Transcription
All right, welcome back to the Copywriters Podcast with your host, the world's greatest copywriting coach, and a very special guest lined up for today: David Garfinkel and Chris Haddad.
Am I pronouncing that correctly? Whatever you want. You know, I grew up with it being Haddad because I'm from Massachusetts, but everyone says Haha these days. It's easier. Okay, I'm fine with either way; I don't care. All right, I'm stoked. David, you asked me if I could completely rearrange my schedule to make this happen, and there was no way I could say no. And then I found out that this is Chris—Chris's like third or fourth podcast for the day, of the day.
Yeah, wow. Okay, so a little bit out of alignment with the way that we usually do the show, but I'm excited to be here, and I'm glad to have the guests. And so I'm just going to turn it over to you, David.
Yeah, I appreciate that, Nathan. So let's get right into it. Our guest today, Chris Haddad, sent shockwaves through the copywriting world 10 days ago with the launch of his much-awaited online training program called the PIG Method. PIG stands for Punch In The Gut, and I would say that's a fairly universal description of how Chris's copy, in his video sales letters, affects viewers. When you watch one of Chris's promotions or read a scoop, you go on an emotional rollercoaster ride that's right up there with what you experience with a blockbuster Hollywood thriller. Chris does have a background in theater and film, but his greatest accomplishments, I would argue, have come in the digital marketing space. Chris has created products and promotions for those products which have brought in millions—millions—of dollars and caused quite a stir in the marketplace. However, the PIG Method is the first time, as far as I can tell, that Chris has revealed his secrets of how he puts the promotions—his copy—together, which is something a lot of people have wanted to know for quite a while.
And before we bring them on, I want to share something I'm sure you have wanted to know for a long time: Copy is powerful. You're responsible for how you use what you hear in this podcast, and most of the time, common sense is all you need. But if you make extreme claims, and if you're writing copy for offers in highly regulated industries like health, finance, and business opportunity, you may want to get a legal review after you write and before you start using your copy. My larger clients do this all the time. So Chris, thank you so much for joining us. I know this live—welcome, friend.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What I want to say is I know the launch process has nearly turned your life upside down, but you seem to be enjoying yourself through the process.
Yeah. Yeah. Before we dig into your experiences pulling the project together, just tell me how you're doing.
I'm doing great. So we're recording this before the actual launch, so that's the whole thing. So, um, hopefully it would go—it goes well. I'm feeling really, really good about it right now because we are two weeks before the actual launch, and I am predicting—I'm looking at the numbers, I'm reading the tea leaves—I think we got a seven-figure launch here with no email list and no affiliates, which is pretty amazing. So we'll see what happens.
I do too. I—I—I totally do. So, um, that's—that's great. Uh, some people, um, suffer during their launch. You don't. I'm sure—I'm sure there's been like, you know—yeah, everyone's different, but—but they don't hear that.
We have a good team, right? I have a good team. I have Mike Calicakus who runs my team—runs my business. There—Mike is really stressed out. Mike is working really long hours, and he's—he's earning his pay, and he's doing all the things that I don't want to do or can't do, so I can focus on the VSL. I can focus on getting the uh, the Facebook group that I created where I'm doing all of my promotion for this really hyped up, and anxious, and figuring out the offer and doing podcasts and things like that. I feel like I'm doing—I'm spending my time, for the first time in a long time, doing what I think is like my—my core competence group of things right now. And so—and I'm also selling as myself, which is really great because I can just be as funny and weird and energetic and whatever as I want to be, and I'm selling a product that I absolutely believe in because I created the product, and I have seen what people who have used my material in the past, when I have taught a couple of times in the past, have gotten. So it just feels really—it feels great. It feels like I was telling a friend this morning, it feels almost like playing like jazz right now, right? Like I feel like instead of having to like get all the music in front of me and know exactly where it's going to go, I feel like I'm just like sitting down at the guitar and just seeing what comes out and taking 18 years worth of marketing knowledge and just letting it go, and it feels absolutely great. I'm having a great time.
Well, that's great. You know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to talk about the product, but first, if you could share the experience—one of the things—and I'm actually working on a product myself, quite different, um, for—for one thing, it's—it's called the LAMB Method—not that—no, it's not called anything—um, but yeah, it is—it is the first time where I have—with—with some expert help, I'm getting into my own process when I coach and critique people. Yeah, and for me, it's been like getting a pair of pliers and pulling out my fingernails one at a time. And maybe I'm just sort of genetically wired to suffer, I don't know, but um, in—in your case, what—maybe it hasn't been that hard. I—we haven't talked about this much at all, but I'd love to know what's it been like to create the product, uh, especially when a lot of the stuff that you do, I'm guessing, is intuitive at this point. It's unconscious competence. You're not only bringing it up to consciousness, but then you're spelling out, "Here are the steps." Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
Um, so I have done two other courses in the past, both of which I did once and then never sold again. One was my VSL workshop course I did back in 2010 with my buddy Lou Dallow, and I did that right before the Rachel Ray stuff took off—like the Michael Fiore stuff took off—so all of a sudden I was making millions doing that and didn't really care about teaching copy stuff. And then about seven years ago or so, I did one called The Escape Hatch, which was my entire process—like soup to nuts—for creating a ClickBank offer and putting it up on ClickBank and doing things like that. I did that once, and then, of course, I got really sick and lost my mind for a few years and didn't follow up on that at all. But I have some experience, you know, teaching copy and marketing things, and it is a challenge though because I'm known for having kind of a weird brain and having a different way of looking at these things. So the—the challenge of systemizing what, like you said, is unconscious competence for me has been really interesting. But the actual creation of the content wasn't that hard, honestly. Um, once I kind of had a basic idea—well, you know, I created the product by basically asking Facebook—all the people on Facebook that know me—"Hey, what do you want me to create?" And they said, "We want, you know, the storytelling course." Like, "What should I call it?" They're like, "You should call it the PIG Method," because I saw a speech you gave once where I said PIG on a slide, and people were just like, "That's what we remember." I'm like, "Ah, well, then I will call it that, because why the heck not?" The actual content though, um, you know, I wouldn't say that was easy to create; it certainly took a lot of effort, but figuring out how to systemize it was not actually that difficult, and I broke the course down into two—I originally was going to be like three or four modules—eventually I broke it down just into two, basically. So the first half of the course is called Mind Reading Your Market, and that's all about like developing your empathy, learning to understand what actually motivates people to make the sale, learning what people's real insecurities are—all this other kind of stuff in there about how do you see the world and see the market the way that I do, basically. And the second half is taking all that stuff and then applying it to the actual storytelling methodology that I've been using for all these years. And the cool thing about it was I basically just sat down with a bunch of my best sales letters, and I said, "Well, what is the structure being used here?" And I look at it, and it is the exact same structure every single time. The details are totally different—much like in Hollywood, right? Like every single Hollywood movie is based off the hero's journey. I have kind of my own uh, variation of that that's a lot simpler than the hero's journey that I use for my sales things, but I found it just incredibly satisfying and fun and exhausting, basically, to create, and I'm having a lot more fun now that I'm past the content creation into the market.
Well, um, question—were you surprised that you used the exact same structure? Because I sure bet you didn't think about that way when you were doing it.
I'm not surprised. Um, I—I, you know, I can't think of how else you would do it, basically, is the weird thing, right? Like if you actually get in the course, you'll see the PIG beat map where I go through every single detail of every beat that needs to be hit. I don't know how to write a VSL that doesn't cover all of those bases. I think you're really missing things if you do, because it's always going to be the story of the product creation and like, you know, how the narrator either created the product or got to a point where they discovered it and all this other kind of stuff. So I knew going into it that it was going to be very similar, and certainly, you know, because I'm good at this—I've been doing it for a long time—um, I can write VSLs that don't have that exact structure, but it's always going to be pretty similar to it.
How long did it take you? I—I remember you did a few posts on Facebook that—yeah, that I'm running out of gas. I don't know if I'm gonna—never wake up again.
Yeah, I was tired, man. I was tired. Um, I would say I got sick for a couple of weeks—my Lyme disease kind of flared up—so that took me out of the game for a little while and slowed things down, but otherwise it probably took me a month and a half to get it all put together and recorded and all the other stuff that goes along with it. And then there was a matter of like figuring out the bonuses, and I put a swipe file together of all my stuff, and etc., etc. So it's been—it was pretty all-consuming, and I'm still giving a little bit of the content to Mike and the team, but um, very satisfying though. Again, I'm having—it just feels good to be uh, teaching marketing stuff. I've missed doing this. So yeah, that's good.
Well, uh, would you like to spend 10 or 15 minutes just um, sharing a couple of pieces—maybe—maybe today you could share a couple of pieces from the first part about reading your market's mind?
Yeah, I mean anything you can release before you release the actual product or after you have released the actual product?
No. Uh, we'll figure it out. But no, I mean the main thing for me is just like that first half of the course is largely about empathy, and it's about understanding people. You know, as Mark Twain famously said many times—he was a copywriter, as you know, I'm sure—um, you know, people buy on emotion and justify with logic. And that whole module is really about taking that out to its deepest, most absurd, and most logical conclusion about understanding where human emotions come from, why we feel the way that we do, how evolution impacted us over all these millennia to make us want what we want, and how we have no choice over what we want. I talked a lot in it about how you're not special, and that's awesome, is kind of a thing I say over and over again because I think a lot of times people go through their lives thinking, "Hey, I'm the only one with the imposter complex. I'm the only one who, you know, even though my Facebook says everything is awesome, is actually dealing with all this horrible—I'm the only one that does this," and this and that's not true at all. You know, with my own life and the bipolar stuff, etc., I've gotten the uh, joy and horror of getting to experience very, very intense emotions, but they're the same emotions everybody else is experiencing too. So a lot of the course is about teaching people how to get in touch with their own emotions so they can use those to write copy or create offers that create tremendous levels of empathy uh, in the person—the prospect—who's actually watching the—watching the product or watching the VSL.
Yeah, that—that—that is good. Now one of the big arguments I've heard among, you know, sort of tweety-stiff psychologists and pundits on TV is that some people are born without the ability to have empathy. And yeah, I've always wondered—I—I don't know if that's true. I know that for some people it's a lot harder than for others—usually it's a little harder for men than for women—but even in—in that situation, I've seen a lot of women who've had a hard time getting the kind of empathy—not—not in social relationships necessarily, but in—in copy. What's—what's your opinion about that?
I think sociopaths don't have empathy. I think, um, you know, with my own mental health challenges, I know what it's like to not have any empathy. There was a period of time there where I was in a tremendously uh, narcissistic bipolar state and simply did not care about anybody else and was not able to understand the people's emotions at all. On an emotional level, though, I still understood them on an intellectual level at that point. Um, but yeah, I mean, can empathy be taught? I think—I don't think it'd be taught, but it can be developed, right? You can take what you currently have, and you can find a way to make it more intense and more powerful and find a way to take your personal human experiences, you know, take the specific and make it into the universal, essentially, because you—I always think—I tell people—you already have everything you need inside of you to be able to write more emotionally and with—with more connection. It's just a matter of are you willing to look inside yourself and see what you see without blinking in order to get—gain access to that.
Well, let me ask you a—a dangerous and provocative question. Okay? Do you think it's necessary to go through some kind of suffering—like maybe what you went through or something else—in order to really be able to have that kind of empathy?
I think life kicks everyone in the balls many, many times, and how hard life kicks you in the balls isn't the most important part, as long as you get kicked. So not everybody has gone through, you know, the car wreck I went through or the Lyme disease I went through or the bipolar stuff, but everybody has their suffering, everybody has their pain, everybody has things they've been through. And if you have suffered, you have what you need to be able to write more emotionally, because everyone is suffering pretty much all the time—they just don't want to admit it.
So how do you convert that pain and that suffering—past a focus on yourself, especially if the pain is great—to a prospect? How do you convert that? What's that—how do you change the focus?
You know, you change the focus, but—well, you know, you'll notice most of my stories are written first person for a reason. Um, if you go through any of my copy, it's almost always first person because that's the only way that you can really communicate internal emotion really effectively, right? You want people to be—I want people to be able to feel they are intimately inside the head of the narrator or the hero or whoever else um, is the thing. Beyond that, it's just a matter of, you know, I want to say like putting the—putting yourself in the prospect's shoes, but it's a matter of just kind of accessing your own pain and talking about—thinking about—like, so for instance, if I'm writing to um, 45-year-old women who want uh, to have amazing sex in their life—like Language Desire for instance or something like that—I am obviously not a 45-year-old woman. I don't know what it's like to be a 45-year-old woman who is scared that her boyfriend is going to leave her for a porn star because she can't talk dirty, but I do know what it's like to be insecure. I do know what it's like to be sad. I do know what it's like to feel abandoned or to feel unlovable or to feel the imposter complex or things like that. And all I really—if you know intellectually what the emotions that the hero or the character is supposed to um, inhabit, then you can find a way to look internally and experience your own times that you've gone through things. It's a lot like method acting, actually. I talk about—I call it method acting for marketers in the course, but it's largely just about taking, you know, what—what do you—what fuel—what tools do you have inside of you that allow you to access those emotions and that you already kind of know you need to kind of twist the knife in um, in your actual copy. And in the course, I talk a lot about what those emotions are and how to use shame and how to use all this other kind of stuff, but I think it's just a matter of getting, you know, self-awareness more than anything else—being willing to confront your own demons and understand that you uh, you contain multitudes.
You know what you're saying about uh, method acting reminds me—I was just talking with a client about yesterday—um, Dustin Hoffman has a great master class on acting.
Oh yeah.
And he has this one line which—it haunted me when I first heard it—disturbed me and stayed with me. He said, "If you're playing a—don't play a—find the inside you," and—and—and but the way he said it, you could tell he was right, in touch with that archetype.
Um, and—and it takes some courage to make that journey, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does. Yeah, it's terrifying. It's terrifying for people, but if you want to get really good, I think it's the way to do it. I think, you know, if you want to get really good and get to that next level and be able to write, you know, write and create offers and marketing at a level that just cuts through the—and connects emotionally, you got to be brave, you know. Um, being brave doesn't mean you don't feel fear. Being brave means you do feel fear, but you do it anyway.
Okay, so that's—that's something that um, not too many people talk about—encouraging copywriters. I mean, yeah, people talk about the courage to make, you know, extreme claims and the courage to walk around with a thousand dollars in cash in your pocket, so you know what it's like to be rich and all that kind of external stuff, but you're—you're talking about the internal courage. And yeah, and I—I think—I think it's a great point. We haven't talked about that uh, too much on this show, and—and you and I haven't talked about it. In fact, nobody's talked about it until today that I've heard.
I'm sure lots of people have talked about it.
Nathan, I kind of want to get a bit of a—a bit of clarification on—a lot of times—getting into the emotions of our prospects—you mentioned that—but when you're writing for somebody else and maybe it's a business owner, maybe it's a made-up character, or whatever the case may be—keys for getting into the emotions of that person—it's just by um, you know, it's by imagining yourself in that position—imagining yourself being that person—feeling it. You know, if I'm gonna sit down and try to write as a 45-year-old slightly overweight woman, I sit at my desk, and I sit there, and I—I try to like, you know, feel what that would be like—what would it be like to be a little bit too heavy? What would it be like to feel insecure about this thing or that thing? And just be willing—you know, we all have a masculine side, and we all have a feminine side—it is inside you, right? Don't be terrified of the fact that you have these other things going inside your brain. It really is possible to kind of access them, but it takes the ability to not be scared of what you're going to find inside there and not to judge yourself for having these emotions that might not be—I don't know—heteronormative or whatever else. You know, when I'm writing copy as a 45-year-old woman, I really feel like I'm a 45-year-old woman while I'm doing it. You know, it's fun.
Wow.
Freaks my wife out a little bit, but it's fun.
Do you talk to her like one of the girls when you're doing it?
No, we don't talk when I'm doing it. I'm in my—in my office talking to myself and typing.
Yeah. Okay. That's a good answer. All right, Nathan, are you done? Are you—if you have another question, we have a little more time than we ought to—wrap it up.
Um, you know, I'm just sitting back absorbing this. It's been so long since the last time Chris was on, and I'm just trying to bring most of this in as possible. I guess the only thing I could add to it is I tend to find—I—I just recently went through a piece of copy with one of my clients and found that the hero's journey was inside of the piece of copy. It was just—it was slimmed down. It wasn't all 12 points. I think—I think it was just like eight points of the hero's journey, but uh, the—just the concept of kind of internalizing these things that have worked for years and years and years, and they still—they still grab and—and create that connection with your reader or with your viewer—um, just the importance of understanding that there is a—like a universal template that we all can see ourselves in, and understanding that as a copywriter is very important. So I like to hear—I like to hear where you're going.
Yeah, the key—the key about the hero's journey—because again, my version of the hero's journey is a slimmed-down version as well, because you don't need every single one of those beats to make a sale. In fact, they can actually be negative if you're trying to make a sale as opposed to trying to have an actually satisfying story. Um, that's very important. But the thing about the hero's journey is Joseph Campbell didn't create the hero's journey; he unearthed it. It was already there. If you look at Gilgamesh, you look at Shakespeare, you look at any, you know, the Jesus Christ—any of these stories over the millennia—it was already there. For some—for whatever reason, that particular structure—those particular characters—is really genetically born into our brains as a way that a story should be—that's what we think a story should be. And if that is not there—if those components aren't there in some way—it doesn't feel right to us, and it won't emotionally connect with us either. You gotta cover those beats. Every single movie in Hollywood follows the exact same structure; it's all the same movie—these same beats at the same point in it—uh, but you won't—if you don't know anything about storytelling, you would never notice that. Also, I think—I've never really heard anyone say this before, but I'm sure many people have said this before—I haven't heard it—um, in real life when we get—when we—when we have an incredible struggle and we just missed it by that much and we, you know, survive and we're retelling what happened—that's going to have a version of the hero's journey. So I—I think it comes maybe out of the most uh, perilous and high-stakes uh, experiences in life, you know.
What I think so too. Yeah, yeah. And again, the hero's journey is almost, you know, there's always that moment of crisis, which is something I talk about a lot in my my program as well. And there's always that moment where the character can choose to either give up or get off their ass and go do something. And you'll see that everything, every movie, every sales letter that actually works, it always has that same kind of component.
Yeah, very cool.
Well, before we wrap up, if there are any copies left—and I'm not sure there will be at this point—um, if this is if this is a couple weeks after, there will not be. We are limiting the number available, correct? The current plan is the limit of 200. Um, that is possible that I will figure out a way to do more than that, but I'm not sure. Uh, we're going to sell out at 200. We're just going to, at some point, if we don't sell it on day one at 200, we'll sell out by day two or three at 200 for sure. Whether I will open it again or not, I don't know. I'm not sure if I'm going to do this again or not. I'd like to, but can happen. So I'll be deciding that as I get closer to the launch if I'm going to re-release more, or maybe I'll actually raise the price. Who knows. We'll see.
So how can people find it? Should they join your Facebook group, or are you going to...?
Yeah, what I would do: if you go to thepigmethod.com, um, there should be a page up there with like a waiting list kind of email or something like that. And if you get on that, then you will definitely hear about uh, if if and when or when and if we actually end up releasing it again. The goal would be to release it again next year, but who knows, you know, can happen. I can get sick again; anything could happen.
Well, stay healthy.
Whether or not you re-release it, I would do my best. Please stay healthy.
If you would if you would come back next week.
Yeah, or next week.
Oh yeah, I will come back next week. I want—I only own one shirt though, so I think I might wear the same shirt next week too. I hope that's okay.
Well, I I'm down to a black shirt too. The difference is I'm, you know, a little older, so I have a collar.
Um, okay. And uh, Nathan, I think that's it. I think we're all three gonna be wearing black shirts again next week.
Yeah, I think so. Mine is blue. This is a blue shirt. It's a deep blue shirt, like a navy blue shirt.
Yeah, navy blue.
There you go, navy blue. It's Air Force blue or whatever.
Yeah. All right, guys. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you check out the Copywriters Podcast website at copywriterspodcast.com. You can subscribe there and catch more episodes. If you want to check out next week's part of this conversation with Chris, make sure that you're subscribed. And until next time, we will catch you later.
Yeah, thank you. Catch you later. Your spam, you.