Biggest Lesson Ever
You did study this, right?
Well, no worries if you didn’t. I’ll take care of you.
But there will be a test on this!
Seriously though…I recently told you about a podcast you had to listen to.
This interview is between two of my mentors, Mark Ford and Porter Stansberry. It’s important for your success and for the development of your skills. Please listen to this or read the transcript below.
I just spent the weekend in NYC with Porter and 90 other members of a private club. I’ll you more about the weekend in an upcoming email, including how I ended up in the $22,000 a night Presidential Suite doing prisoner squats (like this)
Until then, here’s your homework…
I pulled the following highlights for you (bold, italics emphasis in quotes is mine). Don’t let my highlights stop you from reviewing the interview. I’ll bet you choose another 3-5 of your own big “A-Ha” ideas:
The Key to Success
“Mark Ford taught me that in every business there is a key lever that makes it work. In publishing, that key lever is the copywriter, and Mark explained that to sell anything in publishing, you must have four things.
1) A list
2) An offer
3) A guarantee
4) Copy
The fourth element is the only one that really changes from company to company. If you look at all the financial publishing companies, we all have the same lists, same prices, and same guarantees. What’s not the same? What’s the key lever to success in this industry? Copy.” – Porter Stansberry
“Mark said, ‘So if you want to be successful, Porter, don’t become a marketing guy. Instead, spend your time learning how to be a copywriter. He told me this when I was 24 years old and that’s exactly what I did. It was 3 years later that I wrote something that became famous, ‘The Railroad Package’, which launched my business. I would have never understood publishing well enough to become an entrepreneur if I hadn’t had that mentoring. What Mark does is he will help you figure out what the lever is in your business. It comes down to understanding the art and the architecture of the sale.” – Porter
“If you ever come across great advertising, you probably don’t even recognize it as advertising, ’cause the very best advertising will fool you. You’ll never realize it was a sales piece.” – Porter
“This is the most important thing you’re gonna hear about building wealth in the entire podcast. This is the real secret. I knew that, in the age of computers/mass media, if I wasn’t creating something scalable, then I was wasting my time. That’s why I got involved in publishing financial research. If you want to be wealthy, you have to figure out how to make your business scalable. Copywriting is scalable. We spend tons of time and money producing our work, but the thing is we’re able to sell it at zero marginal cost. It doesn’t matter whether we have 100 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers. Our overhead costs are the same.”
“You have to find a way to take what you know about business and make it more scalable, and that’s why starting things like a consultancy on the side can be so lucrative. You can write down what you know and you can sell it online.” – Porter
“The best business I ever heard anyone start is a guy I know wrote a script. He wrote a little piece of computer code that figured out when any web site in the world was gonna expire. He figured out a way to buy any web site in the world immediately when it expired, and then at the same time, contact people to see if they wanted buy it, and to do so, at a reasonable price. It wasn’t blackmail. And this business, at one point, was making $50,000 a day and it had no employees. It was the ultimate in scale. So the big secret about wealth building is scalability, and the Internet allows you to do this no matter what your background, no matter what your business. All you have to do is be creative enough to figure out how to scale what it is that you know how to do.” – Porter
(BTW, due to a government change in buying domain names, this system stopped working…which worked out for me, because this guy helped me achieve one of my biggest business dreams.)
It’s crazy how it all works out when you network as much as possible, add value, build your skills, and tell positive people about your dreams.
Keep on pushing on to add value,
Craig Ballantyne
PS – One last tip from Mark:
“If you can become the most valuable employee to your employer, whether you’re an accountant or copywriter or marketer or product creator, within a year, you will be making more money.” – Mark Ford
PPS – I highly recommend that you read…
…EVERYTHING from Mark Ford that you can get your hands on.
PPS – And here I am sitting at the desk in the Presidential Suite office.
