Carl Galletti

Editor: Today I am excited to welcome Carl Galletti, a distinguished figure in the world of marketing and copywriting. Known for his insightful strategies and profound understanding of direct response marketing, Carl has helped numerous businesses achieve success, and with his ability to transform complex marketing challenges into opportunities for growth, Carl has become a rather important figure in the industry. So Carl, it's a pleasure to meet you. Carl Galletti: Glad to meet you too. Pleasure to be here. Editor: What I'd like to start with is just a little overview. Your career spans several decades now in marketing, so what first drew you to this field? Carl Galletti: Well, a long time ago, I read Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy, and I got interested in the field of advertising, but never did anything with it. Many years later, I went to a seminar because I was in real estate. I was a real estate broker at the time, and they send you to seminars every so often. And so, I was sitting in the middle of a seminar, it was like $395, which in those days was a lot more money than it is today. I got looked around. There were like a couple hundred people, and I started adding this all up, and I'm saying, "Okay. This is a room that you rent from a hotel. There's a speaker here. I'm sure you could hire a speaker for some amount of money and it can't be all that much compared to how much money is here. What is the secret of getting all these people here?" Carl Galletti: I finally deduced that it was the copywriting, that was the advertising that got them there. So I got interested in that, and I said, "I want to know how to get people to a seminar." So I had subscribed to Entrepreneur Magazine. In the back, they had these reports, and I was looking at them, and I had never ordered any before. So I saw one about how to get people to a seminar, how to promote a seminar, and then I did a couple others, and I called them up to order. In those days, the internet wasn't as prevalent as today. I called up to order, and they up-sold me on a package for that, including that report and the other ones I wanted, plus a whole bunch more stuff. So I did the upsell, and then what I didn't know is that Jay Abraham had advised them to do this, and in exchange, he was able to use the list to promote his own newsletter, which he came out with, so he sent me a promotion for his newsletter. Carl Galletti: I read the sales letter for it, and I said, "I had never ordered a newsletter for $500 for a year in my life." At the time, that was a lot more money than it is today. I ordered that thing, because by the end of the sales letter, I was just sold on it. I said, "If this guy charges $2,000 an hour for phone consultation, and he can write a sales letter this good, I not only want to know everything he knows, I want to know who he learned it from." So I got his newsletter, and in there, I got introduced to people like Claude Hopkins and Scientific Advertising, and because of that, I said, "I have to know who this guy is. I'm going to call Jay up and ask him," but before I was able to actually call, I got a letter from Gary Halbert, and I didn't know it was Gary Halbert who wrote this, the Boron, basically The Boron Letters, because Jay didn't give his name, right? Carl Galletti: But when I opened up the letter, the sales letter for it, he talked about the Tova Borgnine promotion that he did, and I connected immediately that it was the same guy. So I ordered his newsletter, and I was a lifetime. I was one of the first subscribers to his newsletter, because I called up and his girlfriend at the time, Paulette, answered. Later on, I had found out from her that I was like one of the first people to order Gary Halbert's newsletter, and I still have all his newsletters to this day. They were fantastic. From him, I learned about the Robert Collier letter book and all of the masters of copywriting, marketing, and advertising, and just learned from Gary and Jay Abraham, and eventually they hired me to write for them, so I was a freelance copyright. I became a freelance copywriter at the time, and have been ever since and went on from there. Editor: It's an amazing story, Carl. I mean, you mentioned some real heavyweights there, Jay Abraham, Gary Halbert, and so on and now of course we add Carl Galletti to that list. You've been referred to, for many years now, as a copywriting legend. Can you maybe share what that means to you now to be regarded in such high regard alongside your peers? Carl Galletti: Well, I wish my family felt the same way about it. To them, I'm just an average Joe. But anyway, it's great to have some degree of fame, but I think it was a producer in movies who said, "You're only as good as your last picture, right? So the next picture, you still have to prove yourself." So you always have to keep proving yourself. The only way to do that, really, is to keep up and to review the basics, and learn the new stuff, but Dan Kennedy did this thing, where he said, "Principles never change," and Jay Abraham used to say something similar. He said that human nature is immutable, meaning it doesn't change. Carl Galletti: What got people to buy stuff 1000 years ago is the same thing that gets them to buy stuff today, but that doesn't change. Strategies change, like your strategy one time might be, TV's the latest thing, and then before that it was radio, and then magazines and newspapers, et cetera, so those strategies change, and how you use those mediums, as a strategy, change. Tactics change often, so you hear people talk about how things move so quickly on the internet. Well, there are only the tactics that are changing quickly on the internet, but the strategies, the fact that there is an internet and how you use that strategy to promote stuff, that changes, but it changes less often, and actually, kind of rarely. Carl Galletti: But the principles, what it takes to sell people and to promote stuff doesn't change, so studying Claude Hopkins is critical to understanding how to write copy, because he was there. What happens is when you go to the source, what I call the source is these are the people who came up with it in the first place, and they usually have the best insights, because they're not repeating off of what people came before them. They're creating it anew. It was never there before, and they have some insights that are just unique and interesting, and you can learn a lot from them. Editor: On a personal level, how has it changed for you from when you first started? Carl Galletti: Well, remember when I said, "I not only want to know what Jay Abraham knows, I want to know who we learned it from," and that's why whenever he mentioned something, like Claude Hopkins or a book, in those days he had mentioned scientific advertising and my life in advertising. In those days, they weren't at the bookstores. You couldn't buy them online, so I had to call Crane Publishing in Chicago, get on the phone with somebody, and get them to sell me the book, and of course, I had to write out a check, put it in the mail, wait for it to get there, and then they sent it to me. It was like, "Oh. It's a several week procedure," so that's what it took to get it in those days. And so, I started accumulating all of these things, and as a sideline to my copywriting business, I sold these books. Carl Galletti: I'd either buy them from the publisher. In the case of Crane at the time, I'd get it from the publisher, and I'd resell it, and I even went as far as reprinting the Robert Collier letter book sold that, and that was a major chore. But what I do is I'd collect all of these books, and I'd buy them wholesale from the publisher. I sell them retail via mail order, and people like Gary Halbert and Jay Abraham would recommend that people came to me for those books, and today that's translated into scientificadvertising.com, which is my site that I sell those things, not from publishers so much, but some of them are in the public domain, and I reprint them with good clarity and all those other things, all of the old stuff that I discovered for myself, which most people don't really know about. I put them all on that site so they can get them pretty easily. I have some of Dan Kennedy's older stuff. I have some Gary Halbert stuff, kind of treasures of the copywriting, advertising, and marketing industries. Editor: And you've written books yourself as well, Carl, I believe? Carl Galletti: Oh, yeah. So that's one of the things that I've done way back when I started coaching people on copywriting, and I called it The Copywriter Protege Program, and the sales letter that I wrote was 30 pages long. I showed it to my neighbor, and he said, "Do you think anybody's going to read this?" Carl Galletti: I said, "Well, here. Take a copy of it and see if you read. It's interesting enough to read." Carl Galletti: Now, he had no interest in copywriting, but when he came back, he said, "Boy, I read all 30 pages of it. It was really, really good." Carl Galletti: So anyway, I printed up 300 copies of that, and from that, the Copywriter Protege Program at the time was like 1997s, so like $2000, and it had a 6% response out of those 300 letters, which is a lot for a $2,000 product. After distributing the 300 letters, I had 18 orders for $2000 or $36,000, so that kind of got me excited too, but the real essence of the thing was I started coaching people from that, one-on-one. It was a one-on-one coaching Program, and it lasted for a year, and call up anytime, and usually once a week or twice a week, you check in, and we go over stuff and I critiqued stuff, et cetera. People learned a lot from that. After doing this for two or three years, I decided, "Let's videotape this." Carl Galletti: So I held a seminar, and it was a four-day seminar, videotaped the whole thing, audiotaped it, and had some materials. Then, I put it into a course, so you didn't have to get on the phone with me one-on-one all the time. It was all there in the course, or most of it. Sometimes you could call, and I critiqued something. For example, this one guy, Garrett McDonald, took the course, and then I had this thing where you could call me up, and I'd give you a consultation for an hour for $500 at the time. It's $595 now, so he did that because he had a client who's putting out a catalogue and had to do with supplements. So I critiqued his catalogue, made some changes, which might look relatively minor when you just look at them, but he went back, and when they retested it, it brought in an extra $500,000 a month- Editor: Wow. Carl Galletti: ... From that catalogue, and they mailed that every month. So it was pretty big. It just goes to show how you can make changes in something, and it might seem minor even, but it has a big effect on the results and on the other end. So even after he took the course, because it was pretty good after he took the course, and it made a profit, but it didn't make as much of a profit. So just tweaking it a little by critiquing it and stuff, and we went from there. Yeah, and I'm a big believer in, if you're a copywriter, you should also practice what you preach, so write copy for your own stuff. That's why when you mentioned writing my own stuff, I put together this thing called the Marketing Made Easy Workshop, which I did with another guy. I was living in New Jersey at the time. Carl Galletti: We went up Woodstock, where he had a retreat, and we did a seminar for local people there, and it was great. And so, I packaged that up into a package that I sold, Marketing Made Easy Workshop, add some other things that I wrote. It actually took a long time to do that. I think it probably took about a year before that came out, because I figured, "I need to add value to this. I need to add this and that," and by the time I was done, it took about a year. So I sold that, and then I've written some other things since, and I've also recently been writing articles on Medium. If you went to my site, carlgaletti.com, there's an articles thing that I just posted there, which has a list of my articles. It just started, so there's, I don't know, maybe about 10 or 12 articles. I forget how to count them, but they're pretty good articles and they're good about copywriting. One of the things that, while we're talking here, let's give some information about copywriting- Editor: Sure… Carl Galletti: Like, what should your copywriting be? But I said you need to realize that, if you're copywriter, use it on your own stuff. Sell your own things. That's what I was trying to get at with Marketing Made Easy Workshop, so I went out and sold that. I did it in seminars. I remember the first time I sold the package of Copywriter Protege Program with Marketing Made Easy Workshop, along with it was a Robert Allen seminar, and Robert Allen had me speak at his seminars. He and my friend, Ken Kern, it's like he'd start the seminar and then introduce us, and we'd do the rest of the seminar until the end. He'd come in and say, "Well, that was it. Any questions?" But one of the things we did, or I did, is I was talking about copy, and then I just mentioned my Copywriter Protege Program, and it was right before lunch, I remember. Carl Galletti: I said, "If you want a copy of this, here's the deal." I sat down, and I had a whole line of people, and I think there were only maybe about 30 buying units in the whole seminar, and I think I sold maybe like 25 of them, so it was a pretty big day, and I kind of got the bug from that. But I always believe that if you're good enough copyrighter, you should be writing copy for yourself as well as clients, and it helps to do both, I think, because clients keep you on your toes, and then writing your own copy also keeps you on toes, but in a different way. So anyway, back to, so how should you write your copy? So, let me just cover some important points, because I want to make this a valuable thing to people listening to it. The first thing you need to do is make it new, unique, and different. Now, you know how I said principles never change, and what sold people in the old times, and scientificadvertising.com has all these old things that are really treasures of the copywriting, advertising, marketing industries? Carl Galletti: It's kind of a paradox, because how you learn to do this, sell stuff, is using the old guys, not just them, but you got to get your basics from them. But when you sell something, it's got to be new to the person you're selling it to, and this is an old principle. It goes back to, I've heard people mention this, about when we're living on the Kalahari, you paid attention to movement, because you didn't know whether it was going to be something you wanted to kill to eat or it was going to kill you to eat you, and so you need to know how to respond to that, and even with animals, they do the same thing. They're very, something new happens, something different, something changed, so you want something, you have to try to get something to be unique, exclusive, different, new, because that's what gets people's attention, so you have to, if you're selling a product, it needs to be something that's new and different, right? Editor: Good advice, yeah. Carl Galletti: Especially if the latest stuff, if you want to really be big in that stuff, and there's something called a unique mechanism, which we copywriters really pay attention to, and that's, there needs to be a mechanism in there which makes it unique, sets it apart from everything else. I'll give you an old example. David Ogilvy, when he was advertising Shell Oil, they came up with this thing called Platformate, which was a special blend of the gasoline. Now, gasoline is gasoline, and it's all made from oil, and it's pretty much not too different, but with this secret ingredient, Platformate, some secret formulation, we don't know what that is, but they called it Platformate, and he demonstrated a car without Platformate, and it went to a certain distance before it ran out of fuel. Carl Galletti: Then, he marked that with a paper barrier, and then he put the car back, and then he put the fuel with Platformate in it, and that car just ran, and it ran right through the paper barrier, crashed right through it, and it kept on going. It shows how Platformate increases your mileage, so that's a mechanism. That's a unique mechanism that's very important. Another technique we use is storytelling. People love stories, and that's an old technique that people still love to this day, and that will never change. It's a principle. People just love stories. You can create trust with what you're doing, what you're writing by telling stories. "Hey, I'm telling stories right here, right?" Editor: Yeah, yeah. Carl Galletti: So that's kind of part of the thing. Then, so that's a whole thing. Oh, the other thing. If someone's interested in being a copywriter, here's what you need to do, or any kind of writer, to tell you the truth, this is what you do. You have to write every day. Now, that sounds so simplistic. Write every day, three words, three simple words that I didn't get right away. It is like I wasn't writing copy every day when I started out, but I soon learned from people like, Stephen King has a book on writing, and he writes every day. Even comedians, like Jerry Seinfeld, he says, "You have to write every day," and he's got this thing, you mark a calendar. When you write that day, you mark an X on it, and the next day, you mark an X on it, and you never stop. Editor: Right, so it's a little bit like going to the gym, I guess, in many ways, isn't it? Carl Galletti: Exactly, yeah. Well, although hopefully more often than you probably go to the gym. How often do we do that? But that's really important. So one of the things that I do, I write a lot of copy, and I write a lot of non-copy just content every day. I even have stories, fiction that I write every day, so I sit down and write a fictional story. They're not even to sell yet. I may sell them one day, but they're just to practice writing. What I've found from that is that the action of writing every day, you get to learn how to construct what you're writing, and you get to learn how to say it and how to say something, how to say what you mean. That's important, because it's different than talking, and in fact, one of the other techniques is you need to read your copy out loud, because that's an easy way for you to catch where you've left something out, it's awkward, or you've gone on too long, etc, so these are all techniques, and of course, now to bring things up to date, we have AI. Carl Galletti: I've been hot on the heels of AI since ChatGPT became an item. I had a client that I just finished working for about two-and-a-half years, grew digital, and they had me writing emails for them. I got up to writing 20 emails a week on three different webinar offers and two different newsletters. One the newsletters was on artificial intelligence, so I had to be on top of everything and learn the latest stuff, so I could put it in the newsletter and write that newsletter, and I've been doing that ever since. So ChatGPT, and the other ones are all things that I use on a daily basis, but the thing you have to learn about is copywriting has changed. It's a new tactic, right? That's changed fairly often, but maybe it's a different strategy, actually, because we didn't have AI for a long time, so that rarely changed on how you actually write something, but now that we have AI, the first thing people do whenever something's new is they get it all wrong. So they've done that with AI, expecting AI to write the whole thing for you. Carl Galletti: So you get people promoting these products where it says, "With this product, you can write a whole sales letter. Just give it one word. One keyword, and it'll write the whole sales letter for you." Nonsense. It won't do that. If you try to get it to do that, it'll write a short email letter for you maybe, and it won't be very good, but the way you have to do that, the way you incorporate AI into your writing is you need to know what the elements in your sales letter, and we still call them sales letters, even though most of them don't get mailed out. They get put on a web page or in an email, but it's a sales letter, and you need to know the elements. So you break it down, element by element, and you get ideas with AI. So you may say, "Give me 20 headlines. Here's the product I'm selling. Here's what I'm going to do in this. Here's what this is. This is an email, or this is a webpage that I'm writing, or a sales letter, and I need a headline for this." Carl Galletti: Sometimes if you've already written it or you've got a rough draught, you send it, the rough draught, to AI, and you say, "Here's what I'm writing. Give me a good headline for this," and it'll give you 20 headlines, titles, or whatever. You look at that, and you say, "They're pretty good," and then you may pick bits and pieces from two or three different ones and construct a really good one, but you need to know what makes a really good one from what doesn't, because AI will give you a good head start on it, but it doesn't go the whole way, and you do that throughout the whole thing. So it's like you could have it create a story for you, but it's not going to be your story, so you need to give it the elements to work with. Here's a story, so one of the things you can do is write out your story in your own handwriting, type whatever. Not just handwriting, but typing. Get it in, and don't worry about how it's worded or whatever. Just feed it to AI and say, "Yeah, rewrite this in good English." Editor: Make sense of this. Carl Galletti: Correct my spelling errors and my punctuation, etc. it'll come out and give you something that's perfectly punctuated, perfectly spelled, and hopefully got something that you like or with a little touch up. Editor: I think you're right. I think it does need human intelligence, as well as artificial intelligence. Those two things combine is where you really get the rocket fuel, isn't it? Whereas if you just want to rely on AI itself, you will get a response, and the response will be okay, but if you really want to refine and have the very best, then you need to prompt it in the very best way that you can and give it the information that it needs to be able to take that and make it even better. Carl Galletti: Exactly. So getting back to selling your own stuff, as an example, I'll give you some examples from my life, is that I also did affiliate sales. And so, one of the first, this wasn't the first one, but one of the first ones that I did was John Reese had something called Traffic Secrets. It was a course that he sold for $997, and he only was going to have it for sale for 18 hours. So I had a list of maybe 5,000 people, and that's generous. I think probably there were 3,000 or 4,000 good names on the list at the time, and I promoted this to them. Carl Galletti: I sold it by putting in a really good bonus package with it. See, his thing was called Traffic Secrets, and he sent me a copy of it beforehand because he wanted me to promote it. When I looked through it, I said, "This is really good, but it's got hardly anything on copywriting, and you're great, it generates traffic, but when you get the traffic to you, you need to sell them something, right? Or you need to promote something, and that's copywriting." So, I took my Copywriter Protege Program and gave it as a bonus to anyone who bought the course. I was, I think, the third-highest selling affiliate, and that was considering the fact that the two highest selling affiliates above me had lists in the 50,000 to 200,000 range. My mine was 5,000, so I was able to compete with them by giving really good bonuses. Carl Galletti: Then, I did the same thing. Actually, there were a few other things that did something similar with, but Frank Kern's was even more impressive, because he came out with something called Underachiever Mastery System. I did something similar to that, but it wasn't my Copywriting Protege Program. It was one of my, for about ten years, I ran a seminar in Las Vegas called the Internet Marketing Super Conference, and I had recorded that and each one of those. And so, I had one year of those that I normally sold for, I think it was $997 for the videos, $497 for the audios, and $597 for the transcripts. I put all that into one and gave it as a bonus if you bought his $1497 Underachiever Mastery Program, and sold 71 copies for like $106,287 in sales in 24 hours. Editor: Wow. Carl Galletti: And that was just using email with a bonus, so I wrote the email. The email was probably pretty good, but when you do an email, the real job of an email is to get someone to show up at the web page to read the sales letter, because that's where the sale is really made. So you're just enticing them to read that, and one of the ways to do that is to give them a good bonus. So a lot of people do that now. Practically, everybody does that now, but in those days, that was kind of rare. So it was new, it was different, it was big value. But the best thing that I ever came up with was speaking at a seminar in the UK, and I was speaking at a seminar, and I had 60 minutes to speak, and in those 60 minutes, I sold $458,949 worth of product right afterwards. Editor: Wow. Carl Galletti: And I broke that down into seconds. It's like $127 and 49 cents per second. Editor: That's incredible. I mean, here's a question for you, Carl. When you are making an offer, whether that's in a sales letter, whether that's, obviously, on stage, when do you ask for the sale? When do you put the offer in front of the prospect? Carl Galletti: Well, you usually do it at the end. It's the CTA that you ask for the order, but sometimes you want to do it more often. I remember there was someone who told me that he put a buy button at the end and then he put one in the middle, and then he kept putting them throughout the sales letter, and the more he put it in there, the more offer and the more sales he got. So I think that was Armand Moore who told me that, so I don't know how that holds up today or whatever, and you can probably do that, because sometimes people will reread the sales letter and maybe second or third time through, they just read the first few paragraphs, got to the first buy button, and then decided they were sold at that point, so let's buy it. Editor: I mean- Carl Galletti: But probably everybody's accustomed to the fact that the buy button's usually at the end of the sales letter, so that's usually the place where you make your offer, call to action, your CTA call to action, and you need to make that explicit. You need to explain, "Here's what you get. Here's what you get. Here's the guarantee. This is the offer, and this is why it's valuable," but the most important part is the headline, because if the headline doesn't get them interested in reading the first sentence, then they're never going to read the rest of it, and they're never going to get exposed to the rest of the stuff, and then the beginning of the sales letter is the most important. When I coach people, here's what I tell them. Carl Galletti: The reason I tell them this is because, in critiquing people's sales letters, I always found that they put the most powerful stuff, not at the beginning, but somewhere after the beginning, in the middle sometimes. I just have them move it up to the front. One of the ways that I learned this is by reading Frank Capra. Do you know who Frank Capra is? He's a director, the movie director. He wrote It's a Wonderful Life and a bunch of movies. One of the movies he wrote was Lost Horizon. In his autobiography, he talked about the fact that when he did Lost Horizon, everyone in the crew loved it. When they showed the dailies every day, they showed what they had shot the day before, and everyone thought this was going to be a big hit. So when it was done, they played it in a movie theatre where they did a test and they invite people off the street. You didn't have to pay, come in, sit down. It was a movie. Carl Galletti: You play the movie. People were walking out, because they didn't have to pay. They didn't care. They didn't like the movie, so he couldn't figure out what it was. Then, finally, he just thought, "You know what? The real interesting part of this movie is when the guy gets to Shangri-La, and that's the interesting part," so he took off the first two reels. In his words, I think he said, "I threw away the first two reels." In a practical sense, he didn't throw them away. He took the beginning, put it on the third reel, and started the movie that way. Did another test, and this time they stayed, loved the movie, applauded at the end, and it went on to win like five major Academy Awards. That was Lost Horizon. Editor: It's incredible, isn't it? Carl Galletti: Yeah, because it's like when you sit down and write, sometimes you think you need to have a buildup to get to the good part. No, get to the good part first. Start with the good part. Editor: Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, especially as you say, copyrighting is sometimes a skill that is overlooked, I tend to think. Would you agree with that? Carl Galletti: Definitely. I think it's because copywriters bring value, and so they have to charge a lot of money, because it's something that takes a while to ferret out and do all the research. I was talking to Gary Bencivenga on the phone one day. This is a while ago when he was still writing copies, retired now, but he was telling me that he writes only one piece a month. He's got one copy assignment a month. It takes him a month, because he researches things. He said that one of the reasons that he does better, he outperforms other copywriters, is because he's just so much better at researching. Carl Galletti: Actually, Eugene Schwartz said the same exact thing. He said, "I beat other copywriters out, not because I write better copy, but because I do better research. I work harder on it." He used to do books for Prevention Magazine and other companies, and he said, "When I was through reading that manuscript and studying it, not just reading it," because he'd do it over and over again, and he'd really study it and break it down, "I knew more about the subject than the guy who wrote the book." Carl Galletti: The example that he brings up is the fact that one of the things he wrote, speaking with the author, he said the author told him, "I never said that." Carl Galletti: He said, "Yes, you did," so he pointed out to him where in his book, two or three different places, "If you take all this information, that's exactly what you said." Carl Galletti: The guy said, "Yeah, you know what? You know that book better than I do. I wrote it." Editor: I mean, for anybody who's listening to this or reading this, Carl, how can we find out more about you and also the services that you offer? Carl Galletti: Well, first of all, obviously go to scientificadvertising.com, and that's got all of that old, basic stuff that you're going to learn the fundamentals from. You want to also go to carlgalleti.com, and if you want me to write copy for you, that's a good place to go, and if you want to take my coaching Program, there's copycoach.com. You can go to those three places. That's a good starter. Editor: That's great. Well, Carl, I really appreciate your time today. There's so many insights and so many amazing stories. I really appreciate your time, and once again, thank you for joining us today. Carl Galletti: Well, it's a pleasure being here. Thank you having me.