Transcription
This is a picture of Martin Farmer Burns.
What Farmer Burns would do is he would do what we call today a dramatic demonstration to sell his products and services. He was selling wrestling courses, right? He was like, "I need to get my message out there. How do I tell more people about what I'm doing?"
And so what he would do is he would go to the county fairs. He would go all across the country. His neck was so strong that he would get on a hangman's noose. They put the noose around his neck and then they would pull the trap door. He would fall the six-foot drop, which would normally break a person's neck and kill them. And then he would sit there and he would whistle the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy" while everyone around him was taking pictures, clapping, and cheering. And then afterwards, he would sell access to his wrestling course.
Today, I've got the coolest thing to share with you guys because this is a wrestling story but also a marketing story. And it's about one of my heroes, a guy named Farmer Burns. I'm going to show you some of the stories and some of the cool things about it because there are so many cool marketing principles. But also, he was selling a mail-order wrestling course in 1914. And not only that, he was doing it with space ads that were in magazines. He was doing it through direct mail and sales letters. And over the years, I've collected almost everything that shows how he was actually growing his business. And there are so many powerful principles you can use and apply inside your business to be more successful.
This picture right here is a picture of Farmer Burns actually wrestling. I paid $2745 for this original picture, which is a really cool one.
This is another picture, and I'll tell you a story. I don't remember how much I spent for this. I couldn't find the listing. I bought this probably 10 years ago. This is a picture of Martin Farmer Burns. He has a hangman's noose around his neck. And this is where I want to start the story.
What Farmer Burns would do is he would do what we call today a dramatic demonstration to sell his products and services. He was selling wrestling courses, right? He was like, "I need to get my message out there. How do I tell more people about what I'm doing?" And so what he would do is he would go to the county fairs. He would go from county to county all across the country. His neck was so strong that he would get on a hangman's noose. They put the noose around his neck and then they would pull the trap door. He would fall the six-foot drop, which would normally break a person's neck and kill them. And then he would sit there and he would whistle the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy" while everyone around him was taking pictures, clapping, and cheering. And then afterwards, he would sell access to his wrestling course.
The first principle for you guys to learn from Farmer Burns is if you want to promote your products and your services, it's not just putting ads out there. It's creating and doing dramatic demonstrations to get attention, to get people talking because people would talk about this. When he would come into a city, people knew that Farmer Burns was coming and they all wanted to come and watch him do the famous hangman drop and then they'd come there to watch it, astounded it was possible, and they would go buy his wrestling course, even if they didn't want to be wrestlers, because they wanted to learn how to have the neck like Farmer Burns.
What he was selling most of the time was his mail-order wrestling course. And I will show you this. This is with the actual book, the course that Matt Fury relaunched as a physical book, and he sold millions of dollars worth in the last, you know, 20 years or so since he republished it. Um, but I want to show you guys the sales process behind what he was doing because there are so many cool little nuances of what he did and how he did it.
So, the first one right here, this is the actual ad that he was running in magazines and flyers and things like that. It says, "He thought he could throw me, but..." and then "Learn wrestling secrets from world champion Farmer Burns and Frank Gotch. Send for your free book." So, they started with a free lead magnet, right? They put the advertisement out there and sent a lead magnet for a free book. And so this one took me years to finally be able to find, but this was the actual book that they were selling. It's called "Physical Culture and Wrestling." This is what Farmer Burns used to build his entire business. And so, lead magnet, just like lead magnets nowadays. When you open it up, you start reading it. It's very cool things talking about wrestling and giving you some information. They would run the ad first. People respond to the ad. They send this lead magnet. At the end of this lead magnet, then from there, they would sell the actual course.
And so, this was a course they would mail every single month. They would get new lessons. They would walk them through how to strengthen their neck, how to lift weights, how to do calisthenics, how to become a better wrestler, how to do the core locks and the different moves and things like that.
This is another version I got that's not in the glass. I'll show you kind of what each of these looks like. Kind of a neat fact. When I built my wrestling room at my house, I wanted to put a lot of just cool, like Easter eggs throughout the wrestling room so that it was just special and unique. And if you ever had a chance to go there or seen the videos of it, we have these gladiator walls. Behind the gladiator walls, I actually took one of my first edition copies of Farmer Burns' course, and we actually took one, and it was kind of painful because, like, we destroyed it, but we turned it into wallpaper.
The lessons they sign up for, right? This is book number two. And then inside, there'll be two different lessons. And so, literally, it's like, here are the different exercises, here's how to do it. Ahead of their time. They were like, people weren't selling home-study courses back in the day. He was doing it for wrestling. And so, this was the actual home-study course that people signed up for. They would get mailed out to them every single week.
As I started finding ones that actually came in the original packaging, I noticed that sometimes he would send this with one of the mail-order courses, but between the different courses coming out, he wasn't just shipping them out in packaging. He was a great marketer. He was always thinking about follow-up and how do we get people more happy with the product? How do we make sure they get results?
During the off weeks, he'd send them actual letters. And so, these are the equivalent of follow-up emails that we send out to our audiences nowadays. Okay? And they're really cool because each one, you know, it's "Dear So-and-so." Like, what he's doing here is so powerful. It's like Dan Kennedy 101. Dan Kennedy's been doing a print newsletter for, man, for 40-some odd years, right? And when we bought Dan's company from him, and I was trying to change newsletter stuff, he's like, "No, you don't understand." He's like, "The goal of the newsletter is to build a relationship with the attractive character." He's like, "20% content, 80% is entertainment. It's building relationship." Like Farmer Burns understood it back then. Like he's not just like, "Here's five more exercises to do." He's telling a story like, "I was out there. I met the student. Here's what we did." And like, and then you're surely Farmer Burns signs it and sends it out, right? Okay.
So, the question now is, how can you use this stuff inside of your business? Right? Like, as you are launching a product or a book or a course or something like, how can you implement some of the stuff? So, number one, coming back to Farmer Burns doing the hangman drop. My question for you is, what is the secret sauce? Like, what is the thing that you have that's unique, right? That's demonstrable? You can demonstrate to create some type of dramatic demonstration around it, or who do you know that can help with that?
Remember when I launched my "Expert Secrets" book? I was at a time in my life where I was trying to think about, like, "Okay, how do I get attention? I want people to like, I'm so, I spent so much time writing this book. I want everyone in the world to know about it. I want them to buy it." And I remember thinking, "Okay, what are the different dramatic demonstrations I can do?" And we did a lot of them, but one that was really fun and really simple is I realized that, like, me reading my own book isn't that cool. But I was like, "What if I worked with the world's fastest reader, have him come to Boise, and have him read the entire book?" And I luckily know him. His name's Howard Berg. So, I called Howard Berg up. I'm like, "I have a crazy idea. Would you be willing to come out to Boise? I want you to read my book, and then I'm going to quiz you on it to see if you actually read it." And he was like, "Done."
We brought him out there. I got everything set up and live, and then we clicked live on Facebook Live. I was like, "Hey everyone, I'm here with Howard Berg, the world's fastest reader." I give Howard my book. I'm like, "All right." And he'd never read it yet. I'm like, "Okay, read this book." And we set a timer. "Ready, set, go." We started the clock. He opens the book. And if you've ever seen Howard read, he reads like this. It's like insane. Like, and so we sat there and we timed him. He read my entire book in under five minutes, if I remember, if I remember right. Reads the entire book. And afterwards, I'm like, "Okay, Howard, me and everyone here watching thinks this is fake. You did not actually read the book. So, give me the book back. I'm going to ask you some questions. What are the three things you have to have to start a mass movement?" He's like, "Oh, attractive character." And he goes through my thing. I'm like, "Okay." And he goes through, and he knew everything that I said by reading my book in five minutes.
And what just happened? We got attention. And so, from that one dramatic demonstration, we sold hundreds and hundreds of copies of the book. And then it gets better because after we were done with that, we took that clip and we made an ad. We had a countdown clock, him reading the book, all the stuff. And then we ran that as an ad, which sold thousands of copies of the book over time.
So, that's just one example of how you can use dramatic demonstrations like Farmer Burns did to get more message and more people excited about whatever it is you're selling. Because most people go and they create an ad, they put it out there, they hope for the best, versus like, how do you create something that people will talk about? People will debate in the comments, like something that's actually exciting and interesting.
The sales funnel is the secret. Like, you get attention. The sales funnel is the thing that actually gets you to make money. The entire world is a sales funnel when you guys understand it. This is not something we invented. Look at how the legends back in the day, how they built and grew their companies because all these principles that they were using back then, and you apply those things today, will give you an unfair advantage over all of your competitors and everyone who are in the markets you're trying to compete in.
All right, I got a gift for you guys. I would love to give you some of Farmer Burns' ads. Obviously, you know, most of you guys want to learn wrestling from him, but until, you know, for right now, down below, I'm going to scan a copy of this ad right here, as well as all these different letters, so you can go read them and just get ideas about how they were structuring these things way back in the day. And so, that's my gift for you guys. Hopefully, you get some good ideas and insights for how you can structure your marketing campaigns based on the stuff that Farmer Burns was doing. So, the link in the description, click on that, and you'll get a PDF with all the swipe files. Other than that, I hope you guys enjoyed this lesson. Hope you got a lot of value from it. I'll see you guys all in the next.