? So lead with the benefits, not with the features. Okay, so changing gears. Now, I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, because David Wood had an excellent segment on this.

I believe it was three or four modules ago. The heading of that module was about video marketing. But we wound up talking about some solid gold stuff. And one of the things he mentioned was archetypes. And you can look these up.

Not these on the screen, but different archetypes. An archetype is basically like a stereotype in a way. It's just a shorthand. It's just a way of summing somebody up very, very quickly, okay? And there are different archetypes.

There are classical archetypes and Jungian archetypes. And it's worthwhile for you to kind of look into that, but here's what I'm getting at. You're going to come across a certain way to your prospects. And the way you come across should be totally authentic. It should be you being you.

But the question is, who are you? What would you say is your — like if somebody had to sum up your main description in just a couple of words or a sentence or two, how do you think they would characterize you? You know, we have a friend named Mike. I would say he's Mr.

Credibility, because he sort of comes across as a very dry — hang on a second, let me get some water — he comes across as sort of matter-of-fact. It's just a matter-of-fact delivery of data. He's not a robot by any means, but I would say that's his archetype. He's just Mr.

Credibility, you know. Frank, he's the laid-back surfer. He's the surfer guy. He's the guy who just kind of lays in a hammock all the time and then twitches his little finger a couple times a month and has thousands of dollars come rolling in. David Sharp, very clearly — he's very prominent because it's such a part of his story.

He is the ex-addict turned financial superhero. He's a five-star general to an army of badasses, right, that's how he and Wood have been signing the emails lately. But it's very clear. You don't wonder well, I wonder what Sharp's thing is. No.

You hang around Sharp and his watch is marketing. It's very clear. He's about personal transformation.

David Wood, he is sort of the unpredictable. He's the wild card. He's the unpredictable anti-guru, right. He's the guy who is irreverent. He's the guy that will slap around all the conventional thinking.

He's the guy that says the sacred cows make the best burgers, right. Nicole Cooper, who I just love, and Jessica and I got a chance to spend some time with her a few weeks ago, she's the new mom with the big wallet. She's the new mom, got a baby in the house, and just kicking butt. But I can see in her marketing that's such an ingrained part of her story.

She's more than that, you know, she's a lot more than just that. But I'm saying the shorthand is new mom, big money. Kevin Connect. Kevin Connect.

He's the super dad. You catch Kevin any time, he's probably hanging out with Tanner and Olivia and Melissa and Josh, and they're doing something or whatever. So you can go on and on and on. But here's my point. You've got to be yourself.

You've got to be yourself. I would say my archetype is probably family guy. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know. Sometimes it's helpful to pair up with somebody and just say, hey, how would you describe me in my marketing?

And your online persona, your personality as you come across in emails, is probably going to be an exaggerated version of who you are. Like, say, Frank — I mentioned him because he's sort of the lay-in-the-hammock guy who doesn't do anything, just twitches his little finger every once in a while. Well, the truth is Frank actually works a lot. But he also lays around a lot.

And he is lazy. But he accentuates his laziness as part of his marketing persona. Same thing, Kevin Connect. Kevin, he's really a master when it comes to communicating with people. He's amazing when it comes to cultivating relationships in his team and building duplication.

I'm fascinated by watching how Kevin moves around his team. But his dominant persona is not that of a nurturer or a team builder so much. I see him as super dad. So here's the reason I say be yourself.

Can you see me, Tony Rush, trying to act like Frank, talk in a certain way, let my hair grow out to my shoulders, and talk about surfing all the time? It just doesn't work. And one of the things — there was a guy years ago, he was called the Rich Jerk.

And it was so funny, because you guys may remember this, and I won't get off on too much of a tangent here, but the Rich Jerk guy was all about — he would open up every email saying, hey, losers. He would insult his list every day. It was always like, "The reason you're not making millions of dollars is because you're not doing what I'm telling you to do, so stop being a loser and buy my product." And that was his persona.

The guy's actually a nice guy, as far as I know, but his public persona for a little while was the Rich Jerk, and that was the brand name. But can you imagine Nicole Cooper trying to play the Rich Jerk role? It doesn't work at all, right? So the lesson here is be yourself, but it may help to partner up with someone, a spouse or a partner, and say, if you were taking the 30,000-foot view, looking out from outside, what would you say sums me up in a sentence? What would you say is my dominant persona?

Okay? Because that's going to be helpful, and you always want to be true to being that, because that's your authentic self. Now, even though I'm the family guy, that doesn't mean I can't talk about buying a nice car, or the fact that I travel, or, "Hey, I just got back from wherever." Everything doesn't have to be about my children. Everything doesn't have to be about my wife.

But you're never going to see me having emails going out saying, "I was at the Playboy Mansion last night, man, I had a glass of scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other." Because that doesn't work. That's not me. And the biggest amusement out of that Rich Jerk thing years ago was that people saw this guy being a certain way, and they all wanted to copy him.

So you have all these Rich Jerk wannabes running around insulting their list, and what they didn't get is that they couldn't be like that guy. What they needed to do was find their own thing and be that. And you can be the most powerful you that exists. Okay? I can't be Kevin Connect.

I can't be David Wood. Wouldn't I look funny if I walked on stage at the next event wearing an A-shirt and shorts and flip-flops? That's not me. Or if I decided that I was going to come across as surfer guy —

You see, I can be the best Tony Rush. And that's who I show up as in people's inboxes. And, again, it seems like a very small and subtle thing, but this cannot be overstated. Don't model somebody to the point that you're actually trying to be them.

Think about who you are. Decide who you are. Be that authentically.

You may want to accentuate certain areas of your personality. Like if family is your big thing, then obviously it makes sense that would come out a lot in your writing, your emails, your videos, your blogs, or on Facebook, or wherever you're marketing. But you're not going to suddenly decide, "42-year-old, slightly overweight, balding middle-aged guy — let me try to pretend I'm a new mom." That doesn't work, okay? Getting big results by legally stealing some of Hollywood's best stories.

This is sort of related to archetypes, and we did touch on it in that last module with David Wood, but there are some great and classic templates that not every email you send out will be one of these, but it's helpful to have this list, because if you're ever sitting down thinking, "What's a good email I can send out today?" you'll probably find that a lot of your good stories land in one of these categories, and there's a bunch of them. I've just highlighted four here. Hometown Boy Makes Good is a good one.

Hometown Boy Makes Good is always a fun one, because it's sort of that rags-to-riches thing, which many of us have in our story. We came here started with nothing or very little, and we created something amazing. So Hometown Boy Makes Good is a really good template. It basically is the story of somebody who moves from no results to great results. The Reluctant Hero is a funny one.

Funny to me, the template — and by the way, you've seen these in all kinds of movies, you've seen them over and over. The Reluctant Hero, "Armageddon." Big blockbuster movie.

Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, meteor coming toward the earth, NASA can't do anything about it, we've got to figure out how to — and we find Bruce Willis on an oil rig. He's the best driller on the planet, and Billy Bob Thornton has decided that the best way to do this is to drill and drop a weapon into the meteor, and so you've got the Reluctant Hero. He knows he can get the job done, but he's reluctant to do it for personal reasons and other reasons, but he allows himself to go along with it, and yes, he'll step up and save the day. Reluctant Hero is a great one. You see this a lot in the information business, and it is good, and it's often a valid story — I'm not saying it's always fiction. Sometimes you really do see somebody like, say, Shakir. He could have kept all the information in the last two modules to himself, because Shakir's got a rather lucrative business providing traffic for a lot of people, and he could have very easily said, "I really want to keep these secrets to myself, I don't want to give it all up." But I could totally see if Shakir wanted to, he could sell this 15K Formula module as a Reluctant Hero. I could write this up and send it out to my team and say, "There's this guy, Mr. H, right? He's provided some monster traffic for different people in the industry, and we said, hey, look, you've got to teach this stuff in the 15K Formula. He said, I don't know, this is high-powered, high-octane, thermonuclear super-ninja-master secrets, but you know what, David Wood and David Sharpe are doing something amazing and special here, there's nothing like Empower Network, so yeah, I'll do it, I'll step up and give solid gold information for four hours, let's do it." And that's the Reluctant Hero story, a fantastic template, and often true, because there's a vested interest a lot of times for people to keep information to themselves — like I'm doing tonight, I mean, I've never taught most of this stuff before, and I'm not being paid to be here or to teach this stuff, so I could sell that. I could say, "Hey, Reluctant Hero, I was willing to give up this information just to contribute to the value of the product."

Us Versus Them will come up around tax time — solid gold, solid gold. Us Versus Them: you talk about how having a home business gives you so many tax advantages, and of course the Us Versus Them is the evil mongrels at the IRS, and it's us versus them, and if you want to win out over "them," then you've got to get in a home business so you can get all these wonderful tax write-offs that come from being in business for yourself. There's a lot of Us Versus Them: home business owners versus employers. Why would you want to work for a boss when you can work for yourself? Anytime you can create in-groups and out-groups, right, us versus them — everybody wants to be in the "us" group, not the "them." You don't want to be in the "thems." You want to be in the "us." Okay, fantastic template. The Underdog is a little bit like Hometown Boy Makes Good, except this is the one where the odds are stacked against you — you get some of that in Reluctant Hero too — but the Underdog is basically your Rudy story, right, the football movie: "Failure was not an option, and I said, you know what, I'm going to make it work." Kevin Connect is the Underdog — Kevin and Melissa's story. Kevin spent the rent money to go all in and didn't tell Melissa, and they went from 500 bucks in their bank account to 30,000, bills paid, all bills paid, debt-free, and 30,000 cash in the bank in, I don't know, four or five months, three or four months — that's an Underdog story, great story, and we get a lot of those because Empower Network is a place where people can come and create that pretty easily. The Hero's Journey — David Wood mentioned this a few weeks ago, so I'm not going to go into detail, but this is probably the master template. The Hero's Journey is, by and large, the outline for just about every major story you've ever heard: The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Batman, the Avengers, Captain America — most of the superhero stories that we see being recycled nowadays are all Hero's Journeys, basically involving somebody who's called to a quest, not sure they're going to do it, they're suddenly presented with either a gift or a super talent of some kind that allows them to move forward, they're met with tremendous obstacles, they're met with temptation, they win through, and of course at the end they win the day. And it's a template — if you want to pick up a fascinating book about this, Joseph Campbell is probably the best-known expert on this, the book's called "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," absolutely amazing, and it has its roots in Greek and Roman mythology and Norse mythology, and it's absolutely fascinating that today you sit in the theater eating overpriced popcorn and a huge jug of corn syrup, and you're actually looking at an outline that has existed for thousands of years, and if you understand that, you can model some of your writing around it.

All right, we've got to hurry, we were covering some ground there, weren't we? Let's get back to talking about what's in the actual body of the email. A bucket brigade — you used to see these in the old westerns, you know, the barn's on fire, they bring up the whole town, they didn't have fire trucks and high-pressure water hoses, so what they did was they get a bucket, one guy's dipping water, and they pass the bucket down —

It's a row of people passing a bucket from person to person until it gets to the fire. Bucket brigade copy is a way of getting your prospect — instead of a bucket, you're getting your prospect's eyes pulled from one paragraph to the next. I illustrated this a few minutes ago in an earlier slide about how your eyes move through an email, and if it's done correctly it's almost automatic, and they find themselves reading an entire email even though they only intended to open it real quickly. Let's go back just a moment — they deleted all the junk email, they didn't want it, but because of that sexy, amazing subject line, they've opened it, and because of this bucket brigade concept, the way the email is written, the way it's formatted — let's go back to the James Patterson thing, there's a lot of white space, it's written in chunks, everything's written in chunks — we've made it very easy for the prospect's eyes to just bounce right through the email, and even though they intended only to open it and glance at it to see what you meant by that amazing subject line, they find themselves being pulled through it. It's hypnotic. They can't get away from it. And then, before you know it, they're at the call to action, and it's irresistible. I would say, whether I was in Empower Network today or not, I would say the undisputed masters I've seen at this are the emails that we get from davidwoodanddavidsharpe.com each week. Here's one for the nine o'clock p.m. call — I don't see the date on this, but it doesn't matter, anyway, the easiest way to create this bucket brigade effect: you've got these five different things, impactful hypnotic language, and I've got them highlighted here. "How I got rich quick." "How I got rich fast the easy way." "Get rich quick." "You won't get rich at all — I did that for a reason, I want to share the formula." Hypnotic language, really subtle stuff. Bold type — you don't want to go crazy with it, a little bit goes a long way, but you need to bold-type enough things in your email so that things leap out at the prospect. If you look at this one down here where it says, "I did that for a reason" — beautiful, it's bold type, it's short, it's got the dot at the beginning, and it's standing alone, it's not part of a paragraph, you can't not see it, right? So bold type, really important — if you bold-type too much, though, it loses its effect. So notice how sparingly Sharp, I think it was who wrote this, bold-typed about five or six things in a few inches of copy, highlighting. This used to be such a pain to do — it's so easy now. You're bouncing from paragraph to paragraph, and he's writing in chunks. Then, of course, you've got — notice the two lines of asterisks here — these are attention getters. Back in the world of direct mail we used to call them Johnson boxes, and it was literally, on a typewriter, a way of creating a graphic when no graphics existed. You just make two lines, and it was a way of highlighting a block of text. Indentations do that too. Bullet points — we don't have bullet points here, but bullet points are really easy to do, and they grab attention. People love the eyeball loves a bullet point. You see a list of three or four things bullet-pointed, like this over on the right-hand side — I deliberately chose to bullet-point each of these five items instead of making it a paragraph. It's easier for you to read, easier for you to grasp, and easier for you to take notes. So bullet points in emails work great too. Here's an email that I sent out, and this one is part of my follow-up series.

It actually gets a great open rate. Let's look at it as a quick case study. The subject line says, "Weird story and picture" — so strong curiosity there, there's an embedded command there. I also didn't use the PIC abbreviation, but I'm promising a picture, which ties right in. People see the picture — what was the picture of? The embedded command, I've gotten to where I just about use it too much, probably, because I think if you use it all the time it probably gets a little watered down, but I probably use it at least a third of the time. "Check this out," or "open this" — you're telling them what to do, once again writing in chunks, that's a bold-face word here. Got an embedded graphic — that actually is, by the way, the restaurant that is like a block from my house, and it looks awful, but anyway, this is one of the most-opened emails of the others. Subject line: "Sometimes a sandwich..." He made a sandwich, is running down restaurants and making money from home, and if you can read the entire thing, it's just, "I was having a tomato sandwich one day, and I came out, I think I made like five hundred dollars while eating tomato sandwiches." Again, you've got a story, you've got some curiosity, you're writing in chunks, it's easy to read, and then you tie it into the offer, or whatever the call to action is — in this case, you find out how you can make five hundred dollars while eating tomato sandwiches, "watch this video." I have this very early in my follow-up series, so the only link in this email goes to the Commission Loophole presentation video for Empower Network. You can do the exact same thing in a vitamin company, a legal company, long-distance internet, whatever — same concept. So that's just an interesting case study. Pictures, by the way, instant attention getters, especially for social proof — I'm a huge fan of that. You know, let me give you this real quick, almost like this right here —

joindotme, or a project like that — if you see that right there, it's just a little screenshot, software that's free for Mac and PC. It's just a great way — Sam Crowley posted this like two weeks ago, seventeen days ago —

Well, see, I can take a little screenshot of that, and next time I write a broadcast email out of AWeber, I can just upload that graphic. Boom, it's right there in my email, and it's embedded. It's embedded in the email.

They don't have to click a link to see it or anything. It's right there, social proof. Huge, huge thing. By the way, this is Tom Zaremski, a guy on my team. "What a difference a year can make."

"What a difference a year can make. This year on Christmas Day, I woke up to see we'd had our first $3,000-plus day with Empower Network." Social proof is so easy to get, because we have tens and tens — I mean, at the time of this recording, I think now over 70,000 people, and they're all writing stuff on Facebook all day long about their results. Here's Adam.

"And I don't know crap about internet marketing." I thought that was fun. Here's a post from David. David Wood. David's a huge source of social proof.

If you shoot a video, go to YouTube and take a screenshot of your video playing. It took me about four tries to get one where my face didn't look like I was eating prunes or lemons or half asleep. But after four or five tries, you get a decent little thumbnail shot, and you can just put that right in the email and hyperlink it so it says, "Come click here to watch this video, it's a quick 10-minute video on how to create money out of thin air," whatever. So anytime you put graphics into an email, instant attention getter.

Social proof, video players — big, big deal. And once again, there's no right or wrong on this stuff. Don't be afraid to experiment. Use the structure we've outlined here, easy to read, and it pulls your prospect through the email to the call to action. Okay?

So the last thing, and this is going to be fairly quick, is we've kind of touched on it throughout the entire webinar. We've talked about archetypes. We've talked about being authentic. We've talked about writing like you talk. We've talked about not trying to be something you're not.

And all of these things really go toward this question about what's your authentic voice. So what do we mean by voice? It's really just how you come across, how easy you are to read, your emotional posture, and that will vary. Sometimes, like, I had a team call last night, and it was so funny, because I got on this call —

It was a Google Hangout, and this isn't about emails, but it is about emotional posture. But I was so fired up about this Google Hangout thing — my team meets every Wednesday night, and all our team leaders get together and have a conversation. Greg Onishuk is there, and Kevin, and Mark Kosio, and John. I love Anya, and Jessica, and Melissa. And I was so jazzed about it.

And what was funny, though, is about an hour before the Hangout, I just got in this really relaxed, grateful kind of vibe. And I was so excited about sharing — we've got the next event coming up, and we've got a team party, and we're doing this and that — and I was so jazzed about it during the day. But when I got to the actual Hangout, I was in this really laid-back kind of vibe.

And when Kevin Connect said, "Hey, Tony, come on out, what's on your mind," I felt like I couldn't put six words together in their proper order. I was just so laid-back, but I was in this state of gratitude, because I remembered what it was like when I couldn't even afford to buy my kids a little Star Wars figure standing in Toys "R" Us. And having had this amazing holiday surrounded by friends and family, and of course having just come back from David Sharp's house not long ago and masterminded with such amazing people, I just kind of had that on my mind before the Hangout. So when I showed up on the team meeting, I wasn't full of piss and vinegar, ready to charge hell with a water pistol. It was more of just this laid-back thing.

And the reason I bring it up is because that's going to happen sometimes when you're just being authentic. So sometimes the stuff that I send my list is not dynamite. It's not supposed to be a thermonuclear weapon. Sometimes I'm just saying, "Hey, God, I'm just the luckiest guy in the world. I'm married to the hottest woman I've ever seen, the most fascinating human being I've ever known."

"I've got three amazing boys, Will's 16, Pate's 14, Easton's 6. They're all healthy. They're all just amazing. I'm in awe every day." And I get to hang out with people like you for a living, which is 70,000 of my best friends, right?

And at the next event, I get to hang out with 3,000, or 3,600 or so, of my best friends. And pretty soon we'll be having these things in stadiums where I get to hang out with 15,000 or 20,000 people at a time. And so my point is, not every email you send out is going to be like a home run where you come across like the most powerful person in the world. Sometimes it's going to be just this quiet, relaxed confidence. And here's what you've got to get.

That's your voice right then, and that's okay. You don't have to put on your marketing. When I got this, guys, everything changed for me. It's okay to just be where you are. Sometimes I'm ticked off.

Sometimes I write an email, and I am so pissed off at how hard people make it. It's almost like they're trying to fail. People get so bogged down in the minutiae of this industry, and they get their eye off the ball. They don't have goals.

And it ticks me off. And I write some email about how ticked off I am. And then I get a bunch of sales from it. And then I'm in this other really quiet space where I'm just grateful for the fact that there's really nothing my kids could ask for right now that if I wanted to say yes, I could just pay for it. It's fun to walk through the mall and just say, there's really nothing in this mall that I couldn't buy.

Cash. That's fun. To walk on a car lot and say, they don't sell any automobiles here that I couldn't pay for right now. Cash. That's just weird.

And you get in this space of gratitude. And sometimes you write an email that comes across like a quiet rain. It's not a thunderstorm. And here's my point. You're still being authentically you.

Okay. It's just a different emotional posture. And that's okay. And you know what? I've sent out emails like that.

They got a 3% open rate, and I couldn't possibly care less. Oh sure, I'd have loved to have a 30% open rate on those emails. But I send it out, and it's like, I don't care. It doesn't matter, because I was being authentic in the moment. I was saying exactly what was on my mind.

And then other times I'll write an email that I think there's no way this thing's going to get opened. But it's what's on my mind, and I'm going to talk about it. It's my list. And I'm the CEO of my own corporation here.

So I get to do whatever I want today. I'm going to talk about this because I want to. And you think nobody cares about this, and you send it out anyway. And all of a sudden you get some ridiculously obscene open rate. It's monster.

And then all of a sudden you get like four or five people that sign up, bang, right there. And then two of them go inner circle, and one of them goes all in. And you think, wow, I just wrote a $2,000 email. Not counting the results. Not counting the residuals.

Not counting the future pass-ups. Not counting who's going to buy this later. But just today, $2,000 email. Not bad for 10 minutes of emotional authenticity, okay? So just be aware that not everything you write is going to be solid gold.

I wish it was. If you ever figure out how to do that, put me on the list of people who want to know first. But you'll never go wrong doing the right thing, and you'll never go wrong being yourself as long as you're being the most powerful version of yourself. Okay? So, as we've talked about, everything should be authentically you.

Okay? If you try to fake it, it doesn't work. Don't show up trying to be a thermonuclear weapon when you don't feel like being a thermonuclear weapon. Sometimes it's okay just to be the soft, gentle rain. You don't have to be a thunderstorm every time.

How you come across in your emails — I coined this phrase a couple of years ago because I never heard anybody talk about it: assumed rapport. When you talk to people and you talk about them — assumed rapport —

You just instantly have rapport with them. You ever done that? You're at a restaurant, you talk to somebody, and all of a sudden you feel like you've known them forever. Well, what I like to do is just go ahead and start there if I can. And email is not body language and tone of voice and things like that, although video is.

But in either medium, I like this thing of, when I email somebody, I say, "Hey, Tony here." I'm family. You fill out the form on my website and ask me to contact you, I'm going to treat you like I've known you forever. That way you can receive me like somebody you've known forever. I don't email people saying, "Hi, my name is Tony Rush, and I want to take a moment to thank you for stopping by my website, and in case you've forgotten, here's the URL that you stopped by."

All that does is highlight the fact that I'm a stranger they've never heard of, right? I'll give you an example. Here's an email that I sent out. It says, "Hey, Tony here. Jessica and I are getting ready to head out for lunch, but I wanted to get this to you."

"I get questions every week about Empower Network, like, how much does it cost to get started? I don't have a list, can I still make money?" See the little bullet points? I actually homemade the bullet points.

I didn't even use real ones. I just used dashes. But here's the point. I didn't say, "Hi, my name is Tony Rush." It's, "Hey, Tony here."

I skip over the whole "Tony's a stranger and I don't know who he is" part. Just skip that. This prospect already knows my wife's name. And they evidently know I don't have a job either, because I'm at home writing emails, getting ready to go out to the butcher's block and have the Big Daddy brisket sandwich that I love so much. If you're ever in Dothan, let me know.

I'll take you there, or to the barbecue shack, "the dump." But assumed rapport — just go ahead and skip over the whole stranger thing. "Hey, it's Tony." Not "Tony Rush," formal introduction or anything like that.

This assumed rapport, I think, probably carries me miles down the road, further than if I tried to go the formal route of "Hey, Tony Rush here, thank you for coming by my website, let me tell you a little bit about myself."

I just talk to them like they already know who I am, and they just learn my kids' names and my wife's name and my hobby as they open my emails. Okay? Write like you talk. Talk about that.

Don't try to impress anybody. Big words will kill your sales. Don't use jargon. MLM-ers are probably the worst at this, I think. You see some of the emails from back when I was in the MLM industry, and people were talking about, "Well, yeah, the mucopolysaccharides and the long-chain proteins that are in these antioxidants is what's going to really eradicate those free radicals."

And you can just feel the guy slip into a coma. What did he just say? Was that English or Urdu? Was he even speaking English? I don't know.

Pay plans are the same way. You hear people talking about, "Well, once you've got your BV and once you've got the right CV, your BV will take care of itself, and, of course, then you're an executive director and you're going to pick up your $500 such-and-such bonus and you get the override on the executive director's level." What? Don't talk that way.

Don't use jargon. Talk like real people talk. Jargon is for people who want little bitty checks. Okay? Keep things simple.

Write like you're talking, like you're talking to Homer Simpson. Just a quick word on unsubscribes. Do not let unsubscribes get under your skin. I know sometimes, especially when you're on a bit of a budget, you're like, wow, I'm paying this much per lead.

And you send out an email and you see that like 11 people unsubscribed, or eight people unsubscribed, or something. You're like, oh man, I just lost some of my leads, that was like $20 worth of leads I just wasted. I need to do something to get these unsubscribes lower. Well, nobody likes to see unsubscribes, but that's just part of the business.

And part of qualifying people is making sure you're not dealing with wussies, which, by the way, I just love that we talk about that openly. I love the fact that David Wood and David Sharpe have put in the presentation, "No wussies allowed." So that way we don't actually get a lot of unsubscribes, because we've pre-weeded the wussies out. Hopefully the wussies never fill out the form to begin with, but it's possible. And if they do, let's put them out.

Let's run them off as fast as we possibly can. So unsubscribes, don't let it stress you out. The more mail you send, the more unsubscribes you're going to get.

And don't worry about it, because, listen, those people were never going to buy anything anyway. The sooner you get these people off your list, the better off you are. Don't worry about it. So the more you mail, the more unsubscribes you get, and the more money you'll make. One of the things I learned down in Costa Rica at our masters retreat was that I wasn't mailing enough.

I was mailing like five times a week, and I needed to be mailing ten times a week. I needed to be mailing content and pitch and all kinds of stuff, twice a day. So if you don't have the Masters course, get the Masters course.

We had a guest speaker on Sunday down there — just solid gold, and very much related to what we're talking about here. If you want to know the psychology behind that aspect of this, if you don't have the Masters course, you need to get it right now. Get your credit card out. Get your wife's purse out of your pocket, and get the Masters course, because it's solid gold.

But this one concept about email marketing that I pulled out of the Masters course, I figure it's been worth at least $100,000 to me since coming back from that event. So a word to the wise is sufficient. We're in the home stretch. Two slides left. Broadcasting or autoresponders?

Here's my view on this. Once upon a time, back in probably 2001, people actually believed that you were sending emails personally. You didn't even have real forms, really — you had to send an email to an email address, and it would auto-reply, and now you're on a list. And you get an email the next day that says, "Dear Tony," and you think, "They even know my name."

"This had to be written by a human being. They called me by my name." And, of course, the game back then was, let's load up our autoresponder with about 200 pre-written messages, all this personalization, calling them by their first name, talking about maybe doing a meeting there in your city in Dothan, Alabama, or whatever. There was all this cheesiness that went on.

And it was somewhat believable because it was a new technology. Obviously, we don't even fool with personalization anymore, because we don't even ask for people's names when they fill out a form. We just want the email address. Nobody believes that you're sending out these emails personally, so don't worry about whether you should be collecting first names.

I love the fact that here in Empower Network, and I know we've got people that are in different businesses and people who have bought this product as generic training for what you do, I would recommend that you actually only collect emails. Phone prospecting is a diminishing returns activity. There's no excuse for why anybody should ever really do it, unless you just really want to, or if you've got more time than money. Other than that, no — the more information you ask a prospect to fill out, the lower the response, the lower the opt-in rate you get.

So the very minimum you can ask for is an email address, and it's beautiful. But here's the other thing. I'm not a big fan of these big, long autoresponder series either, where you've got like 100 messages preloaded. There's nothing wrong with it, put it this way —

But I think that stuff should be used as a foundation. It's a foundation, so that if you're brand new and you're just learning this stuff, you've got messages going out from day one. That's great. That's awesome. There's nothing at all wrong with that.

I recommend it. However, it should never be used as an excuse for you not to show up in your business. It should never be a replacement or a substitute for you sitting down and writing something to your list every single day. Now, I don't do it every day.

I get busy. I skip a day sometimes, or I'm traveling, but I probably email my list 10 times a week. And if I don't, it's because I got sidetracked doing something else and I just didn't do it. But the goal for me is, if I mailed my list two times a day, Monday through Friday, I'd be happy with that, and then once or twice on the weekend. Eight, 10, 12 times a week, you're not going to go wrong with that.

But you can't sit back and expect to get Lawrence Tam's results without doing it every day. Lawrence has got a lot of responders, he's got some good letters.

But Lawrence is going to sit down and write something today too. That's what he does. That's what David Sharp does. David Wood does it.

Tracy Walker. That's what I do. And you're not going to get the same results that I get if you're going to sit back and expect somebody else's pre-written letters to do all the work for you. Because I'm going to be the guy that shows up today and writes an article. I'm going to write an email about that stupid article in Newsweek magazine.

And you're not. I'll be writing about current events. I'll be the guy sending the email at midnight saying, "Hey, are you still up?" I'll be the guy who sees something about how Miss America did something on TV, or I heard about it on Facebook, and then I made an email out of it, and it goes out. Like the election going on —

I'll be the guy writing an email about how who's sitting in the White House for the next four years has way less to do with your quality of life than what you do. But if you're relying on somebody's pre-written generic autoresponders, you have no way of knowing what day those letters are going out, whether it's going to be relevant to the election, or the new year, or your birthday, or the fact that you were sitting eating tomato sandwiches and made 500 bucks. So broadcast something to your list daily. That's the goal.

Now, if you skip a day or whatever, but at minimum, aim for sending something to your list every single day. And again, word to the wise: if you sit back and let some generic pre-written series of letters try to do all the heavy lifting for you, you're not going to make the money. You will make money, but you will not get the results that you deserve, because this is affiliate marketing. Marketing, keyword, affiliate marketing, internet marketing. It's not internet-sit-do-nothing-and-let-a-system-send-out-letters-for-you.

It's internet marketing. Part of that is learning how to market effectively. And like everything else, if you want to get really good at something, do it a thousand times, ten thousand times. That's how you get good at it, by doing it.

The reason I got good at writing emails was writing lots of bad emails first, okay? But it's just part of it. Don't skip that part of the process. You get a big advantage of being a 15K Formula member and a Masters member, so you can avoid some of the pitfalls, but you can't skip the step of showing up and doing it yourself. You can't skip that part.

You've got to show up and put in the time, put in the energy, put in the effort, hone your craft, and become the most powerful version of yourself in this form of communication. So it's a constant tweaking and adjusting. Please do not feel overwhelmed by this. It's taken me two hours to explain, but at the end of the day, guys, there's a lot here, but the bottom line is it's fun. And if you're not having fun, you're probably not doing it right.

These emails ought to take less than 10 minutes to hammer out. The first few times you do it, you may feel the tendency to be a perfectionist. I would say resist that urge. You're not trying to win a prize here. If you're on AWeber or GetResponse, there's a reporting section, and there's a section there under messages, follow-up, and broadcast.

You can see how many people are opening your emails. If your open rate is low, work on your subject lines. If your click-through rate is low, it's probably that you can tweak the body of your message, make it more interesting, use more white space, write in chunks, keep those lines narrow, add some graphics, add some highlights.

Be more interesting. Crawl out on a limb. Be bold. Be willing to say something in an email that doesn't feel comfortable to say. Get out there on the edge, and you can do some really cool things, but I'll close with this. This was my last slide. I would just say, even though we covered this in almost exactly two hours tonight, please don't forget that at the end of the day all we're doing is sending an email. That's it. And do not let all the tips and tricks and the little subtleties and nuances that we've packed into this webinar tonight make you feel like, "Oh my God, it's just so much to learn." Start simple. If you're not broadcasting every day, make that your very first action task tonight or tomorrow, wherever you are, whatever time it is. Make sure that you send something tomorrow, and do yourself a favor: keep it short. If this is your first foray into this, make your first emails very short, make them impactful, chunky, lots of white space, very clear call to action, and fire that bad boy out. And once you've done it one time — I'll tell you, the first time you do it, you save the message, you hit that button that says "send," and it says, "Do you want to broadcast this message right now?" and it'll feel like you're about to let loose a bunch of carrier pigeons. The first time I ever did it, I was thinking, "Wow, I'm getting ready to email all these people at one time." You push the button, and you go take a break, go watch a movie, go see "The Hobbit," go play with your kids. You don't have to sit there and wait and watch. Go enjoy yourself, go get a smoothie, go work out, take a walk, go hang out with whoever you're in love with. And then come back in a couple hours and take a peek at it again, see if you have any leads. If you have any leads at all, you'll have a significant impact on your business. You're on a level playing field. There's no super secrets — we just laid them all out here tonight. When you do that one time, you're on the same level playing field as I am, as David Wood is, as David Sharpe is. You're doing the exact same thing that the top earners in this company, or any other internet marketing company, do, except you have the advantage of having the real nuts and bolts that we discussed. That's rare out there in the industry. So congratulations to you for being a member of the 15K Formula. Hope this is a value to you.

I believe David Wood is wandering back for the microphone. I'm going to turn the call back over to you, David. You there?

Yeah, I'm here, can you hear me all right? Awesome. Well, first of all, just thank you — I post a little message on Facebook, and I'm always wondering what people are thinking as they're coming to the training, and everybody, man, you over-deliver, and I think that's valuable. Let me give a couple valuable perspectives here, just from sitting here — I had to take off for about 15 minutes during the webinar, but I've been here the rest of the time. There's a couple things I think you pointed out that are really important, that are also really easy to gloss over for somebody who's heard them, and they may just ignore them and need to hear them 18 times in order to just do them. I just want to hammer this: I think the most important thing for people in this webinar to do immediately leaving the webinar — first thing, I think it's about half and half, you and Shakir. Half your leads are solo ads and half your leads are coming from something else?

That's excellent — I mean, we're also doing some cost-per-click marketing, and it's about half solos, and today it was almost all solos. Okay, so you're generating — and I know you've been doing this for a long time — you're generating leads through solo ads using stuff that you learned last year, and you've used those and these email techniques, and that's made you about a half million dollars.

I just wanted to point out, so everybody on the webinar realizes why I brought Tony out. I think it's like six or seven years he's been doing this, and that's what you've done for the last year — you've made a half million dollars with this over the last year. I mean, more, actually.

And I did not really recognize the difference between sales and marketing, because I was good at sales and the other things I'd done before coming to Empower Network. I was talking to John Levine the other day, and I believe a few years ago I was in this top-tier company, and I was making a good income, but I was tickled to death to have 12 leads a day coming in. I remember talking to somebody back then saying I was probably getting about 300 a month. It was a big deal. But what I was asking for was first name and last name and email address and phone number and best time to call and what's your goal, and I was getting on the phone.

And this was during that time in the industry where the phone was not working the way it should work, and I was resistant to this internet marketing idea. I felt like I still had to be on the phone. So when I came to Empower Network — the only reason I bring that up is, I had never generated more than probably 300 leads in a month, and I thought I was doing something. So when we did the original 15K Formula, I didn't know what a solo ad was.

Matter of fact, I remember asking Alex Zubarev, I sent him a note on Facebook. I said, "Dude, I know this is a stupid question, but what is a solo ad?" And he's like, "You're joking, right?"

And I said, "No, I'm serious." He's like, "Dude, if you've made as much money as you have in this industry and don't know what a solo ad is —" And literally, within the next 10 days of discovering what that was, and going through that module in the original 15K, I remember taking a screenshot and sending it to my buddy Kevin. I had over 240 leads come in in a single day, and that was the first time in 20 years of being in this industry that I had ever had that many people asking me for information on my business. And that's a valuable perspective for a variety of reasons.

One of the things I think is worth looking at is that you've only been doing this for a year. Before this, you were closing on the phone, right? And when we say "put down the phone, pick up the paychecks," you can replace the phone with email. Remember, Tony, when you first met me —

It was when we got in that company — not going to mention the name — we got in that company, and they had a really boring presentation at the time, nothing wrong with the company, good company, but the presentation was 80 pages about the product. And I got in at 2 in the afternoon — my old company had just collapsed, they decided to go out of business, but I got in at 2 in the afternoon.

And then by midnight I'd recruited 67 people, right? You remember that? And you hit me up on Skype after I did that, like, "What the heck's going on?"

Well, a lot of people hear you say, "Features versus benefits, what's the difference?" The difference is 80 pages about the product versus only talking about what people want. And everybody on this webinar, I want you to think about that for a second.

You could take this information and sell our stuff, sell Empower Network stuff, sell anything you want to sell with it. I've recruited into network marketing companies with tangible products, intangible products. I've sold systems. I've sold affiliate products.

I've sold about anything you could imagine using this same stuff. And for me, I had a real breakthrough, and this was it: because I come from the same traditional background you come from — you've got to make the phone call, you've got to make that personal connection.

You've got to be branded on everything. After a while, I was making money, and I had a lot of these philosophies still. But then I just started challenging all of them. I said, "Do I really need to talk to somebody personally on the phone for them to make a decision?"

So rather than doing that, I decided to talk to them and get them to make a decision through email. And the same thing that worked on the phone worked in the email, right? And another thing I think that's really important that you pointed out, and this is just a perspective — you need to tell people exactly what to do.

You need to tell them exactly what to do. Like they're Homer Simpson. Like they couldn't figure it out if they were really thinking about it. That's how clear your instruction needs to be when you're telling people what to do, right?

You need to tell them like they're Homer, like they're too confused to decide whether to grab a remote control to change the channel on the TV because they don't like what's on, and there's a remote control on the right and a beer on the left, and they can't reach either unless they move in one direction. They're too lazy to grab both.

It needs to be simple and clear when you're telling people what to do. And the first time I came across that — I don't want to talk too long here, I just want to give some perspective on what you said and validate some of this stuff and highlight it so people actually do it. The first time I heard that was in an offline network marketing company.

I had been in a company, an old-school company, that had no calls to action in their presentation. Their presentations were amazing, exciting, hypnotic. You wouldn't know what it was.

You wouldn't know by the end of the presentation, but you wanted to do something. You wanted to get excited and do something. But you didn't really know what to do. So what they told us to do was, "How do you recruit?" They said, "Bring them to the presentation."

So I got people to every presentation for like six months straight. Nobody joined. They said, "What you do is you give them this info pack, an 80-page catalog, 18 product samples, three tapes to listen to with two hours of information on each tape." And it was like an 80-dollar thing, Tony.

So we had to buy these info packets, and I was broke, so I'd have to buy them. And then I was supposed to go get them back. I'd give them the info pack, and the person would listen to it and not get interested.

And then they wouldn't show up to the follow-up appointment. And I wanted my info pack back. And then I couldn't afford another one until my next paycheck. So I could only bring a few people to the meetings, and I was like, why aren't you joining?

I'd just stare at them and be like, "So?" And then I snuck into this meeting with Eric Worre.

He was at the time a corporate trainer for a legal services company in network marketing. And he said, "You know how easy recruiting is?" And I was like, recruiting ain't easy, that's for sure, right?

I said, I don't care what this guy says, this is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, harder than selling religion. That's what I thought. And he said, "Here's how easy it is."

He said, "I'm going to show you." And he drew a picture of a chair standing sideways, and then a picture of a butt sitting on it. He said, "First you get a butt in the chair." At the presentation.

He said, "That's the first key. If you can do that, you can also do the next step, which is the second key. And if you do these two steps, you can recruit anytime you want." So I said, okay, I can get people to the meetings.

That's easy. Just invite people to the meeting. Now, I'm not recommending people on the webinar go start doing meetings. I'm just telling you my experience with it.

So anyway, he says, here's what you do. After the meeting, you've got to have an order form in your hands. And you have the order form with the pen ready.

And after the meeting, you don't stand up. The meeting ends. And it doesn't matter how good the presentation was, or whether they did a good job.

What you do is you grab your chair. You don't stand up. You scoot towards your prospect. Tony, you probably know what's coming next.

Because I think you've used this strategy too. But you turn towards the prospect, and you look at him, and you say, "So, Tony, what did you like best about what you saw?" And he's going to say something.

Because if you ask him what he liked best about it, he's going to say he liked something. Because you didn't ask him, "Hey, what did you hate about it?"

You didn't say that. You say, "Hey, what did you like best about it?" So I said, okay, I can say that. And then they're going to say what he liked.

And then you say, "I think that's awesome too." And then he says, here's the next line: "So it sounds like you're ready to get started." And you just wait there. And you nod your head.

And they're going to nod their head like 90% of the time. And when they nod their head, you say, "Tony, how do you want your name spelled on your checks?" And they'll say, "Tony Rush," and you just start filling out the order form. And he says, if you do that, you'll recruit 90% of the people that you bring to meetings.

And I said, "Bull honky." But I was audacious enough to actually try it. I said, this is such bullshit, I've been getting people to every meeting for six months and I can't recruit.

So then what happened is I invited people to the same meeting with no call to action. The guy talked about nothing for hours. Now, I was the only guy in the room not following the system, because I had an order form there with a pen. And I sat there. And it was one of my buddies, actually, who finally came to a meeting.

I forced him. I dragged him. And he was like, "Ugh." But after the meeting, he was excited because they were excited.

And after the meeting, I didn't stand up. Everybody else stood up and kind of walked their prospects to the door with the big old $80 info pack, making money from selling the info packs and the downlines, the whole thing. You know the game, right? But anyway, I sat there, the only one with an order form.

I had a pen. I scooted my chair over. I said, "Hey, Eric, what did you like best about what you saw?" And he said, "Well, it seems exciting."

I said, "I think so too. Sounds like you're ready to get started." I'm just sitting there. I nod my head. And he says, "Yeah."

And I said, "Eric, how do you want your name spelled on your checks?" And he just started spelling his name. And I just started filling out the order form. And he signed it. And I got his credit card on the spot.

I swear I about fell out of my chair. But all I needed to do — this is the point — was tell people exactly what to do. Exactly what to do. Tell them exactly what to do.

Now, I'm the most incessant of this, I think, of almost anybody on the internet. I want to bring out Rashkin, maybe a few others next. We can just continue on getting people to take action.

Rashkin is one of the best people. He's on this webinar too. He's one of the best people in the world I've seen at this. Dave Sharp's one of the best people in the world at this. But one of the consistent things is I'm always telling people exactly what to do.

Oh, yeah. It's hilarious. And it's something that people can learn. It's incessant. What's funny is there is a huge, huge value.

I mean, it repeats the same thing like 18 times in a row. Just get outside of their seat and just observe what you're doing, as opposed to just hearing what you're saying. Because the first time I heard you, I was like, man, this guy is constantly closing. And then somebody else who hears the exact same presentation is like, God, this guy just keeps saying the same thing over and over. And it's funny, because that guy is probably still broke, and I'm rich, because I chose to learn something from it instead of complaining about it.

So, yeah, it was amazing to watch. The first time I saw you, it was like, man, this guy is constantly giving direction. It's like I grew up on a farm — you're taking the pigs to the stockyard, to the auction.

You're having to kind of get them into the chute. There's a big pen full of pigs, right? You've got to get them lined up, going down the chute to get them on the trailer. That's kind of a redneck thing to talk about, but whatever. But it's the same thing.

It's like, at the risk of sounding disparaging to our audience, anytime you're talking to a group of people, you cannot go wrong by making the directives as simple and repetitive as they possibly can be. Because if you don't, there will be somebody who says, "I don't know what I was supposed to do. I didn't know how to get on the trailer, I didn't know how to get on the bus." And you can't go wrong being repetitive and being very clear in that directive.

Well, yeah, that's it. And here's another point I want to point out. Guys, don't be afraid to tell people exactly what to do. Don't be afraid to say something like, "Go to the order page right now, where you're going to see a button that says, 'Take action,'" or whatever the button says.

I think it says, "Get instant access," or whatever. But you're going to find a join link when you go to this page that says "get in." "Get instant access." Now, don't rush there. Just click on the link.

But then when you click on the link, you're going to see an order form. What you need to do is fill your information out on the order form: your name, your address. Make sure to put in a proper phone number so you can be contacted. They actually call their new members, right?

You want to be contacted. And then go ahead and hit the button that says "take action." And then when you hit that button, you'll go to a place to put in your credit card. You might want to actually pull out your credit card right now, set it on the desk so it's ready when you're done filling out the order form.

It's only $25. I mean, the more descriptive you are, the more they do it. And a lot of people, I heard people talk about this years ago, but every time I've been more clear and more specific and told people what to do more, people have bought more stuff and taken more action. So I take that as proof that it works.

So just, guys, be clear, right? Another thing I think is super important is everything you do should have one purpose, okay? And a lot of people gloss over that. They want to put too much information in a headline or something like that.

Now, there's this guy I know who thinks he's the best copywriter ever — I'll just say he thinks it, because you look at his headlines and they have like eight pages of things he's targeting. There's like 800 different people supposed to watch the video. "You might want to watch this video if you're struggling."

"And you might also want to watch it if you're not struggling. And you might want to watch it if you're tall and also if you're short. And you might want to watch it if you're overweight, or if you're not overweight, you might want to too. And if you're a man or a woman, you might also want to watch the video."

And it goes on and on and on. And, you know, one thing that you said, a lot of people are just too wordy, right? I actually got on the phone with Tony just the other night, because my buddy Chris is down here in Costa Rica, he flew down to hang out for Christmas. I was hanging out with Chris the other night.

And he said, "Hey, Dave, I want you to talk to this guy on my team." And I popped on the phone and looked at the headline this guy had on his sales video. He'd learned it from this other guy. And I said, "Dude, take this trash out of the headline, man."

Make it target one thing. Make it about one benefit, right? A headline in an email should have one reason to open the email, not six, because long headlines on emails, you don't even see them, they run off the page.

So if you're going to have a reason to open the email, you should have the bullet points of why, in the first few words, because the headlines run off the page. You don't even see full headlines in most emails. And it's a good thing to keep in mind that everything should have one purpose. When you open the email —

That email should have the purpose of getting a person to do one thing, not eight things. You shouldn't have five affiliate products in one email, because if you have five things to do in the email, people will just look at it and get confused. It's better to tell them to do the same thing five times than to have five different offers in an email. Just have one offer in the email, guys.

One thing, maybe an offer, but maybe it's a call to action that you want them to look at a blog post with an offer. And then you tell them to look at the blog post five times, whatever you tell them. Be clear and specific and tell them exactly what to do. Now, Tony talked about that, but people have a tendency to really gloss over it.

Another thing that's helped me out a lot: make your stuff easy to read, okay? He talked about having it thin, right, and I agree with that. But also, I've noticed a lot lately, and part of it's AWeber and their crappy new interface —

I actually liked their old one better. But a lot of people send emails out with this tiny, itty-bitty text. Tony, you notice that? You don't do it, but you look at some people's emails and the letters are super tiny, and you've got to lean into the computer to even read it.

Well, the fact is, you don't lean into the computer, you just don't even read the email. Guys, make your text at least size 12 in your emails, okay? If you're using AWeber or something like that, and it has that tiny text, you can highlight your email and there's a drop-down menu — it doesn't matter what autoresponder you use — to make your text bigger.

If you have this tiny, itty-bitty text where people have to lean in and squint, people don't even read the emails, because it's tiring on the eyes. Make your text bigger. I actually put mine at 13, 14 sometimes, not all the time.

But I make it big, because it's easy for people to read. Make your stuff easy to read. And the last thing I'm going to say about this is just be yourself. Now, Tony said this, but I'm going to re-say it, because the last thing you guys want to try to do is be me, right? I love being me.

I enjoy it tremendously. I'm crazy all the time. Tony, you know, he says I'm the off-the-wall guy, but I'm like that in real life too.

I'm completely unpredictable all the time. Never know what's going to come out of my mouth. Sometimes I'll be drinking wine and decide to write an email headline that says something crazy, right? I'll do things like that. But then the email magically brings in 30 or 40 members that day, right?

And so being yourself, guys, being willing to just say what you want, being willing to tell people exactly what you think about something, being able to tell people exactly what you think and exactly why they should take action, and just being you about it — it's the most important thing. Dave Sharp was saying something.

We were at that leaders thing, we flew all the leaders down, and it's funny when we get around, because we just sit there and talk about marketing. We tell stories about marketing.

Tony, I remember we were in that room with you, and you started telling these old stories about people getting their team to take action. And you hypnotized us, man. I was sitting there watching you tell that story. We were in a room full of people —

We were in a room full of people that represented about a million dollars a month of income just at Empower Network. Just in the room. And we were sitting there, and you're talking, and you've got a million dollars a month of eyeballs, maybe 12 people, just hypnotized watching that story.

But the thing is, you weren't sitting there trying to pretend you were somebody else and telling a story. You were just sharing something that happened to you. And I think that's valuable to point out — Aaron Rashkin, he didn't try to be anybody but Aaron. Right. Right.

He didn't try to be anybody but Aaron. Tracy Walker ain't trying to be Dave Wood. Sometimes she'll do something a little off the fly just to see if it works, and it works for her, and she thinks it's funny.

The fact is, Tracy Walker ain't Dave Wood. I ain't Tracy Walker. Can you imagine me? Look at the way Tony's dressed. Can you imagine if I dressed like Tony?

First people would start laughing, they'd think it was a joke. But I don't wear suits. I don't like it.

But he likes that stuff, and he looks great in it. Guys, the fact is, if you speak from your heart and be yourself, you're going to get such better results. Make it about one specific purpose, guys. One specific purpose. And don't tell people to do what you want them to do once.

Tell them as many times as you possibly can. I look at Rashkin's emails, Tony, he's got some of the best badass stuff ever. Sometimes I look at his emails from Empower Network and I pull out my credit card and then realize I'm already in.

Yeah, I mean, I just look at them and do it.

But what does he do? He tells people what to do all the time in his emails. He's one of the most insistent people in the world too about telling people what to do. He'll tell you straight up, "Pull out your credit card. If you're reading this email right now, you need to pull out your credit card."

"Click on this link and buy. This is what I'm telling you to do, and that's the reason you should do it, because I'm telling you to do it. I'm Aaron." He's hilarious.

And, guys, be willing to be off the wall. Be willing to say what you actually want, and your results are going to go through the roof. Be yourself. The biggest thing —

Say to validate what Tony said today: just be willing to be yourself. And the last thing, okay, the last thing — some of you are going to gloss over it. Some of you are not going to believe it.

Here's the key I'm telling you, because we get a lot of emails, Tony, from people who generate leads like you do, through solo ads. And they say, "Hey, I generated 500 leads and I didn't get any signups." Well, now, here's what I know.

Now, I know that our numbers at Empower are this: we've generated about 1.2 million leads, okay, and we've signed up 75,000 people from those 1.2 million leads. Now, if you do a little backwards math and get the percentage there, that's 6.25% average conversions since we launched. Now, that's what we're actually doing. So when somebody says, "I got 500 leads and nobody signed up" — and this applies to everybody, not just Empower.

You can apply this to everybody. Let me just talk to Frank for a second. There's something you're doing wrong. It ain't the leads.

What did Tony say that's the key? He said, "I email my list 10 times a week." Well, that's why he signs people up from solo ads. The other guy I know who does a lot of solo ads, his name's Dagan. And there's a lot of them.

Shakir does them. There's a lot of people in Empower who do them. Dagan does a tremendous amount of them. And every single person who generates a lot of their leads from solo ads and converts at a high rate emails their list about 10 times a week, right?

Right. More people will buy stuff. Don't be afraid of offending people from too much email, because look, they're already getting too much email, guys. Somebody goes into their email inbox and they might miss your first email and never even see it, so they might not even have the chance to get offended, because they've got 400 emails that day, and they might only see it if you email your list twice. And thinking back, there's only one thing I actually even remember from that day, right?

And that one thing makes me more money than anything I've ever learned. And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "Email your list twice a day." So, email my list twice a day. And you guys just got that for a thousand bucks, you know what I'm saying?

Along with all the other stuff we're teaching. So you guys got a great deal here. Email your list twice a day. Email your list twice a day. Email it frequently.

I emailed the members of Empower Network today twice. Twice, right? Why? Because I want you guys to get on the webinar and hear this stuff, because if you do it, your income is going to go up. Tony's income will go up.

All of our income will go up if you just email your list twice a day. There ain't nothing wrong with it. If you do it, you're going to get inundated with email, sure.

But if you're there and you're more present and you're there all the time, they'll see you more. And they'll buy more stuff. And here's the other key with that, guys — you can't do that without getting good at email. I mean, how the heck could you do something twice a day without getting good at it?

How could you even possibly not get good at email if you did it twice a day? If you email tonight and then you wake up tomorrow morning and email again, and then you do it again before you go to bed, I mean, it's like — what, five minutes to write an email, Tony, if you're really good at it? Maybe 20 if you're laughing and giggling about something funny you did, wasting your time looking at funny pictures. But the reality is, it's like five minutes.

I mean, half your emails I could have written in a minute and a half, right? And here's the truth. Let's go back to that day I brought in 67 people into that company, which, let's be honest, was a hard company to recruit into at the time, because that boring presentation — you'd have to make your own presentation just to recruit, because it had 80 pages of product.

Nothing wrong with the company, but like most companies, their presentation had 80 pages of product. So it's all features, right? So here's what I did. I got in at 2:30, right? Now, I had a list at the time, let's be fair.

Because my company had collapsed, the other one I was in, at like 2:25. So I joined this one five minutes later. I'd scheduled a webinar for an hour and a half later. And as I was scheduling the webinar, I wrote an email to my list saying, "Emergency webinar," in an hour and a half.

And in that hour and a half, I sent two emails for the webinar. I sent a voice broadcast out, all in an hour and a half, to my list and my database. And I had 250 people on that webinar. And I did webinars every two hours as an emergency thing till midnight.

And between that time and midnight, I recruited 67 people into a $500 buy-in. Now, that ain't normal. But the reality is, it was because I promoted the crap out of it, telling people what to do all day and all night. And a lot of people don't do that.

And a lot of people are afraid to take action like that, because they're nervous it won't work. Well, it ain't going to work if you don't do it. So don't worry about it. Just do it. Last thing is, what's the real secret to this stuff?

Now, Tony, you've been with us now for a year. In the year you got in, everything's transformed for you, because you've been around this for a long time. And you never made money without the phone, which is what you hated to do, right? You love the money, but hate the phone.

Well, now we've replaced that with just marketing. So you've been here for a year, just doing this stuff, half a million dollars in a year. Now I'm just thinking and dreaming of a year or two. I'm just getting excited about that. But here's what I want to say to everybody here who's on the webinar.

Tony, here's the thing about him, and I want you guys to really look at him and look at what he's doing, and here's why. Tony's one of these guys — you can go to him and say, "Hey, Tony, I got an idea for you." And if he respects you, which he respects people who get results like he does and who are better at different things than he is, you know what he does, guys? He just damn listens. It's unbelievable.

He just listens. We do a webinar, we're teaching solo ads. He says, "What's a solo ad?" Tony, how many leads have you generated in the last year from what Shakir taught in the last two webinars?

I think my list is something like 16 or 17,000. I don't have a big list, but 16 or 17,000 leads in a year, and that's made you half a million dollars. And I'm telling you, Tony, and everybody on this webinar, that ain't normal. But here's why it can be.

The reason it can become normal is because in the last year you've been emailing the crap out of your list with a single offer, with one intention. And here's the key, guys. When that happens and you start getting results, when you start taking your results and sending them to your list, like he told you, with the social proof — and before you got results, just send other people's results, it's fine. When you start doing that, doing the same thing all the time, you know what happens?

A bigger and bigger percentage of your list just starts believing it. Don't they, Tony? They didn't join you 18 months ago. You were 12 or 18 months ago, whatever it was, when you started, when it attracted the 15K Formula stuff particularly.

But here's the thing. Seriously, if I was slinging everything under the sun at my list, I would not have made anywhere near this kind of money. And think about it, here at Empower we have 100% commissions. But let's say I found something else that I was really passionate about.

I would still use these same methods, and I would still be one of the top earners in that company, whatever, X, Y, Z. Say I just got totally latched onto something. If I was into X, Y, Z International, I would be talking to my list about X, Y, Z International.

I wouldn't be slinging every quick-buck thing under the sun, every little scheming, gifting thing. So, yeah, I think a big part of the undercurrent of what we've said today is that I treat my list with a certain level of respect. You've asked me to show you how I'm making money, so I'm going to show you how I'm making money. And that's it.

I'm not going to say, "Oh, there's a new ClickBank thing that's $37, and I can get an $18 commission." I'm not saying anything's wrong with that, it's just not what I do. You know how I do, Wood, in this industry — I get pitched on 10 different things a week.

Somebody wants to know if I'm in this, if I'm in that. No, I'm in Empower Network. This is what I do. And that's why I'm number two in the company. And if I can get Lawrence Tam distracted for a little bit longer, I might be able to run past him.

I'm not sure. But anyway, yeah, it comes down to focus. Hey, one thing real quick too, Dave, and I don't want to backtrack too far because I know we're getting ready to put a bow on it, but I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight this, because you mentioned it, and I probably should have made a slide on it.

I think it's probably one of the biggest errors in thinking that we see, not just in Empower Network, in the industry generally. People will say, "I tried solo ads and I didn't make any sales, so I quit doing it." Or, "I tried CPC traffic and it didn't make any sales, so I quit doing it." Or, "I ran a magazine ad one time and I didn't make any sales."

"That's a waste of money." And guys, if that's ever been in your head, or if you've ever said or thought that, let me do you the biggest favor I could possibly do for you, and that is to simply say: traffic creation creates leads, not sales. Effective communication is what creates sales. Okay?

Get that. Because, now, quality of traffic matters, yes. Traffic sources come in different qualities. But I'm saying, if I ran an ad somewhere and I said, I want 1,000 clicks to come to my website, and I got 1,000 people to come to my website and 20% of them opted in, now I've got 200 leads. Well, you know what?

That traffic source did exactly what it was supposed to do. But it's up to me to convert those 200 leads into sales. Now, the beautiful thing is, here at Empower, for those of you who are affiliates, we've got this really amazing presentation from David Wood that's just a great conversion tool. And if somebody doesn't watch it all the way through the first time, the second visit, definitely — I get a good percentage of people who watch the presentation and say, "Well, I'm going to do this."

"I'm going to sign up." Anywhere from 2 to 10 people a day sign up after watching that video. And then sometimes people have to cook for a little while, kind of like a crockpot, like when your mom made a pot roast when you were a kid, put it in in the morning, went off to work, came home in the evening, and now dinner's ready.

It's the same thing. But the crockpot only works if you've actually got some heat on. You can't put it in a crockpot and not plug it up. And where the heat comes from in this metaphor is sending emails to your list. So when I say sometimes people have to sit in your autoresponder and cook, well, they're only cooking if you're mailing. You can't just let them sit there and get tired, pre-written letters, or worse, no letters at all, and expect people to just magically step up and whip out a credit card.

It just doesn't happen. So understand that if you use Shakir's technique, or any other paid marketing technique, or blogging, any of this stuff, and you get leads, then that was the job completed for that marketing. It did what it was supposed to do. You've got leads, but that means you've got money on the table. If you've got 200 leads in your AWeber account right now, you've got money on the table.

You just need to go pick it up. And the way we pick it up is with the information we talked about tonight. So don't be guilty of being the guy saying, "I did a magazine ad one time and I didn't make a single sale." Because then you say, really, how many leads did you get? They say, "Oh, I got a bunch of leads."

"I got a bunch of leads off that magazine ad, but I didn't make sales." Okay, well, fine, the magazine ad did exactly what it was supposed to do, but you dropped the ball on communication. But now that won't be your story, because you've been here tonight and you've got a lot of great information on how to heat things up so that these people step forward and take action. So just bear that in mind.

Traffic doesn't create sales. Traffic creates leads, and effective communication is what creates sales. Brilliant point, Tony. And I got one more thing to say. And then who knows, maybe we'll both have five more things to say after this.

But I wanted to go back to something you just said a minute ago, and we can close it off there. Maybe something will come up and we'll keep going. Who knows? Maybe we'll just talk for a little bit.

Sometimes we do that here. When we get on a rant and a rave, nobody else does that. Everybody says, "Make your calls exactly 45 minutes," and ours are three hours and they just produce better results. So guys, here's what I want to say.

I want to talk real quick about just a consistent message, and being so consistent and focused in your process. There is a big, big difference in profitability that you're going to experience from being focused, from having one thing that you're doing that you're focused on. Now, you could maybe be promoting a lot of things through one process, right? There's a massive value in being consistent over a long period of time. A huge, huge, huge value.

And too many people don't know that. So I want to talk real quick about that. There's 599 people still on this call. We tend to lose about 20% after we go over two hours, but guys, I want to talk to you for a second.

Out of 598 of you, okay? Now, maybe it's not you, maybe it's somebody sitting next to you. I'm telling you guys, there's 500 of you that are just all over the place, right? And I know that because I get the emails.

There's something today and something tomorrow. People are desperately looking for something they're just going to buy magically and it's going to magically make them rich. You know what I'm saying? Tony, you see that? You see this a lot, right?

One day, somebody's promoting a system over here, and the next day they're in a vitamin deal. And the next day they're in a soap deal. And the next day they're in a gold and silver deal. And the next day they're promoting a ClickBank product. And the next day they say, "I'm sorry about that product."

"I didn't think it was good." And they jump to the new thing. And guys, I'm telling you something. You are going to make ten times the money if you focus.

Because there's a lot of value in focusing. Let me talk about it for a little bit. Let me tell you what I did. Let's talk about this over the last three years, so you guys can understand where I'm coming from here.

When I first got online, I ran into a little thing that I was in, and I started promoting that. And I had a company on the back end that I was selling. Now, Tony, with low-tier products, weenie commissions, truthfully, tiny commissions, right?

Nothing, I was making a lot of money from all these little commissions. In three months, from scratch, with no money, no solo ads, no paid ads, right? And that's not normal. But I did it. And how did I do it?

I'm going to tell you the short version of how I did it. The way I did it is I decided — I was so sick and tired of jumping all over the place. I was just sick of it. I was so burnt out from always running around thinking I was going to be in the right thing at the right time. Thinking that was the way I was going to get rich, being in the right thing at the right time and this magical thing would happen.

And then I'd be rich. I was so sick of it that I just decided I was not going to change my message, period, no matter how long I was doing it. Now, if I go back three years ago, there are people on this webinar right now who were with me three years ago, Tony. And I could go through and find some of them. I don't feel like finding them, because we've still got like 600 people on the webinar.

But there's people on this webinar today, okay, today, that got on my list in the month I started marketing. The first guy I sponsored into my business, two weeks in, was a guy named Daniel. Daniel quit three months later. I just ran out of money.

I recently reconnected with him, just said hello. But before he quit, he sponsored a guy named Paul Hutchings, who worked with me for years. I taught him how to market online. And since then he's learned his own stuff and started making a lot of money in different network marketing businesses using my message, which has not changed.

And you can ask Paul, if any of you know him, what was David's message three years ago? And he'll say, "Sponsor two people a day." Now, I didn't have the eight core steps down then, but it was, sponsor two people a day and focus on one thing and one thing only. In fact, Tony, two and a half months after — because I had never been around this pitch-fest stuff that we're all around now — I mean, Empower Network, we sell five things, right?

You guys ever see us email — now, we're not talking about being affiliates here, guys, we're just talking about making money — do you ever see us in this cross-guru pitch-fest thing at Empower Network? Seriously?

I mean, do you ever see us doing it? And it ain't — guys, I'm not really making fun of the gurus, because that stuff makes money. If I go out and do a JV with one dude and he does a JV, it makes money. But you know what else it does, guys? It blows people out. I'm just telling you, it blows people out.

And after a while, the list gets less responsive and less responsive and less responsive. I just saw an email the other day from one of the bigger lists that's out there in the home business niche. I clicked on the email that went to a blog post. This list has a quarter million people on it. And that blog post had about three comments on it.

Why? Because nobody reads the emails anymore, because they don't give a shit, because it's been this cross-guru launch fest for, I don't know, six years now or something. And, you know, when I got online, I'd never seen anything like it. You get on a webinar every week and they're pitching something different that was never there before.

And guys, I'm just being real here for a second. So I was about two months in. I was teaching SEO stuff, and I was teaching people, and I was actually doing SEO.

Now, these guys are good, these are actually good guys, some of the good guys who were doing this. So this is a bit of an insult to them, and I've told them about this later, and they just shook their head and were like, dude —

But I was doing marketing, and I built a team, and there was this product launch. And I asked the guys who were launching the product I was working on, "How much is this thing?"

They're like, "It's like a thousand bucks." And I was like, a thousand bucks? I said, I'm actually sponsoring people through SEO and just teaching them, and I've got a team site here. I actually had an affiliate link. But I sent a voice broadcast out to my whole database.

That said, "Hey guys, this is Dave Wood. Look, I just want to tell you guys I appreciate you. Look, don't buy that product launch. You don't need to focus on it."

"You've got everything you need right here. You can go ahead and put your credit card away. You can go ahead and just pay attention to what we're doing. Just focus. I just want to tell you not to buy."

"I'll tell you the truth, I'm going to earn a commission if you buy. I'm just going to tell you not to, because I don't believe in it. I haven't been through it and I can't recommend it."

And I sent that out to my list with no call to action. But I got a hundred thank-you emails from that voice broadcast.

From one message that I sent out. Now, why did I do that? I did that because — now, should we necessarily do that? Well, maybe I shouldn't have done that.

Because it was actually a good product, that I went through later. But the reality was that people knew after that I was only going to promote something that I was using or something I was selling. In fact, Tony, I just went through all my autoresponders and all my sites, and I'm still trying to find links for stuff that I just ain't going to sell anymore. And I've deleted everything but one thing.

Because here's what I know. I know, from an ethical perspective on my point, that I'm distracted with lots of stuff.

I know there's people who don't know how to market who teach people how to market, and they don't know how. And I know that if somebody will listen to me, I know they'll get results, because I'm not going to be all over the place.

I'm going to have one message all the time. I mean, guys, how many times has my message in Empower Network changed since you guys have been in? Tony, has it changed? We changed from the merchant accounts to the affiliate fee.

And the affiliate fee actually cost less, and that's been about the only change we've had. And we've added some back-end products to our funnel. But we've said the whole time: get two people a day by getting at least 30 leads a day and following these steps.

And this is what we do. We've said it since day one, we haven't changed it once. And the reason we haven't changed it, guys, this is the value. I want everybody here to think about this for a second.

Think about this in email. Think about this in your marketing. If you're all over the place, why should anybody on your list trust you? I don't care if you sell Empower Network. I don't care if you're selling a vitamin deal.

If you're all over the place, why should I listen to you? Am I going to make long-term residual income if I listen to you and you're all over the place, joining everything under the sun and promoting everything you promote and doing cross-guru launches every four days? Seriously, guys, think about this for a second.

And some of you guys need to focus. Some of you need to focus. Some of you need to put everything aside and focus. You need to get on the good people's list and watch what they're doing. But you don't need to go from launch to launch to launch to launch to launch.

If you guys think there's some secret after the stuff we've said — look, there's some higher-level stuff of building organizations that we talk about, right? But guess what, guys? That stuff's useful to hear and useful to study.

But you know where that really comes into play? It comes into play after you're taking the stuff we're talking about now and applying it. When you're applying it, that's when it comes into play.

You guys don't need to know anything else to go out there and make a lot of money off what we've just taught you. Seriously, we can almost end the series, Tony, the new 15K Formula, with this webinar. You guys could take what we've done in this last seven webinars, and this next year, if you actually did it and followed the advice and just focused on one thing and only one thing until you're getting the results you want, everybody on this webinar could go out there and create a massive income comparative to virtually anything else you could do in society. And we have the most ridiculous stories I've ever heard of that prove that. I'm telling you, anybody on the webinar, I don't care who you are, I don't care if you live in a dumpster next to the van I used to live in in Hawaii, you could do it.

I don't care what your background is, because Dave Sharp used to do drugs all the time. Tony, we actually went down — we were filming him going into his old drug neighborhood. Did he tell you this story? I think it was after you guys left.

He went down to film some sales video stuff, because we made a new sales video, it's not out yet. He went down to his old neighborhood, and took those shots with these bad-ass video guys we got.

And he went to his old neighborhood, and a crack dealer who was on the sidewalk walked up and said, "Dave, haven't seen you in years, man." Not kidding, dude — this gangster, gold-tooth-looking, shabby clothes, wearing a gold necklace, straight-up crack dealer on the sidewalk, walked up and just gave him five. Guys, you can do it.

But you need to focus on one thing all the time. You think you're going to get good at this stuff if you're all over the place all the time? You ain't going to get good at nothing. Now here's my observation, the last thing I want to point out.

Be consistent. Have one message, guys, one message. And then you know what happens when you do recommend something? Because you're recommending it, people will just do it.

Tony, you want to know why so many people joined me that day? It wasn't because of the company presentation. I wasn't even on any of the presentations. I invited people to webinars, and I was talking to people on Skype and giving my links, and they were joining.

I wasn't even on the presentation. I had somebody else doing it. But you know why they were joining me? Because they had been on my list for six months. I had one message.

And my company went out of business, and they knew for a fact that if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't be promoting something new. So I got in the new thing, and they all just joined, because they loved me. Because I was doing one thing. And you know, those guys, my core team, Tony, that sponsored in my first six months on the internet, some of them left and came back.

They left, they came back. People in Empower Network, they're going to leave, they're going to come back in two years when it's five times the size, and they'll say, "Shit, I should have stayed in, but I'm going to get in now and stay in. I'm done."

I'm not even messing around, because I've seen it happen over the last three years. I've had people leave and say, "Dave, I just got to be around you again. I'm just so sick of people jumping all over the place and having mixed messages and telling me to do dumb stuff all the time."

Guys, be focused in your message and people will love you for that. Be focused in your message and they'll love you for it. They'll love you for being focused.

They'll love you for not jumping all over the place. Now, there's another guy, I'm not mentioning his name, but you probably know who he is if he's on the webinar, one of my buddies. I know his list size. And he ain't doing as well, and there's one reason for it.

It's because he's all over the place. Guys, focus. Focus like a dog that's clamped onto a piece of red meat that won't let go for nothing. Focus. Focus.

One time I went to a meeting, one of these Amway conferences — I love those things just because they're crazy — and this guy was talking about focus, and he started screaming and yelling, "Focus, focus."

And then they had somebody walking in the background with a huge stack of books, and they fell over, and then the guy pulled a wig off his head, and then somebody came and broke like a guitar, and they smashed something on stage, and the guy was just screaming "focus" on the stage. You know what I'm saying, guys? Distractions are going to come for your marketing message, whatever it is. But focus on a process. Be consistent.

Be consistent, and that will create such power with you over time. That's how you become a Tony Rush. That's how you become a Rashkin. That's how you become a Tracy Walker, a Nicole Cooper, a Dave Sharp, a Dave Wood.

That's how you become a powerful personality: you focus your message, you put everything into it, and you just make it happen. So I'm going to tell you guys something. If you can't make one thing happen, you ain't going to make another thing happen. Until you make a decision that what you're doing, you're going to make happen no matter what, and then you can take that power with you to anything.

So here's what we'll do. We're going to end the webinar now. I think that's good enough. Tony, you did a bad-ass job. Everybody on here, if you guys think this was worth at least $1,000, go ahead and comment on your Facebook walls and all the threads going on on Facebook. We've got comments coming in like crazy right now, because there's still 575 people on this call, three hours later.

Guys, engage. Let's do this. I'll see you on the beaches of the world, because the beaches of the world, the cool thing is, they're reserved for people who focus. And we'll see you next week. We're going to come back and talk a little bit more about conversions, and maybe some upsells.

We might go to team building after that, and then we'll come back to some more paid strategy. But I think it makes sense to just go through some of the stuff that helps you guys make money with what we've taught, because what we've taught is what people are using to get a tremendous amount of results. Then we'll come back to some more paid stuff later on that you could use to really scale your advertising out over the coming weeks. So be back next week, Thursday night, 9 p.m. Eastern time as we record the series.

And if you think this is worth more than $1,000, guys, and you haven't been through the other webinars yet, you watch those things — you know what we should do, Tony? I'm just saying, guys, we should just rename this product the 100K Formula and charge $15,000 for it, because this is high-level stuff, and it's all you need to know to start getting the results that you want. So, guys, take action.

Take action. Get all in. Right on, man. Focus your energy. Focus your mission.

And you will be with us. And that's the key. I'll see you on the beaches of the world. Bye-bye. Hey, Tony, I'm going to call you in a second, bud.

Right on, man. Good night, guys.