CRAIG CLEMENS: From Broke Dropout To $1 Billion Dollars In Sales In My 30's! (MUST WATCH INTERVIEW)

hi i'm craig clemons and i went from two tacos for a dollar at jack in a box to selling a billion dollars worth of stuff via copywriting and i'm one of the passionate few omar is one of the best interviewers in the game he does his homework he asks the questions that other people don't think about to pull out the lessons that you need to take your life to the next level don't miss this episode i'm really proud of it and i know you're gonna love it welcome to this episode of the passionate view podcast today it's your host omar and today we have a brand new episode with none other than billion dollar copywriter craig clemens known as the co-founder of golden hippo which has helped clients collectively to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars craig shares with us in this incredible interview his story of going from middle class beginnings and going through an awkward stage in his teens and early 20s trying to find himself ultimately finding himself scrounging through couches for quarters just to get food whatever he could to get by but later finding success after he found a mentor and struggled for a long time to master the art and business of copywriting so wherever you're at in life whether you'd like to grow your business maybe you'd like to master a craft maybe you're trying to find yourself or figure out what you want to do next i promise you there will be a gem in this interview for you that will also be equally inspiring and educational so with no further ado i want to encourage you guys to sit back relax and enjoy this powerful interview with my good friend and billion dollar copywriter craig clements enjoy thanks so much for being on the show today craig pleasure is my man yes how many episodes do you have to cross before it becomes the passionate many yeah i know a lot of people say that grant cardone actually brought that up one time stole my joke but uh it's an honor to have you on thank you for having us here in your office and i know it's been uh i did the leg with the wrong bottom of the foot forward it's all good man that's all good thank you for having us here in your office i know it's been a couple years in the making i was trying to do this interview and now a lot of people might have heard about what you do with golden hippo they might know you as a billion dollar copywriter but a lot of people don't know that you grew up from very humble beginnings and sort of didn't see this path to a company that would go on impact the world with nutritional supplements and all this other stuff you guys do but take me back to the beginning like where did you grow up what was your childhood like and where did the ball start rolling for you as a kid so my childhood was good i was you know middle class raised in a suburban town called thousand oaks which is you know there's no white picket fences but there are brown fences and sidewalks and trees and we always had food on the table my parents were together at first my dad was an engineer my mom was an elementary school teacher and i just didn't really like to do homework so i failed a lot of classes and didn't understand the need for school even at an early age i was wondering what am i going to do with all this history stuff and algebra stuff i just wanted to get out there and do something man i wanted to be a circus ringmaster i'm actually not even joking really that was what i wanted to do when i was around like seven or eight and in a way i guess it kind of came through yeah and then where did you sort of go to middle school high school at that time did you fit in did you also have a tough time in school then so do you know they have that hall of fame in school where they vote like who's the desert island dream and who's most likely to succeed and the class clown so i got voted most bashful so i was the shyest guy in the whole school yeah i actually don't think i was the shyest guy because i feel like the shyest guy was probably just not even spotted right you know he didn't get the votes but i was spotted as a shy person yeah and so the most visible introvert the yes yes exactly so that was me i think that was eighth grade or ninth grade i'm having a hard time remembering and i you know played a little bit of sports like before high school so i was athletic a bit but i wasn't good enough to play the high school sports then when i was 13 though i found martial arts and that was really my thing and so i went around the united states with this fight team fighting in karate tournaments like the karate kid actually that type of stand-up fighting and this is right before ufc was coming around what belt did you go up to i got to black oh really yeah first degree black belt and then at what point did you sort of stop that or wean off that so i did that five nights a week till i was about 20 years old so when my friends were starting to drink alcohol and go to parties and all that when they were 17 i'd be on a friday night in the studio man working on my round kicks yeah in the dojo and the dojo that's right that's right yeah sensei yeah i actually did karate as well did you i did it totally style to a blue belt okay i did it to a blue belt but i remember doing the katas and the pinyon one pinion two and uh sparring and all that yeah it was great yeah yeah and it probably translated to a lot of areas in life too it helps you with that combat mentality a little bit yeah well it helped me with the confidence because i was so shy i mean forget about talking to girls i couldn't even like talk to another man and have a friendship if i didn't have something to like you know force us together and so i recognized this and i started buying books on how to talk to people so i remember when i was in high school i bought this book by an author her name is leo lowndes l-o-w-n-d-e-s called 92 little tricks for success in business and personal relationships and it talked about how to give a compliment and how to say hello and how to say goodbye and just like really basic stuff but that's what i needed because i was so shy so i remember i would go up to other guys and i'd be like hey omar how you doing how was your weekend man and they'd say oh it was good i'd be like cool man yeah mine was good too all right see you around i'm like wow that was good i just held a normal conversation didn't say anything dumb and it left on a high note and i would practice that in high school just having normal conversations with people so this was really something you were like working on yes yes yes okay and then what happens you said you're 20 21 so at this age are you thinking about going to college after high school or did you have any idea what you wanted to do with your career or life after karate yeah so i didn't have the grades to get into college i graduated high school with a 1.7 gpa and my parents and teachers didn't like that very much i had to go to summer school to make up a class to be able to walk in the graduation and then even when i was in the graduation because i wasn't really supposed to be there at first they didn't call my name when i walked across my poor grandma was sitting in the stands and she was just waiting for craig clemens and it got all the way to z and she's like where's greg what happened you know she couldn't see so uh yeah barely graduated high school my parents had this dream that i would go to college but it didn't seem to be in the cards for me that said there's something called junior college and they'll accept anyone into there you know so i started going to junior college and i was taking the classes that seemed to be the most fun along with the regular classes and i would do this thing where when i was getting an f i would drop the class on the last possible day so it wouldn't go on my report card because i knew i needed to get a b average to get into a real college and then i had a couple times where i forgot to make the phone call to drop the class and then like d or f actually hit on my report card and that really crapped me out of that college thing man because uh that was my last shot so how were you at that age when college was yeah it was like 1920 well i graduated high school i think it just turned 18 about the same week as graduation really and then went to junior college after that summer and i was still just trying to figure out like what is the way around all this yeah and i used to get this magazine called the penny saver do you remember that from the mail with classified ads on the back was the get rich quick section it was all the get rich quick ads that would say like you know make twenty dollars an envelope stuffing envelopes or get rich buying real estate and i'd call all of them and i'd have them send me the materials and i'd go through them i'd be like one of these things has to work you know one of these has really got to be the way to get rich i always knew i was going to figure out a way to become successful and i knew it wasn't going to be through this college but i didn't know what the hell it was where was that where was that from the desire to be successful or rich or was it just like what was it that inspired you because you said your parents weren't entrepreneurs right yeah you know what i think it was man is is growing up my parents were quite frugal we always have food on the table clothes in the back but a lot of those clothes were homemade a lot of that food actually every food item we ate had to be bought with a coupon if there was not a coupon on the paper we would not buy it so when a new cereal would come out with like the new monster and you know the special cinnamon fruity combination like mom i want this new cereal should be like well great let's look on sunday and see if a coupon comes out in the paper and then i'd be like going through the sunday paper and just turning the pages and hoping that the count cinnamon would come up and then nothing and then i wasn't eating that cereal for a few months because they usually wouldn't put the coupon out until it slowed down you know so i think that sparked the desire in me to not have to do that and then also my allowance was different than my friends so my friends you know they would get uh like set allowance and mine was per chore so i would get five cents a chore cents five cents so at the end of the week i get like a dollar 35 and my friends would be like what the you always got a dollar 35 you know i'd be like well how much do you get they'd be like i got 20 bucks so you know they don't have to do yeah yeah so like wait a second okay working is not the way that actually in reverse i guess it was probably supposed to teach me work ethic but it actually taught me that nah working isn't the way the way is to not do and get the 20 bucks so yeah so that was that was a childhood for me monetarily but it also forced my brothers and i to figure out other ways to make money so we had a golf course uh like in the next neighborhood over from us and we would get soda cans and put them in a cooler and we'd go park up where the golf carts would drive by and we'd sell the sodas for 50 cents you know and that would be one way of making money my brothers would go find golf balls like in the hills then they'd sell them back to the golfers and then something else we did how many brothers do you have two brothers they're twins and you guys are always close yeah they're two years younger than me so one day we were in hawaii family vacation you're not supposed to put your shoe bottom up to the camera you're supposed to do this leg i'm learning for the folks at home in hawaii and on the beach there's shells everywhere go into the gift shop and there was a big shell like a clam with a bunch of little shells on a plastic over it and all of a sudden it was like eight bucks and i was like wait a second these are the same shells that were on the beach for free someone puts them in little shells and a big shell and puts a plastic over it it's like damn that's a pretty good business so my brothers and i next day we went to the beach we got all the shells and we put them in a garbage bag and we did that again the next day when we got home we took the big shells and we put the small shells in the big shells and we wrapped him up in plastic and we went door to door in our neighborhood and saying like hey who wants to buy one of these shells and that was a good haul the issue was the supply of shells in excuse me was limited and we didn't make enough to get back on a plane to go to hawaii you know yeah the shells and the beaches in california weren't quite as nice so pretty early on you learned the power of sales i did yes i learned the power of sales and the power of presentation another thing that i did was i got all of the neighborhood kids together to bring their dogs and cats and my brothers and i we collected reptiles so we had like snakes and lizards and frogs put them all around our lawn and we had a neighborhood zoo and charged the adults a dollar to come walk through and see the different cats and dogs and reptiles so you guys were trying everything yeah all kinds of things i did the lawn mowing we're usually usually the one bringing up ideas to your brothers since they were younger and they would do it or was like a team thing or well i would bring up the idea and then they would outsmart me so like they would make it happen well no so the golfer thing is a good example my friend matt who was the neighbor kid and i would do the thing with the coca-cola selling those and we'd make like eight bucks and then my brothers would go find the golf balls they'd sell them back the golf balls along with the sodas and they'd walk with like 30 bucks because they realized that the golf balls was where the money was at yeah so they would see the upsell in it yeah they were better at building up that funnel yeah you know so then okay so then talk to me about how sort of early on then i know in your early 20s and mid-20s that's when you sort of start hear about um sales right you got like a telemarketing job or that's when you start realizing oh you'd actually make some sort of stable income or something like that so i was a waiter from about 18 to 20. and i was a very bad waiter i got fired from every waiting job i ever had one hyatt i'll just count them out loud so it sounds it sounds better uh wood ranch barbecue outback steakhouse rib ranch bbq you can see i like getting that free barbecue yeah yeah i like wood ranch barbecue by the way oh wood ranch was great i lasted a month there that was my shortest one ever and yeah so i guess four i guess i got fired from four table waiting jobs and i i was really good at convincing the manager to hire me but i in retrospect i was omar i was a bad waiter i was good at talking to the tables at that point because i've been reading the books you know i wasn't shy anymore but when it came time to remember a fork or you know ranch or the barbecue yeah it was the organization thing i was never good at the organization thing and that's a secret skill of being a waiter is you have to be really organized and remember what your tables want so sucked at being a waiter and it sucked to suck at being a waiter because at that time in my life that was the best place to work man you get like 75 bucks a night in cash at the end of the night you work with a bunch of hot girls so it was like the scene and if you worked at outback steakhouse then you'd hang out with the people who worked at macaroni grill and chili's and it was like the cool spot to yeah that was like the trendy crowd in thousand oaks was the little like restaurant workers you know and when i realized wood ranch was devastating for me also because of all the restaurants to work at if you worked at wood ranch you were like the right that was like the she she spot to work out so when i got that job i remember going out that night to the bar and i was like yeah you know i work at wood ranch barbecue oh yeah yeah the one in gory hills yeah the one where you wear the ties yeah that's that's where i work that lasted a month and then devastatingly i was fired and this wasn't that long ago right it's the early 2000s this is yes i was 20 i'm 40 now so 20 years ago then i was jobless i still live with my parents and i heard about a job that some people had at the junior college where they would go after school and call people on the phone and sell them tools and industrial supplies like drill bits belt sanders and things like that and i heard they were making some decent money like fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars a month which was even more than the top waiting jobs of the bank good waiting job you'd probably do a couple grand a month three grand a month unless you worked at cheesecake factory now remember i said wood ranch was like the shishi place to work cheesecake factory was another level of income if you worked at the cheesecake factory you were almost guaranteed to make like 4 500 bucks a month but the hours the cheesecake factory sucked you'd have to be there till midnight so you couldn't go party with the people from chili's and macaroni grill and all that they would get off early so didn't want to put in the dedication to do cheesecake they were the more committed crowd yeah yeah yeah that was where the you know honor roll so i decided to try my luck at this uh telemarketing company i didn't really know what telemarketing was at the time but i did that and you just call these farmers and mechanics that are out in iowa or idaho or oklahoma and offer them these tools and industrial supplies that you you would have pictures of but we never actually saw them there would be pictures of them in a book and then there would be the sales pitch that you read when you get the person on the phone so i tried that out and that ended up being a lot of fun and i made a little bit of money and how long did you do that did that maybe a year yeah about a year and i was decent at it and when they would get new tools in you had to come up with the sales pitch from scratch and i would write some sales pitches that did pretty well and then i remember once they they run this booster pack and i i i love selling this booster back i could sell the out of this booster pack man i had the best sales pitch for this thing you know it's one one of those things if your car breaks down in the middle of winter you can bring this thing out it'll jump start your car you know if you're uh driving somewhere with your wife and her hair dryer stops working she can plug it right in this booster pack and get ready for the big event so she's not up in your hair you know the mechanics like that one yeah yeah so i had this pitch and it was doing really well and it was getting me to the top of the sales boards and the manager took my pitch and copied it and gave it to all the salesmen in the office oh wow because that was better for them and i was so pissed but what i didn't realize is that was my first copywriting was writing the sales pitches to sell those tools writing words that sell yeah yeah yep so i did that for about a year and then i heard about these guys that were doing the same type of thing picking up the phone and selling merchant accounts to businesses which let them process credit cards so like credit card terminals and the ability to process credit cards on the web and they were making five to six thousand dollars a month selling these things and so i asked them to get me a job there the three guys that i knew and they refused and i think they were jealous i think they didn't want me coming in there and outselling them so i went to their competitor and i said hey are you guys hiring uh the company is called bank card usa they said yes and i remember i was a cocky bastard man i went in there and i told the big boss i was like hey how many sales do i need to do in my first month to get my own office and not a cubicle and he said if you do 20 sales your first month you could have an office i said great so you know you hear about the guys that like gary vee or whatever he would take that or you know tom bilyeu or some of these these awesome entrepreneurs and they'd show up at six a.m and you know work for 16 hours a day to get those 20 sales man something in me just didn't let me do that yeah so i went in there like the first day i was there like you know seven a.m and i remember i was determined to make a sale my first day and i stayed impressed i did get a sale my first day and it's hard to get a sale because usually you have to ship them a fedex package and they look through it you know but this guy just faxed on the stuff and i was like man you just got to send this back by the end of the day you know it's going to help me out and i got a sale my first day and then the next day rolls around my arm alarm goes off at 7am and i was like snooze that snooze you know like i was just lazy man i was lazy and so i sold like i don't know eight or ten in my first month which was solid but i didn't have the office and i just didn't have the work ethic yeah yeah because i was going to bars every night and you know trying to hit on the hot girl from macaroni grill when the people were serious about the job would be in bed in there at six in the morning yeah and as i tell my team now hard work gets rewarded and so there was someone at the office who would pass out the leads as they came in on the phone the way the company worked is they'd send out pieces in the mail and the business owner will get the piece and they'd call and be like hey i want a credit card machine i think but i don't know if i'm going to start my business yet but i'd like to just talk to salesman just get some pricing okay that's one level of lead right then there's someone else that calls up and be like hey i got someone here he wants to buy a rolex he wants to buy it today i need to process a credit card right now that's a different kind of lead one of them is more likely to lead to a sale than the other you got a guy who's coming in at 6 00 a.m trying to put food on the table for his family then you got another guy another salesman in the credit card office that's rolling out of bed at 10 30 a.m half hung over walking in there like wearing the same from the nightclub last night who are you going to give the good lead to you know so i wasn't getting the good leads and i didn't deserve the good leads because i was lazy man i wasn't dedicated so that job was a step up from the other telemarketing job i had and that first year i made 43 000 at the age of 21. so i was rich at that age that much money i was like legit loaded i sold my piece of car that i had to have someone at the company jumpstart every day before i could drive home i bought a nice used dodge ram truck and i was living high on the hog and the the girls from macaroni grill would talk to me now even though i wasn't in the restaurant scene now i was like established you know you had a dodge yeah you had the dodge ram i always actually saw that truck as being an important part of my success with women because when i was in high school there was a kid a year down from me and when he turned 16 his parents bought him oh his dad actually worked on on cars his dad got him a brand new lowered chevy silverado on like 20 inch rims cherry red it was so dope man and all the girls at the end of the school day would just hang out in the bed of that truck and i had this hand-me-down 87 volvo station wagon maroon sat seven comfortably was a good thing about it but like you know it was always on the edge of falling and voted the most uh the most introverted or yeah yeah and high school didn't go so well i mean it wasn't bad you know i mean a lot of people had it worse but uh you know it was all right but i was i was embarrassed to drive my car home from school past that truck you know i know they'd all be looking at me so i'd take the different route out of the parking lot so that was a big deal when i got that truck and then so after the copywriting jobs i'm sorry after the telemarketing jobs what happens next so i was still living in thousand oaks i finally moved out of my dad's place at the ripe old age of 21 and thousand oaks was a great place to be raised but once you're 21 everyone's gone man all my friends had their together had gone to college so i was there with like the other losers who were going to junior college or training to you know finally get that cheesecake factory or whatever they were doing you know they weren't the people who stayed home and kind of didn't really write too much or aspire to do more yeah right so the people who were doing more you know as one kid from my high school went to harvard there was like a ton of them that went to san diego state or university of san diego or university of arizona or cal poly and me and my loser friends would go visit them on the weekends and we'd go down to san diego and they'd be like living in the dorms or in like a apartment with three or four other people having parties no parents around you know just living the life man and i was like man i up i'm still living with my dad you know and then when i moved out i was just still living in a thousand oaks hanging out with a bunch of waiters you know these guys are like living the college dream dealing with the tailgate parties and the frat parties and all that and i regret not going to college people ask me hey craig should i go to college you didn't go to college and you know you still got to be successful and school isn't for me well go to college for the experience if you're going to go to college go to the experience and now i've realized that certain colleges you can get an amazing applicable education you can get skills that you can take with you you know my dad always told me the reason for going college because he didn't go to college and i was like dad why should i go to college he said well when you go to college employers see that you can start something and complete it and that's important and i think that is a good reason people should go to college starting something completing it gives you a sense of pride pick the right college and you will learn some applicable stuff like i was at moorpark junior college you know i had some great professors who i learned a lot from but some of the classes were just you know not things that were applicable and the experience those are some of the most fun years of your life you know you're basically still in that time almost man you know like enjoy those 20s man these 20s are amazing and i think it's more amazing when you're not living with your dad and uh you know trying to like survive on uh free barbecue hand-me-downs from some restaurant you're working on yeah wow and then it was was it interesting oh so that i did yeah that does have a conclusion so thousand oaks was boring so i decided to pack up my stuff and move down to san diego because most of my friends had moved to san diego out of arizona as cal poly did you have a plan to go to san diego what you were going to do or no i was going to work from home selling the credit card merchant account so my boss gave me his blessing he said yeah you can work from home even though you have people do that we'll just send you the leads down there and take care of you so i get my home office set up and i come down to san diego and i remember that first morning the phone starts ringing at 6 00 am it's one of my past clients i sold a merchant account to i was like man this this is gonna be every day people waking me up at six a.m and i decided to try to find a local job on the phone somewhere that would be able to pay the bills hopefully and then some instead of trying to work from home realize that wasn't for me so little i know that 43 000 on the phone lines would be very hard to duplicate i didn't realize that that was a really good job i thought that that would be easy to find so i bounced around from one dead end telemarketing job to another for about three years down there and that forty three thousand dollars i had gotten i'd gotten it as an imminent independent contractor so i didn't pay any taxes on it and i wasn't making any money down there so i had to spend that to live so i burned through all this money i owed to the irs so pretty soon i'm like 20 something 30 grand in debt you know with the the penalties and the money i was supposed to spend the taxes and i didn't have anything coming in and that's when i was looking through the couch to find the money to go to jack-in-the-box for the two tacos for the dollar taught myself to cook so i could eat decent without having to spend as much money you know we go to costco and get the chicken breasts with my buddy's parents costco membership card yeah yeah you know and uh the ramen noodles are cliche for a reason man you know those are pretty damn good when you're broke and you can throw some chicken in there and some barbecue sauce and make some weird concoctions it's cost-effective yeah yeah creative yeah so that's what i was doing there man i remember chipotle was the new thing and that would be a splurge you know to go to chipotle because burrito would be like six bucks and i'd drive by and there was a guy i knew that worked there and he would hook me up with a quesadilla price the burrito and i'd drive by my bike and if he wasn't working there i would just keep going and go back in the box because i didn't want to spend that much money holy and at this time you're in your mid-20s you're like 24. just not like 22 23. yeah yeah so forget about guacamole you know yeah that's out of the question yeah yeah i have a fantasy can i share yeah absolutely pretend i'm on a therapist couch yeah i have a fantasy one day that i should do i i dream of going to chipotle and buying guacamole for everyone in the restaurant i think that would be exciting yeah that'd be fun someday someday that would be awesome so yeah bounce around i had this backup plan and i told my parents when i dropped out of college which i i finally did when i got the merchant account job i said mom and dad if i'm 25 and i'm not making a hundred grand a year i will become a stock broker because a stock broker was guaranteed big money if you're good on the phones the only thing is you got to get up at 4 am when the market opens and i was like mom and dad i'm going to wait till i'm 25 because i don't want to get up at 4am but if i'm 25 i'm not making this money i will do it if i have to then the internet came about and sites like e-trade and td waterhouse and scottrade and all that come up the stockbroker career just evaporates it's gone so my backup plan my safety net disappeared so i'm 23 i'm working in this shitty ass marketing job 30 000 helping car use car dealerships sell used cars in a way that was even shadier than they did already that's what i was telling them on the phone was like hey buy our used car marketing package you know and yeah going nowhere fast and by this time my friends were graduating college and they were getting like company bmws and salaries 60 grand a year and 70 grand a year and he was like oh yeah i remember this one cat got a job working at this some computer center and i always liked computers and he was working at this computer center he bought a brand new bmw and he also had roommates but he had the master bedroom and i was like man that would have been me i would have the bmw i would have the master bedroom you know are you smoking a lot of weed drinking at this time i was selling weed but not really uh on like a uh el chapo level more on like a 22 year old white dude from thousand oaks level so my roommate loved to smoke weed i wasn't crazy about smoking weed i would watch it or smoke once when i watch a movie or something like that but it would make my shyness come back yeah so if i smoke in a social setting i wasn't talking to nobody but this guy loves smoking weed and he convinced me that if we sold a quarter ounce of weed that after you sell the first four um bags then the fifth one becomes free to smoke and i was like i don't smoke that much man so we'd have to sell half the last bag so i get like at least 10 bucks profit you know and he wanted to go to business with me because i owned a safe and we could keep it in the safe in my room so i agree to that so we were uh weed dealers attack team for for a stretch in there he'd get the free weed i'd get the 10 or 20 bucks and you know we'd sell about a quarter ounce a week or something like that um i did have a a friend in thousand oaks white surfer kid who became a big time pot dealer and he got killed uh by uh um deal gone wrong and this was his greatest kid man his name was was phil shanoff he was a freshman when i was a senior and he was such a good surfer kid you know he had a cut out good times and yeah don't sell drugs because like this guy died um and he was a super big-hearted guy who just chased that money yeah yeah wow so here you are in your mid-20s selling selling shady selling his car stuff and selling pot yeah white boy amount of weed things on the phones and and still committed to being rich like in your mind like i got it yeah i was like i'm gonna figure this out at some point yeah but i better hurry up yeah because that uh chipotle ain't gonna pay for itself and then i got introduced in a roundabout way to the gentleman who would become my mentor his name's eben pagan and i believe you do you guys know each other yeah yeah okay so eben at the time had written a book for men how to meet women and i remember talking to him on the phone and i was like hey man how did you meet evan uh we were introduced to a mutual friend and so my shyness led me to read books on how to meet women because as you remember i couldn't even like hold small talk with other men let alone women so i was reading these books on dating advice i met some people in that world like neil strauss and mystery if you know he is the pickup community yeah yeah so that was that was a um introduction that led to eben who wrote a book called double your dating and i remember talking on the phone and i knew him pre-book and he he told me about this book he would written and i was like oh what do you what are you doing with it is it on like amazon.com or something and he's like no it's an e-book and i said what is an e-book and he said well it's it's a file you send them the file and they print out the book at home and i was like wait a second people give you money for that he's like yeah i sell for 39.95 it's like wait a second you take 39 bucks from these people and then you don't even send him a book he's like no no i sent him a file and i was like no man you're going to jail that sounds shady as and he's like no no it's an e-book you know i'm like okay whatever whatever good luck with that he's like yeah well say what you want to do i made four thousand dollars selling that book last month and talked to him a month later he said he made 17 000 selling the book a month after that he told me he made 70 000 in a single month selling the book and that blew my freaking mind i had never personally knew someone who made the amount of money that i considered to be rich and that was it so i told him i said hey man i want to come work for you i'll shine your shoes i'll get your coffee do whatever it is i just want to find out how you make it that's 70 000 a month and he's like ah thanks but no thanks and you know i was kind of kind of bummed because that was the the like glimpse of possibility but i didn't give up so i go on his website and it's not even a real website man it's like it says enter your name and email address and we'll send you dating tips for meeting women and that's all it was there's no pages it was just entered the name and email address what i later knew was called a squeeze page right yeah so i put in the name and email address and i start getting these newsletters with dating tips and advice and by this time i had a fairly semi-normal social life i was going to the bars and having you know dates and things like that and i'm reading i'm like you know i could write this stuff with dating tips so i sat down omar one night i remember was a friday night and i remember this because it was rare that he didn't go out to the bar on a friday night and i wrote one of those dating tips and i was careful to write it in his exact writing style which is very conversational you know it's very strange like single line [Music] paragraphs a lot of spacing i wrote it i sent it to him and he wrote me back he's like okay now we can talk and i uh got offered a job from him at three thousand dollars a month which even though it was less than i was making a few years back at that point it was life-changing money because i hadn't seen three thousand dollars a month in a long time yeah especially doing something that you're you're getting paid to do something that could potentially lead to something bigger or yourself yeah learn from this guy and i this is maybe could be my finally path to get rich and i was still omar trying to all the multi-level marketing programs yeah i was still reading the books on how to invest in real estate i was still reading the rich dad poor dad and the think and grow rich look at all that stuff i'm still looking for that all the time i'm in your mid-20s at this point now right at this point i'm like 23. yeah and then i start working for him and i'm doing customer service but not like how to download this ebook but like hey will this help me get my ex-girlfriend back people would write it i'm a 40 year old guy i just got divorced i haven't dated in 20 years well this helped me get back on the scene and i would write those guys and be like oh yeah on page 37 there's a way to talk to women that'll help you meet 10 new women this weekend you know so i was kind of learning what was inside the head of the customer and writing them back in a way to sell them yeah yeah so you were learning kind of like an intro to copywriting i didn't really know what copywriting was yet still in real time you were learning it because they were telling you the concerns specifically yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah so i was doing that um i was doing a link partner exchange so i'd write people back in those days um if you had links pointing to your website from other websites you'd get ranked higher in google so i'd write people who had other dating websites and be like hey you want to trade links and then we'd link to each other's site and that was something else i did so those were the first two things i did at the company and eben taught me marketing he would buy me books by guys like gary halberty i'd be reading the gary halbert letter and that's when i learned what copywriting was and for those that don't know what is copywriting so copywriting is taking those words that you would use to make a sale to someone in person or on the phone putting them down on paper or in these days on a web page or in a video and then sending that out to a million people so you don't have to pick up the phone and call every person individually and that was the big epiphany that i had so writing words that sell at scale i was like wow i can do this sales pitch the same sales pitch i say to someone on the phone and i can just take the sales pitch and send it in the mail or put it in the newspaper or put it on a website and then get people to go that and i don't have to pick up the damn phone anymore that's amazing so i wanted to learn copywriting and evan was willing to teach me but it was tough man it was tough at first because i wasn't a natural and copywriting is hard you have to really get the nuances of the english language and the nuances of what the great this copywriter of all time or one of eugene schwartz calls the channeling of human desire so figuring out how to take the emotions and the desires that someone's already feeling and channel them into what you are selling so i started learning that so you start learning and then i heard i know i heard an interview where you said i think it was with mike dillard where you said that uh you would have books with you all the time so you spent like two or three years just non-stop it's just reading reading trying to figure it out you'd be an in-n-out burger dripping the burger onto the eugene schwartz book yeah yeah yep and that book was 100 bucks dude breakthrough advertising eben bought it for me wow but yeah i was totally immersed man i was a music junkie when i lived in san diego i used to love jack johnson and i'd get all the live show recordings and listen to them but when i got this job with ebon i stopped listening to the music and i would only in my truck listen to copyrighting programs and the great thing about that truck is it had a cd player and a cassette player just like i listen to old-school gary halbert cassette tapes there was this one gary halbert program i listened to like seven times in a row to get all the marketing knowledge and i did that for about three years just total immersion in marketing copywriting business development leadership all of these new skills and for the first time in my life i really enjoyed learning because i had associated learning with the stuff they force on you in school right like you know your abc's and playing the song flute did you have to play the song flute i remember that yeah that was like in that was like sixth grade the is a song flute man you learn to play this thing and then you can't even like be at a party and like you know like to have a someone's going to hell here you happen to have a song flute yeah jump on it with a band you know what they could at least like teach you piano or drums or guitar or something like that you know so random i bet the guy who invented the song flute is a billionaire you know what i'm saying yeah yeah but also plastic easily duplicated in china i don't know we should find out we got to do a research but yeah it made me really excited about learning for the first time ever so are you actually passionate about it or you saw it as a vehicle to freedom dude i love the learning i did see it as a vehicle reading but i just like for the first time was super passionate about it but we're in a natural you weren't a natural marketing or copywriting or anything like that i was a natural storyteller i was good at telling stories and that is what allowed me to do well on the phones gotcha okay so you had the seed for it now in terms of you actually consuming the content at what point do you actually start writing your own copy or does eben start letting you write copy for what he was doing because i know he was yeah it's and it's funny because with double your dating and the david d'angelo thing i actually used to read those and i was on that email oh were you yes i was oh wow so this was this is probably like 10 plus years ago well you must have been like 16 10 i was i was like 15-16 i remember in high school okay so that was 17 years ago when i was working there okay so you literally must have been 10 when i was working there yeah but the company was stuck around i went there for five years yeah so maybe yeah maybe at the last fire to vet that's crazy but yeah the the company's still around today you can still buy the products and things like that online and and it's helped you know probably millions of men around the world so i was proud to be a part of that company as well and yeah i was really excited about the learning and i want to learn copywriting because i wanted to be like gary halbert yeah evan told me i could sit in the back of the room and write bullet points for the seminars he would do the live seminars seminars and meetings and stuff yeah seminars that teach the heat of like 300 men come to learn about things like how to meet women online or a special breakdown on only how to approach women you know you talk for three days about how to start conversations with women so i'm in the back of the room taking those notes you know like the show notes that would get turned into the the teasers that would get people excited about uh purchasing the product when it was finished and then you guys would record those seminars and saw them as information yeah as dvds and cds yeah makes sense so how long did you do that before you start writing copy i worked there about two years before i started writing the copy and then i did the bullets you know um i remember i did this first round of bullets and there was like 40 bullets and i sent him to the ceo and i was like hey rob i want to send these to eben so you can critique them can you just pick out your favorites i'm thinking i'll always send them 20. so if you could just pick out your favorites and he writes me back and he's like hey man honestly i don't think any of these are really good and i sent them to someone else in the company and they said the same thing i was like i had a lot of learning to do and what i did next is i went and pulled up some of uh john carlson's writings and yannick silver's writings the bullets they had done and i just looked at their formulas and what i did who are other great copywriters for those listening they're great copywriters and they had things online of bullets they had written to sell like marketing courses so john carlton would have a bullet and the bullet is like a single line teaser is a way to think about it so an example bullet to sell marketing course would be like the three words to put on any sales page that will double your conversions overnight and so i'd take that formula and i'd twist it to dating so i'd say the three words to say to a woman when you first meet her that will get her to give you her phone number instantly who doesn't want to learn that and so i would just look at those formulas and i'd convert them over to the dating stuff that was how i learned to write the bullets and the bullets are i think the best way to learn to write sales copy and it's something that people don't do as much now because they're not used as much in video they're more in print and the reason they're called bullets omar is because in print they'd be in the middle of the page and they would have bullet points in front of these single lines you might do them in your show notes right right do you do things like that i'm sure you do them in your email newsletters and things like that right yeah but if you're doing a video sales pitch if you're turning the camera and being like hey you should check out my new course you're not going to stop and be like here's the things you're going to learn bullet point but but you know you'll just say them in a different way so copywriters skip learning the bullets oftentimes today and i think it's a big mistake so that's how you kind of learned you just one line at a time start with bullets and that teaches you how to write closing copy teaches you how to write headlines because you're learning how to capture attention and build curiosity and you're also learning to shave out words that aren't necessary so you learned it in short bursts and then first yeah yeah yeah wow so then two years before you actually um you write your first thing that evan actually sends out to to his list or well two years at the company about six months writing copy or attempting to write copy until i wrote something that would go out to the email list and how often are you writing so i was writing i was still a off yeah and this at this point now it's really starting to affect me so there was a couple times when eben would write me an email remember it's all virtual company and he'd be like hey man you're really talented and your work is not showing up on time or in the capacity that you're capable of other people in the company are starting to notice and you and i were friends before this company this is business and if you don't get your together we're not going to be able to have you as a part of this business anymore and i'm like oh then i start writing my ass off for like three months and then i start slacking off again it was just like something wrong with me man and then you write me again and he'd be like hey this is the final warning of patricia and i didn't know what to do and then one day he kind of figured out how to push my button and he said craig i'll make you a deal if you can write 10 pages of hard-hitting copy every single day i'll make sure you're making a hundred grand a year you have to do it for six months ten pages of copy a day ten pages a day every day every day seven days a week five days a week five days a week yeah wow so you do that for six months yep and so now i have the carrot in front of this horse and so fueled by my new addiction to caffeine i started writing that copy and about three months into it there was a company restructuring where it went from the people in the company getting a rev share to the straight salary and i've been crushing it man i've been writing 10 to 12 pages a day and my copy was getting amazing because of this consistency so i tell people there's four steps to mastering any skill and there's mentorship so i had evan as my mentorship there's immersion i was listening to the copywriting books and programs all the time there is doing the damn thing which is doing it at least five days a week and then there's the time that you need to do it for so i was crushing all four of those things and three months into it evan calls me up because of the restructuring and he's like hey we're doing this restructuring you're not going to get a revenge anymore but we're going to put you on a salary what do you think it should be i was like well you told me if i was writing these 10 pages a day it'd be six figures a year so and he's like let me tell you what i had in mind and then you can tell me what you think and i was like okay tell me and he says 150 and i was just like couldn't believe it i was so stoked i was like wow i made it because that was like wealthy person money to me at that that that's what i believed by this time i'm 26 i think and so yeah he bumped me up to 150 grand a year and you know the other shift that happened at that point doing that work consistently those 10 days or 10 pages it forced me to become a professional before that i was an amateur and there's a great book written by steven pressfield called turning pro that talks about that shift you make from amateur professional and that was like my crucible man that was my crucible to turn from a off who would just try to get by doing the least amount of work to a professional who was now about putting the work in every damn day to get the result that can only come from compounding success yeah compounded momentum yeah so when you were writing those 10 pages a day what were you writing about and who is reviewing them was was evan looking at them every day evan was looking at them yep and i was writing dating advice for men and women by that time we had a brand called catch him and keep him which showed women how to become more fulfilled in their relationships and so i would write those sales letters as well and i would write email uh promotions that would offer the products that were in the catalogs of both brands and then eben had a monthly interview series this is before podcasts back in the day so you guys are all getting this for free back in the day you had to pay to get podcasts you had to pay at that time 30 bucks a month and you get a cd in the mail to get evan interviewing someone and i used to write the newsletter that would go out once a month that would tell people how great the interview was and what they would learn in it so it was a story and then some bullets on what they've learned and invite them to sign up for the monthly interview series and at this time has evan published your stuff yet or not yet the first thing that i wrote that he mailed out to the list was a a offer to join that monthly interview series and i had a little thing of my advantage because it was the first month we ever did a double interview with two guests but it was the highest selling one that had ever gone out and i remember you saying in another interview that uh when you put it out you kept refreshing the shopping cart refresh your shopping cart watch the sales come in it was so exciting yeah can you share a little bit about what that was like well we would always do the refresh you know but it was everyone else's sales as the company but everyone had access to the shopping cart but yeah when i when i did that thing myself there's nothing better man than knowing that those sales are coming in and it's something that you wrote and you can visualize a real people so if i remember correctly we had like 1700 signups that day and you know you'd see another one i'd be like oh there's another person sitting there that just bought this that's gonna get this package and enjoy these interviews because of something i did so that was really exciting and then you said you remember the moment where the numbers it exceeded the highest grossing uh interview thing that you guys have ever sold right yes yeah i mean that whole day was pretty damn exciting yeah you know and another thing i was writing was summaries of those interviews was part of the 10 pages we do and evan would do an interview like this and i would write all the takeaways into a pdf that would be like here's the 10 things this guest shared so that was a big chunk of it also and then from there what happens how do you transition those skills and copywriting to advance your career what was the next move for you so the next move in writing was going from writing email sales copy to writing things that would bring in brand new customers i talk about when i speak how you can build a decent business off of warm traffic warm traffic as i'm like hey omar i'm releasing a copywriting course will you mail everyone on the passion of few mailing lists and tell them about my copywriting course if you do that they're going to be a lot more likely to buy my copywriting course than somebody's just browsing around the internet like reading about justin bieber you know right yeah but the cold traffic the people who've never heard of you before the people who are just cruising around not even thinking about copywriting or making money or you know nutritional supplements or beauty products or whatever you're selling if you can get those people to pay attention to something go down a journey with you and invest in your product or service that is how you build an empire that's how you build a big business so the next level for me was going from converting warm buyers who had already bought something to people who had never heard of ebon or christian carter the other guru before that was tough yeah and then at this time are you still practicing copy every day or did you kind of get the hang of it yep no i still practiced did this for a long time and i also started teaching copywriting so evan started an incubator where he found other people who had ideas for ebooks and they'd meet once a month and i would teach them how to write copy and they say that some of the fastest ways to learn is by teaching and that was really effective when i was sharing these principles why do you think that is i think because it forces you to crystallize in your mind what you do and break it down into steps because a lot of people who start doing something they get into like a natural flow of doing it and you don't think about like step one step two step three you just kind of do it and then you can get off on tangents and start like trying too much weird yeah yeah and pretty soon you're avoiding or not avoiding but forgetting the sound principles that made your copy do well in the first place so when you teach it and you're showing okay step one step two step three you're forced to know what the steps are and then when you go back to write yourself you're like okay i'm in step one now and now that i've got their attention and i have this captivating story i need to do step two which is show them why this product is different from everything else out there nice and then at this stage i know now golden hippo has done over a quarter billion dollars in sales um your copy alone i think in the last decade has done over a billion dollars in sales talk to me a little bit about the common denominators uh when it comes to being a good copywriter across industry yeah so those numbers are not exactly accurate sure anymore uh but that's okay yeah sales are good yeah and we're growing so um but yeah uh and i also i made myself stop keeping track when i crossed a billion in personal sales for my copywriting because you get too attached to numbers yeah you know it's like how many people are just like refreshing that shopping cart of their life you know by looking at their bank account every day and trying to set these numbers and you know monetary goals and i think that is important there is a place for that but if you get too attached to the number it starts to be that your self-esteem is attached to those daily stats it's correlated so i would find myself you know if i wrote a sales letter then that tanked and it didn't help my copy go up i'd be feeling like then i like i'll be feeling like for the next month while i'm writing the next sales letter and then that one would go up and it would do well and then i'd be feeling all great and then if that sales letter starts declining which sales letters sometimes do then i'd start feeling bad again because i'm looking at these numbers and that's not a good way to manage your own self-esteem you know yeah of course so i made myself stop keeping track of the the number so what was your question my question is what is the combinator a common denominator among sales copy across industries that do well what is it that allows readers of sales messages and letters to really make sense for them to go ahead and invest in a product or service i know a big thing that you talk about is entering the conversation in a potential prospect's mind talk to me a little bit about you know you at this stage the only reason i bring up the numbers to show how vast the success has been across industry so what are the common denominators for people listening who maybe have their own products or services or are getting in a copy or maybe junior copywriters who are learning what are the common denominators of writing words that sell across industry yes so it starts with the first step that if you think about it is quite an obvious step if you don't grab someone's attention it doesn't matter what else is on that page and we live in an age of distraction the average american sees 4 000 ads every single day i recently pulled up my facebook news feed and i was scrolling through it on a timer to see how many ads it would show me in a minute in one minute it showed me eight different ads and guess what facebook wants you to do they want you to keep scrolling because every time they show an ad they get money so you need to fight chop through all that with a powerful message that grabs attention and that is the common denominator any advertisement that works has caught someone's attention first and foremost yeah so that's step one step two is to show them that you have a unique offering so i see so many companies especially in the nutrition space launched with products that are the same as everyone else you know how many different greens powders yeah hundreds how many whey protein shakes i just saw one of these brands launched with some of the biggest uh um possible celebrities in the world to have them board their first two products are like greens powder whey protein shake it's like come on you know yeah they might try it once because so and so celebrities talking about it but then the next time they're in whole foods they walk down the aisle and there's like 50 green spotters and they're like this one's 10 bucks less than this one that so and so celebrity top told me to get so why not you know or they might just pop over to amazon see what else is on there you might have wet their appetite for a good greens powder then they go on amazon there's like 20 others you know so it starts with making something unique if you don't make something unique you're fighting an uphill battle now there are copywriting legends who have took products that are very commoditized and sold them very well famous story is uh claude hopkins with schlitz beer are you familiar with this story so there's you know many many beers in the united states at this point i think it's back in like the 1920s and schlitz beer goes to claude hopkins and they say hey claude you're a great copywriter we need to sell the out of this schlitz that's a tongue twister schlitz spear and claude says well i want to come to the factory and tour and see how the beer is made and they're like well you're not going to see anything special at this factory he's like well i just want to go and you know meet the people that make it find out it's made so he goes to the factory and he sees it like where they bring in the hops and the wheat and they only select one out of 20 because the the rest are too damaged you know and then they take that and they put in this fermenting thing where it ferments in this like solid oak casket for 90 days and then they run it through this like triple diamond filter you know to get it into the beer uh uh cans that finally go out to the customers and claude's like what do you mean there's nothing going on here this is amazing you guys are almost selecting the select weed and hops you guys have this in this like solid oak barrel and then a triple diamond press that's amazing and they're like claude that's how beer is made dude that's a budweiser and you know pabst and everyone makes beer you can't make beer any other way but he says nope there's a story in here that no one else is telling because yeah that might be how all beer is made but i didn't know that's how all beer is made and my wife didn't know that's how all beer is made and i'm gonna bet the consumer doesn't know how uh all beer is made it says the schlitz ad went like this it says schlitz beer starts off by taking only one out of every 20 of the strands of wheat then putting them in the solid oak barrel where they sit for 90 days in the controlled specialized environment to make sure that when it's poured through the triple diamond press it has just the right amount of foam leading to that perfect taste schlitz beer went on to become the best-selling beer in the united states just like and lasted for decades based on the strength of that ad that told the story so i like to say that copywriting is taking the story of your product and service and matching it with the story of the customer's own life that they have in their head of how their life is and how it's going to be and letting them know that if if they incorporate your story as a part of their story that their story is going to get even better so it's a converging of the two stories and that's what claude hopkins did with that schlitz beer which was very commoditized so you can do that but why not give yourself an edge by making something really unique too that's fascinating and it also reminds me of something that i know ebon taught you earlier on or encouraged you to do when he would say to write a biography before you would write a sales message yes yes what was the what was the lesson there so yeah he says that you must get in the uh prospect's head so much that it helps to like try to become that prospect and so he says to sit down write an autobiography as your prospect so if you're a beer drinker you know you think about who your target audience is and for schlitz i think was probably blue-collar workers you know so you think about okay my name's jimmy i live in tulsa oklahoma i've got a wife and three kids and on the weekend i like to ride motorcycles and you know do my own lawn and i'm really proud of my kids and i love getting them on the back of the motorcycle but man getting them to do their chores as a son of a you know relief for me is a a beer at a bar after work with the fellas before i have to go home and you know face the the family and wife and kids you know try to get the kids to do the homework and do those chores you know so you'd sit down and spend 15 minutes doing that and then write to that person yeah so you've written a lot of biographies yes i have yeah yeah i don't write them by hand anymore but i used to i used to actually type them out or write them by hand now i just visualize do you think that the the state of copy has shifted or changed from say 10 years ago 20 years ago to copy today 100 such a great question so back in the day it could be more of like a pure sales pitch like an infomercial for example infomercial you think of them as 30-minute spots but it's really the same message three times over and over almost exactly the same and the reason for that omar is because in the infomercial days you never knew when someone's going to start watching they could come in at any time so you got to get them all that information with the internet everyone starts the same place and the same is true with a sales loader that comes in the mail or the newspaper but the internet everyone starts in the same place so you can take them on a longer journey but also there's a lot more options yeah in the television world they could click a channel now we've got literally buzzers and alarms and you know like that like just popping up everywhere in the middle of the sales message you know you like literally be watching a sales message and your things vibrating and things are coming down and saying like you got other to do yeah and it's not just other sales messages it's like actual real that you might want to do like maybe your wife is like hey omar it's been a while since we've had some romance tonight like can you come home earlier you're like this advertisement you know so the difference between today and yesteryear today you must give value i say that value is your hot knife to cut through that clutter cut through all the clutter of notifications cut through all the clutter of a million advertisements out there cut through all the scrolling you know that you can do now now you even scroll sideways in the stories and stuff and don't you know forget about tinder and all that you know so we got scrolling all kinds of different ways imagine when we're in augmented reality man you're gonna be able to scroll and roll bowling balls and virtual things that have ads on this side and your email on this side and crack it open and there's gonna be a mcdonald's cheeseburger right there like in between you trying to like you know get to your uh tinder inbox that's all five years away so what makes the difference value if someone can jump into your thing and get something that's going to help them whether they buy your product or not that is how you differentiate so we when we create marketing at hippo we leave people better than we found them by giving education and value things they can't learn anywhere else that's going to help them whether they decide to invest in the product or not how would you define value is it education in this day and age well i mean you know as we just talked about my college like some education is is worthless if you're not going to use it or if you're not interested in it but as we talked about when i work with eben some education is priceless if you're going to be able to use it in every interaction in your entire life not to mention that uh relationship and conversation books you know that was and that's what evan was selling and the ones i was reading in high school like i use that every time like my small talk game is strong because that leo lounge book you know that i was reading when i was 14 and a shy kid so it's got to be directed education that gives someone something that they personally want if it's just random crap no one's gonna want it and while products that are commoditized can still be successful like you know there are greens powders that are crushing it in a land of a million greens powders that beer slits beer crushed in a land of tons of beer education on the other hand if you're telling someone the same they've heard a hundred times they're gonna be gone so we sell a lot of health products here and the example i always give is like you know if that education is like so omar i'm gonna tell you one thing that you should do every day if you want to transform your health you ready eight ounces of water first thing in the morning you're like come on man i you know read that in every men's health article and webmd and pass out the flyer at my doctor's office you know for your entire life right but if i was like hey omar something man this is going to change your life you like tomatoes stop eating tomatoes they're terrible for you i don't care what you heard new study shows that there's something in tomatoes called a lectin that goes into your bloodstream from your stomach by penetrating your gut and leads to poor digestion low energy and can even lead to neuropathy if you take uh um the lifespan of a person they're eating too many tomatoes over the span of their life here's the study that shows that you're like whoa so one of my most successful copywriting pieces i've ever written starts off this is a tomato think it's good for you think again that's how it starts if it was like this is eight ounce glass of water you should drink this every morning they'd be like okay next gotcha so yeah so that barrier to entry is very small window of time and then also too you talked about the importance of like that shock value so to speak um i think you had an article one time where it was like it was like how to 10x your income in four years or less and your first bullet point instead of work harder work smarter was like stop watching porn yes so can you talk about the importance of that the shock factor element yes um as it relates to catching people's attention yes so it's it's all back to that scrolling world you know microsoft did a study that shows human beings have uh attention span now that's less than a goldfish i believe it yeah and i think that is absolutely true unless you're presenting them with unique content that addresses a problem or desire that they are facing so you need to speak to someone about something they care about their dreams hopes desires or fears and frustrations hence the importance of entering the conversation in their mind yes or of showing them something unique like the tomato health example you know disrupts something that they thought was the norm um change their reality literally or challenge their their perception of reality yeah yes so another example of a way i've done that in a copywriting piece was a a probiotic piece i wrote that was uh the creator of the number one selling probiotic in america for a little while and it started it started off with a doctor and he comes on the screen and he says hi my name is dr kerry nelson and even after practicing medicine for 10 years and doing my best to eat healthy i found myself suffering from digestive issues so what's unique about that it's a doctor who you think has a together and he was trying to eat healthy and he's still having digestive problems you're like hmm that's interesting it makes you want to learn more and if you're someone who has digestive issues if you have that frustration that problem of digestive issues you got someone who is going to tell you how they fix their own digestive issues you're watching that like a hawk and who more credible than a doctor or like a goldfish yeah yeah you're more credible than a doctor exactly so establishing that credibility is important too if you're going to spit out facts like that so the tomato piece was with a doctor i'm partners with dr steven gundry who's uh hall of fame heart surgeon has completed more heart surgeries on infants than anyone else in the world he invented a device that's used in 90 of all heart surgeries so when he starts talking about health people start listening real quick so if he tells you make tomatoes unhealthy you know you're gonna even if you disagree with him you're gonna listen to what he has to say so let me ask you this um when you see copy obviously at this stage i know you have over 900 people working with you and you see copy all the time how do you know when you have a winning piece at this stage do you have a good intuitive pulse on it or is it really just the market is the ultimate judge yeah how do you know you have a winner on your hands whenever you still have no idea no matter how long you've been doing this i still write pieces that i'm super excited about i put them out there and no one buys really so like it's always the ultimate judge and you will always be surprised by what works let me ask you this what about looking back on your career obviously building what you built with golden hippo riding the roller coaster what would you have done differently knowing what you know now about what it takes to build a successful business obviously leveraging your skill set but what would you have done differently on the way up i wouldn't have become a nightclub promoter on the side i left that out of the story but from 2005 to 2010 i was promoting nightclubs on the side and i was using copywriting techniques to get people to come to the clubs it was a lot of fun but if i had channel that energy into building a business that had you know equity and impact i think i would have gotten here a lot quicker but no regrets it was a lot of fun okay and two more questions um i heard you got kidnapped uh what was the story of that in 60 seconds so yeah that's a long story but the short story is i had a vicious binge drinking problem and i didn't know i had a big drinking problem because i would you know you heard the saying that you are the some of your five best friends so i was promoting night clubs in hollywood every night and i go out with people and i get blackout drunk and i'd go to bed at 4am but my friends would stay up till 8am doing cocaine so i was like oh i'm practically sober compared to these guys you know i'm like the good kid yeah yeah so i thought i was just like good to go and then i went to europe and i was in a town called odessa in the ukraine and i was by myself it was my last night of my trip and i just kept ordering drinks man and once i started drinking i couldn't stop you know that was my problem back then and this guy came up to me and he's like hey man you want to come to the after party with us some local guy well-dressed guy and i was like yeah sure walk out with him in the parking lot get to the back of the parking lot he's like these are my friends and there's like four guys there i'm like what's up guys they grab me and i try to escape and that's when the punches and kicks start throwing you know martial arts training wasn't doing when you're probably remembered you have four in the morning yeah yeah so they put me in the back of a car and they started start taking me off and what's most embarrassing is i barely remember anything i'm just like woke up in a field my phone's missing my wallet is empty i still had the wallet though i stole the credit cards but all the cash was gone about 400 euros worth which is a decent haul and i think i just gave him that my phone was like please let me go is what i think happened but i honestly don't remember and my girlfriend dumped me because i was such a wild man and it forced me to get my together and change my life so it it ended up being one of those like life doesn't happen uh to you it happens for you type of things that was a little beating that uh got me to get on a better path well let me ask you this now and also it's been awesome to get to know sarah and stuart who we've also had on the show see your mastermind see all the good work you've been doing in the world i know you have a bunch of new projects coming out as well but for entrepreneurs or people out there around the world uh listening maybe they're in their 20s 30s 40s 50s even at any age trying to make their life work or trying to make their dream a reality but they're stuck they're trying to figure out how to you know how to make their life work maybe they too are you know in their couches looking about how to buy those uh those tacos for a dollar yeah and they're trying to find their path find their way you know being on this side of the fence obviously the journey doesn't change you know as you get older the challenges get bigger the payoffs can get bigger too but you know it's the same things just at a bigger scale what would be your best advice to people who are trying to make their life work and who are maybe stuck and maybe talk to that young craig who was looking for answers to somebody out there listening man woman at any age trying to make their life work yeah such a great question man so i think that studying marketing is going to help you no matter what you do and i always tell everyone to start with a free book written by claude hopkins in the 20s called my life in advertising and it tells the story of how claude started these companies that are still around today like goodyear tire and like vandecamp beans and the schlitz beer stories in there as well because everything in life is is marketing you know from me landing sarah and stewart as my wife you know and knowing how to like present myself on the first date to you wanting to record this podcast with me to you getting all these amazing passionate people to stay tuned to the podcast and take these lessons you know or to get people to take my lessons versus other people that have been on this podcast you know it's all marketing it's all about what it's going to do for other people so i think step one study marketing even if you do not plan to become a marketer i think that's really important um step two i would say hang around as many people as you can who are already doing it so reach out to people and try to offer value first say hey can i do some free work for you can i do this and that just try to get yourself in the same room as other people who you want to be like as people that might want to mentor you it's hard to get a busy person's attention but the best way i've found is offering to do things for free just to be in the room with them and take notes and run microphones at the seminar back and forth or help set up chairs or offer to help clean their uh freaking cars or you know get them coffee or be their assistant for free the same way you did with ebony in the room with that get in the room with those people okay that's number two number three create your own room i think that masterminding is one of the most underrated and highly valuable things you can do with your time that no one does except for probably every person you've had on this podcast right you have to notice all these smart people get around other smart people on a regular basis and it doesn't take money or success to put that together when i started marketing i was doing this thing called money monday's marketing mastermind and i would just invite all my friends who into marketing none of them were like big dogs we'd come over to one person's house on a monday we'd order thai food we'd either split the bill or rotate who pays it thai food's cheap and we just sit around talk about marketing one or two people would show something they were doing that that was exciting for them or share a marketing story that they read and the power the hive mind man you know those games at the fair where they have you like guess the weight of a huge cow and you know usually the average person writes a guess in the cow and it'll be way off right they did a study something fascinating if you take the average of all the entries of the the contest and you take the average it's usually dead on it shows the power of the group mind uh versus the singular mind yeah wow yeah and you guys when you guys did that you were just newbie marketers newbies men and some of the people in that room that went on to be mega successful and just little by little it just elevated an elevator and it also probably incentivized people to want to bring value to the next one and learn and accountability and projects together yeah they try to everyone you know then we had 10 people reaching out to high-level people to ask them to come share you know and so the odds of someone getting a yes and getting someone really high level in the room to come present to a bunch of young guys was way more successful and you still do masterminds today so you'll do them today so it shows that you've had it throughout your trajectory of success it's been integral so if someone takes one thing from this interview it's not even mine you're the sum of your five people you spend your time with i wish i knew who created this quote but it's so brilliant man so put yourself in that room with five awesome people as many as you can and you gotta cut bait man you got dead weight friends that are slowing you down that are on your passions and your ideas that are telling you you're never gonna make it in life that are just any kind of negative or that want to gossip or even that aren't interested in like going to support you in what you're doing got to cut bait and that's tough but you got to do it powerful okay now before we wrap up we play a game called first things first super simple game the way it works is i just rifle off a word or phrase you tell me the first word or phrase that comes to mind oh all right i like it it's just a relation game sorry let's get it ten words of phrase that come to mind just the first word or phrase that comes out okay intuitively okay okay first word bananas like really copywriting well bananas came i might even before you said it so i want meta on you okay um the internet bananas oh the only rules you can't repeat yourself twice okay i'm not trying to with you i'm just like now i got banana and i literally have bananas in my head i'm trying to get them out you know okay okay okay start over with them start over with give me some other ones okay starting uh first one passion this is so dumb dude but i literally thought of a passion fruit i'm not i'm really trying to be serious about this game but now i got the fruit in my head yeah sorry okay sarah anne stewart love uh masterminds wisdom your journey uh like like joy like jubilation uh your lowest lows the stressful times uh importance debt uh like like energy um financial freedom um relaxation excellent copywriting gangster um your weaknesses uh avoidance deepest regret man they all taught me so much you know so i'm going to say teachings what inspires you to keep going you're why youth love sarah had stewart and the last one you ready your story repeatable i love it if someone's sitting around they think they can't do it you can do it so you know and there is there is uh there's other ways than what people are telling you they're out there there's other ways in what i did it you know i love it and then there's a personal last thing real quick on camera people might love this one and i know i asked you in private but if the craig today could look back at the craig who was in thousand oaks or in san diego yeah just sort of all over the place trying to figure out um what would he tell that that young craig who was looking for answers stress in china what about this what about that sort of you know had shiny object syndrome would he believe that you're in the position you're at today and what would you tell that young craig specifically uh he would not believe it and i would tell that young craig to become professional sooner stop off sooner because i could have done a lot quicker if i wasn't so lazy distractible procrastinating etc etc in one word execute i had a lot of plans back in those days with like get rich stuff like i had a plan in the mlm space that i think would have done very well but i just wasn't an executor i wasn't a pro read that book turning pro by stephen pressfield and turn pro as soon as you can i love it thank you so much thanks for having me on the show appreciate you guys thank you for tuning in be sure to follow craig and stay tuned for the next episode of the passionate view take care thank you so much for enjoying this video and if you found this content valuable uplifting and inspiring to take your life and your business to the next level and have some exciting news for you because the passion passionate q academy officially launched our brand new on-demand training that you can access absolutely free at www.tpfacademy.com right there you'll learn the number one way to grow your personal brand or business brand online fast the same way i've learned from interviewing some of the most successful people on the planet right here on the show who've done exactly that so again don't forget to check it out www.tpfacademy.com i promise you you'll be blown away and also don't forget there's three ways you can connect with me further number one you can text me absolutely free at the number on the screen right now and send me your most pressing life business or branding question and i'll get back to you as soon as i can number two if you'd like to be interviewed on the show you can actually apply right now in the description below and apply to share your incredible story brand or business right here with an audience of potentially millions of people the same way we've helped experts entrepreneurs and authors just like you and don't forget that opportunity comes with the ability to partner with us and help feed one million people through our partnership with feeding america again you can click the link in the description below titled interview application to find out more and last but not least number three if you'd like to get consulting from our team and work with you to help you grow your personal brand or business brand no matter what industry you're in we can do that by simply filling out the questionnaire and description below titled consulting application and if our team thinks that you'd be a great fit who knows you may just be invited to work with us to help you take your business to the next level all right that's it thank you so much for enjoying this video make sure to smash that subscribe button turn on post notifications so you never miss an episode and until next time live strong live with passion and i'll see you in the next inspiring video you

Channel: OMAR ELATTAR & THE PASSIONATE FEW

Views: 27,346

Keywords: The Passionate Few, Craig Clemens, Omar Elattar, Golden Hippo, copywriting, copywriter, entrepreneur, business, Craig Clemens Interview, Golden Hippo Interview, Golden Hippo Founder, Golden Hippo CEO, Omar Elattar Intereview, The Passionate Few Interview, CEO of Golden Hippo, Craig Clemens copywriter, Craig Clemens Podcast, copywriter tips, copywriting course, copywriting for beginners, copywriting tutorial, copywriting examples, The Greatest Stories Never Told, @Craig

Id: ThYnZAPjqcY

Length: 87min 25sec (5245 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020