The Backyard Batting Cage

Jim Fleck

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Name: Jim Fleck

Industry: Internet Marketing, Direct Marketing

Website: jimfleck.com

Jim Fleck’s Bio: You may call him old school in the business of Internet marketing, but Jim Fleck considered one of the direct marketing legends we have today. He has been active online since 1997, so much longer than most Internet marketers.

He is the author of ““How To Make Quick And Easy Money From Your Kitchen Table… In Your Underwear!” and the CEO of Instant Profits Marketing, Inc.

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David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from podcastinterviewx.com. Today I’m very excited, I’ve lined up a call for you guys to listen in with Jim Fleck. Now he’s been around for years. He got started making his first dollar online all the way back in 1998, so way back when, well over twelve years now He’s the author of How to Make Quick and Easy Money from your Kitchen Table in your Underwear. When I first got started, I got introduced to him by seeing him speak at different events. He was actually invited to speak at Dan Kennedy, Jeff Paul’s things. He’s done a lot of work with Jeff Paul, Ron LeGrand, Robert Allen, and quite a few of those names are quite synonymous with information marketing in the real estate space.

So Jim Fleck’s actually really quite big in real estate and created a system and the way that he markets that. It’s funny, even though I got introduced to his stuff very early on, I haven’t heard too much from him in the world of information marketing and internet marketing as well. He’s been off doing infomercials and that sort of thing, so I was keen to follow him up and find out what he’s been working on for the past twelve years.

So I’d just like to invite you to the line and welcome you. Are you there Jim?

Jim Fleck: Yes, I’m here David.

David Jenyns: Excellent, well thanks for your time.

Jim Fleck: I’ve actually never really left the information marketing in the internet market. I guess I probably broke into that a lot earlier than most. I was a technology guy back in the mid nineties and I really broke into internet marketing in 1997. There were only a couple of us back then, Corey Rudl who is not with us anymore and Marlon Sanders and Jonathan Mizel, there weren’t very many of us back then.

At that time at the end of the nineties, I was getting out of my mail order businesses which actually started back in the 1990. I’ve been in the information business now for twenty years. I’ve been pursuing opportunities my whole life. I’ve run dozens of companies and even had my own company when I was thirteen, a real company with twelve people. That was a teenage lawn mowing thing, but a real company with twelve people working for me when I was eighteen years old putting myself through college.

In the late nineties I saw the Jeff Paul mail order infomercial. He was in business with Dan Kennedy and that business had really come to an end. It was really only a short- lived business and designed for one thing only and that was to get an infomercial. They did that with Guthy Renker, the people that were doing Tony Robbins and Victoria Principal and a lot of the big shows here in the States. That really didn’t go anywhere.
A couple of years later we were actually invited out to Joe Sugarman, the creator of the BluBlocker sunglass craze, a legend in direct marketing I know you know. He created 800 numbers, the use of 800 numbers here in ads. We were at his estate out in Hawaii. Jeff had been invited, I’d been invited, Dan Kennedy and a couple of other guys. I told Jeff, let’s take that mail order product you’ve got and let’s sex it up a bit and throw the internet in there.

I’ve been on the internet now for almost three years and we converted that thing to the internet. Of course Jeff Paul in making money on the internet is now really legendary. Quite frankly I was instrumental in creating all that. I was the internet guy in that whole process. So for the last eight, nine years I left the straight information business really offline and went completely one hundred percent online. Quite frankly the majority of my time has been spent on TV because there is nothing that compares with that.

When you can get 15,000 buying customers a month, now some people say I could get 15,000 e book sales a month and of course we know most people are lying when they say that. But when you get people calling in to buy them, there’s nothing like TV. That’s where I’ve been for the last decade. I had Jeff’s products on the internet and there were guys like Sean Casey and Frank Kern and a lot of these guys were old customers of mine on the internet. I’m not taking credit for them, they are all brilliant guys, they went on to make a ton of money online.

A couple of years ago I decided well, I built this huge Jeff Paul business. I built these mail order businesses in the nineties, let’s build one for myself. My wife and I had already, I don’t know if we call ourselves prognosticators, but we saw the real estate crash coming and we started investing early on in what are called short sales in the States and getting properties for discounts from the banks and foreclosures and things like that which I’m sure your listeners have all heard of and probably experiencing there also. I just don’t know the extent of it.

So as soon as we started investing in real estate I said to myself, information is in my blood. The minute I figured out real estate I said, I’ve got to start teaching other people. I just couldn’t get away from it. The idea of investing in real estate came to mind in late ’06, mid ’06. February ’07 I decided to teach what I had already learned. In July of ’07, just a few months later, I had 225 people in a seminar and I was teaching them at about $2,000 apiece.

That was July of ’07. We’re not quite three years later. That first year we did about $3,500,000 in sales, home study courses and seminars. I don’t know what we did the second year but it was probably double that. I’ve got a coaching program that costs $19,000 to join. We’ve got a mini coaching program. The $19,000 is almost like a gym in a box. The person comes to my office and I really install an entire business for them into them.

Then I have a mini one that is $5,000 a year and it gets some ongoing coaching. We sell that by webinar and we did that just a couple of days ago and sold four of them. The beauty of that is, that’s $20,000 and we replayed it again on Saturday and I actually sold two more which is $30,000, but it is recorded. I’m not there, in fact I was at Little League coaching baseball with my son.

I’ve never really left. The beauty of it is what we got to is I have my own television show now selling my book Real Estate Riches in Under Ten Hours a Week and that is a lead generator. So I think that gives a little bit of background David. What I’d really like to tell your listeners though is what the core of it has been for me because in the early nineties I was just trying to start mail order companies and sell anything. I was buying back then,

I don’t know how far you go back. I was doing the one thousand reports on a CD, licensing those and being able to sell to your friends and family maybe. I moved from that into the Dan Kennedy world and that’s where I really learned direct response marketing from. I used to run in circles with Dan Kennedy. I was in his first platinum group, Gary Halbert, I hired and worked with him and Ted Nicholas and Jay Abraham, those were the guys I was hanging around with and learning from and speaking at seminars with them eventually.

There are a number of things I think, and I know we only have a short time today, but if it’s ok, I know we’ve got certain questions so if you want to chime in anywhere.

David Jenyns: You go.

Jim Fleck: When I get going, I get going.

David Jenyns: I won’t get in your way.

Jim: Ok. So I went and I saw that Dan Kennedy was doing certain things and we took direct response and I became the leading consultant in a technology niche and I won’t bore people with it, but I was the leading consultant. My clients were the US government, the Canadian government, the US Navy, AT & T, Great Western Bank and Arthur Anderson, big companies. They brought me in to set up their computer systems in a way where it no longer took twenty people to run them, it took one.

I was the guy they brought in the back door after everybody else screwed things up. When the internet came out, that was tailor made for me. I was outsourcing to Pakistan and India and the Ukraine in 2000. All kinds of people use virtual systems now, but we were doing that back in 1999 – 2000 – 2001. We were very early adopters of the internet.

For me it was bringing a systems approach. I had created what are called intranets which were internets but within a company. So everyone in a company, if they were in a high rise, no matter what floor they were on, they could literally be around the world, but they could all communicate via their little internet. That was before the internet really became huge commercially.

So I knew the internet when it came out. I had been on bulletin boards and places like that since 1990.

David Jenyns: Classic BBSs with the dial up modems.

Jim Fleck: Yes, 2400 board modem. You’d type download and then you’d go have dinner and go out for the night and come back and it would be downloaded.

The consulting business required a lot of travel, it required a lot of me. I made a mistake there building myself up as the expert. There was no way out of that business for me. I had people doing work for me that I was able to expand the company but the real core of it was me. So I didn’t want to do it anymore. I gave up $3 – 400,000 a year and decided to build mail order from home. I became the leading consultant to heating and air conditioning and plumbers and went in and did that niche and killed that niche.

It was crazy, we were doing $50-60,000 per month the third month in business. That’s when Jeff Paul was basically hanging out looking for what he was next going to do in life. I said, let’s take that thing and put it on the internet. Then they asked me to help change their show from a mail order infomercial to an internet infomercial. So I created that.

From there I went on to sell membership sites. I had a $10 a month membership site, continuity site in 2001. I still remember when I was in Dan Kennedy’s flat, him betting me a steak dinner I wouldn’t have that membership site six months from then. Granted I went from ten members to two members, but I still got the steak dinner.

Then I did everything you see now, landing pages, you’ll see people promote a webinar, they’ll send three emails, they do the webinar, then they tell you that their server crashed or people couldn’t get on to do a replay or an encore. That all came out of my teleseminar system that I created in 2002.

My longest running teleseminar ran from May 2004 to June 2009. The same one, recorded, ran at least once a month and sometimes I didn’t even know it was running, I’d just get an email saying we made $25,000 or we made $45,000.It just ran over and over again and of course we do that with webinars now too.

I think the value for your listeners, is the fact that I’ve made a lot of mistakes since starting these businesses and online businesses. I can take anybody and create a new business for them. That’s what I did, I turned myself into a real estate guru and was on TV three years later. So it doesn’t matter what business, the heating and air conditioning, and plumbing, I wasn’t either of those guys. So it’s not important what you do.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes and entrepreneurs often make mistakes obviously, it is part of the learning and growing process. What I want to talk about is a mistake most people make and it has certainly cost me a lot of money and we don’t do it anymore. It’s a mistake that is probably costing many of your listeners money. I’m going to skip over how to get into the business because I could go on for an entire day on how to pick a niche and analyze a niche but obviously you’ve just got to pick a market and try to get into it. That is not hard to do.

The mistake people make is they hear some of the old teaching and online marketers are just regurgitating what they heard from all the mail order guys in the nineties who were talking about the mail order guys from the seventies and sixties. I’m no different, I don’t like to come up with stuff on my own. I think it was Einstein who said there was nothing new under the sun. There’s not.

So what they do here is you learn that the majority of your money comes from a back end promotion, send to your own customers. There is some truth there. Now there is front end and back end. Front end is a first purchase, first product you make with a company, maybe they run ads or you see some Google Adwords or you get a Joint Venture email from someone and you make that first purchase. It might be low cost or it might be higher cost but it’s a first purchase and that person had to market and they had to do work and they had to do all kinds of things to maybe get you in to buy that thing.

Now these days with the internet and with a Joint Venture that is pretty easy. Your listeners may know this, but if they get an email from you for one of my products and they come over to my site and buy it for $1000, the secret’s out of the bag here David, but David’s going to get $500 out of that usually. It’s usually a 50 – 50 split so that did cost me $500 to get one of your people to buy my product. So there is a cost there. Now if I email that person, they’re probably on my list David, and obviously if they buy a $1,000 product from me I get to keep the whole $1,000.

That’s the same thing prior to the internet. With any Joint Ventures there is some expense in getting that customer and that is the front end. But once they’re there, you just ask them to keep buying and that is the back end. I always teach that is where the real profit is. Even though a majority of the profits come from the back end, the long term growth and really keeping your online business alive comes from the front end customer acquisition. Not focusing on that and not building a dependable, predictable way to acquire customers is almost certain death for your growth.

Many big name marketers, and I could drop a dozen of them that people on here know, they probably would think are wealthy and are killing it, but they are barely surviving. The reason is they only do Joint Venture marketing. Eventually someone is not going to want to Joint Venture with you or you’re going to have time when there are big huge lags or you’re going to send the same Joint Ventures or the same offers to your list and they’re going to get tired of them. So you must acquire new customers.

The way to do this is, everybody is always trying to, I want to get Google Adwords going or I want to get some Space Ads going, I want to automate my front end so I can automatically have leads coming in and I can spend all this time creating new back end offers because that’s where the real profits are, don’t I? Jim just said I get to keep all those profits.

The purpose of the front end marketing is to acquire new customers, it’s not to maximize profits and it’s also not to make a sale. Its purpose is to bring in new customers, that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for profit, for break even or for a loss. The purpose is to just get a new customer. The purpose of the back end marketing is to maximize the lifetime value of the customer to your business.

So you get customers who spend more money, you give them greater and greater value and additional offers and that’s what happens. That’s just what I said a second ago, but let me tell you why people really look at it wrong. Front end get new customers, back end more offers, generate more money. It’s really deeper than that and that’s where most companies place their priority on creating new products and offers. I fell into this and David you probably fell into it too, you’re thinking what else can I create, what else can I do, what other services and products?

But the problem there is, that’s not really how the biggest and most successful companies operate. I didn’t always know this. You have to be careful who you mimic and who you model yourself on. The most successful ones, they understand what we just talked about. The long term growth and security of your business, your online business comes from front end customer acquisition. So what you’ve got to do here is, you’ve got to know what it’s going to cost you to get a customer. That is your cost per acquisition. There are things that go into that but mostly it’s just, right, what am I spending to get that person on my list?
Then there is the lifetime value. You’ve got to add up everything someone spends with you. It’s pretty easy to do that. You just take all your sales for a certain period of time, divide it by how many customers you have and alright, that is what each customer is spending. What most people can’t do is, if I say what is your business currently paying to acquire a customer? I’m paying $110. Most people can’t even begin to tell you. I also can tell you that it’s $130 from TV, but it’s lower from AdWords and it’s lower from direct mail which averages us out to $110. The lifetime value of our customer is $450.

So I put them on my list for $110, and over the next couple of years they spend $450. I make $300 and some dollars. So every person I put on, I’m making $300. So I want to put on as many as possible. And for the back end, the profits come from different areas. So a simple way to think about the metrics we just talked about, is the cost per acquisition tells you how well you’re doing on the front end and your lifetime customer value is a measure of how well you’re doing the back end offers.

The question is, which side of the business can you put on auto pilot, the front end or the back end? So you want to think about a couple of things. Which sale is the harder to make, the front end or the back end?

David Jenyns: The front end.

Jim Fleck: Correct. Which end faces more competition?

David Jenyns: The front end as well.

Jim Fleck: Yes. Which end required constant innovation? A lot of people think it is the back end but it is the front end if you’re going to keep ahead of the competition and you’re going to keep making the sale and keeping the cost down. Which one has the higher conversion rate? That is going to be the back end. Which end are you going to make bigger profits on? That is going to be the back end.
But many people say, alright bigger profits, higher conversion rates, I shouldn’t put that on auto pilot, that is where the real money is. People will say, let’s put the front end on auto pilot. That’s wrong. You want to put the back end on auto pilot. I know I can get $350 or $400 per customer. Then if you’ve got a home study course, you’ve got a service of some kind, you’ve got a restaurant, and you know you’re going to make x amount of dollars when people come there.

If someone comes to my restaurant, this doesn’t have to be internet marketing, David, and I know they’re going to eat there for the next three years and spend $200, I just need to get more people in. So you get your back end established as quickly as possible and then you focus all your time, not all your time but a majority of your resources on as many front end activities as possible.

We’ve got a funnel that gets people in and then, I don’t have the figures in front of me, so let me paint a picture from memory, I think I can get most of it, they get in and they get an opportunity to buy the front end, I’ll come back to the front end. Once they’re past the front end they get the opportunity to buy a $47 e book. Then it takes them up to a $297 home study course that we ship to them. All of these offers are finished at the end by an opportunity to join our monthly membership for $47 a month. We don’t really tack on products anymore. There are a lot of problems with that with merchant accounts now.

We let the continuity be a separate sale. So they’ve got to buy it. We have the $297 home study course and then we have several $700, $800, $9000 courses. Then we have a $1,000, $2,000 and $3,000 seminar. They also have a chance to join my $5,000 lower end coaching program and then there is a pretty highly filtrated way to get into a $25,000 a year and I put four or five of those a year in. They come to my office, work a day or two with me and that’s done and it’s not a bad way to make $25,000. They get to watch me do what I would have done anyway.

Along the way we filter the people out that actually are in a position, either because they have liquid cash or they have good credit and they can invest in real estate. We put them over into our track where they get to buy houses and apartment complexes and things like that.

All these things I just mentioned to you are all promoted via either auto responders or some of the seminars are just once a quarter so you’re already on our list, so once a quarter you’ll get promoted to that event. It’s all basically automated. I’m not coming up with new seminars, I’m not coming up with new e books or new coaching programs. Even my coaching programs, everybody in the Mastermind program shares their information with me and they know one of the things is I get to share it with everybody else. Everybody is sending things in all month and almost all I have to do at the end of the month is send it all out to the whole group. So I don’t even have to come up with my own content.

I do answer questions and advise them on whatever real estate deals they might want to talk about and things like that. So it’s that back end that is automated. Now we also have basically a DVD, it’s got four or five days of live training we’ve compressed down into Flash or something and it is on one DVD and we sell it for shipping and handling. That is our front end offer.

That’s not automated, we’re constantly trying different Google AdWords, we send postcards for people to come to that landing page. We do personalized urls that are also called pearls on those postcards, we run TV that point to those websites, I do Joint Ventures, I do what is called CPA, cost per acquisition, I do CPV, cost per view, all kinds of things keep feeding to that same landing page that gets that person to buy that DVD for just shipping and handling which is $8.

That page, we’re just getting ready to design up a new looking landing page to test against the old one. So we’re constantly changing that, changing the copy on it and looking for more and more places to run banners on the internet and get people into that funnel. Really the way to do it is get your back end established as soon as possible, and then focus all your time on the front.

So if you’ve been involved in marketing for any time, this is really backward to, David, you were probably taught the opposite way as I was. Get the front end, get some ads running and then start working on selling more and more stuff. The biggest companies I finally discovered that’s not how they work.

Which sale is harder to make? The front end. Which end faces more competition? The front end. Which end requires constant innovation? The front end. So how can you automate those things? You just can’t. Hopefully that’s something that your listeners, and I know if they’re beginners and don’t have a business yet, that may not help them right away, but I can tell you that long term, you’ve got to have new customers entering into relationship with your business or you’ll be out of business.

Most of these internet marketers are constantly scrambling, that’s why you see some internet marketers constantly coming out with new products because they don’t have new customers. They’ll get Joint Ventures with other people, they’ll maybe do a product launch and they’ll get those customers in there. By the way, product launches don’t generally make a ton of money on the front end. Many of them actually lose money but a lot of them don’t make much money.

The last three product launches, one person did about $450,000 in sales. Now he gave away about $125,000 in prizes and that $450 was split at least two ways, 50 – 50 plus he had 20% refunds. So the $450 had $90,000 in refunds, that comes down to $360, that was split so that’s about $180 and $110,000 in prizes, he was up about $70,000 and worked for three months. Three months on that launch. That’s some continuity but that is split 50 – 50 every month. So I just want to impress on people they’re not always as huge as people think they are.

It’s not a bad way to boost your income a little bit once or twice a year, but again, our product launch, I run the same thing to my new leads constantly because they’re brand new to the internet. They’re brand new to my list. They don’t know that I did a product launch last month. They don’t know that I did it last week. So part of my auto responder series is people get into my product launch as if it’s brand new. They get that same sense of anticipation of this thing is brand new that everybody else did when they participated in my launch.

Our product launch goes continuously, it never stops, just a perpetual launch in fact.

David Jenyns: So really it sounds as if you have this model down, You’ll start off and the person will have carved out their niche. Then they set up their product offering and having that funnel where you’ve got the entry level, lead generator front end book or low cost course to get them in. You progressively go down that funnel, sell courses, seminars and coaching and also continuity for that.

Once you’ve got that system in place, you then swap over to spending the majority of your time building up that front end and coming up with as many creative ways as possible to generate those leads.

One of the ones, and I know you’re an expert in, and this is something that I think a lot of internet marketers never head down that track, so I’m interested in getting your thoughts on the way that you use TV and infomercials. I know you’ve had a lot of experience writing copy and long form sales copy and direct response, all those types of things. How do you see that compare and what are the differences and similarities when you look at the way that you work with video? I suppose there are two parts there, both video just online selling your products and services and also video through TV through infomercials and things like that.

Jim Fleck: TV is extremely difficult and extremely expensive and it’s not really accessible to 95% of the people. I was fortunate enough to get in with a company that ran many of the successful thirty minute infomercials here in the United States. Their infomercials were about mail order and about real estate and about other things. I happened to be there at the right time when they wanted to convert them to the internet. So I was able to work on other shows for eight years before I got my show on the air.
That’s a difficult thing to teach people. For instance it cost $1,000,000 a week to run the show.

David Jenyns: Yes, you’ve got to know your numbers for that.

Jim Fleck: Just so people don’t think I stuttered, that’s $1,000,000 a week. You’ve got to have a pretty serious operation to make television in that form work. But what lessons we can learn here is, and I’ve been on the internet since before we could really sell things, so I can remember, many of the young listeners aren’t going to remember this because they’ve had fast internet pretty much their whole young lives, but it was extremely slow. If you tried to use video it was just ridiculous, it just didn’t work.

I even remember the first company that came out, they were called Crushed Media. They could make things work, what we would consider now, excruciatingly slow, but when they were done with it, it seemed like it was a revelation. We couldn’t believe how much faster the videos slowly skipped for us. But now we can stream video the same as television. Television is such a powerful medium, that we don’t put almost any page up of any kind anymore without video.

If you were to go to my support site, there’s a video of me explaining things to the people. You know we have so many different products that sometimes people get a charge on their credit card, I’ve done this, you look down, and I don’t remember what that is, so we list our website on the credit card.

They can go there and there is me talking, saying, ‘Hi, this is Jim Fleck I’m glad you stopped by my site here. I just wanted to let you know, in case you need some help with a product or registering for a seminar, just open up a ticket over here and send us an email and someone will be on it right away.

If you’re not sure what your charges on your credit card are, it was probably real estate related. If you’ve been looking around, you might have purchased,’ and I name a couple of products. ‘If you simply don’t remember, just open a ticket here and tell the person your name and give your email address and tell them your question and they will tell you exactly what your credit card charge was for.’ Things like that.

We use video everywhere. Thank you pages, thank you for buying. ‘I want to let you know we really value you actually using some of your hard earned money or your hard earned time with our company. Because of that, I know you’re really excited about your purchase and we’ve got a product that we normally sell for $197, but now because I know you are interested right now and want to make a change in your life and I’m so excited that you’ve just joined our company, I’m going to make you a special offer.

I want to put it in front of you right now. This $197 product all included in your order is $49. Just click on it right now and it is my way of saying thanks for joining the family, blah, blah, blah.’

That’s a thank you page. Normally people would just let the merchant account or the authorized.net or Infusion or whatever just go to a thank you page. I use those two examples because those are areas where people wouldn’t even think to use video. We do most of our selling by video now. I don’t write almost any long form sales letters. When I started in ’97 I took a forty page mail order letter and put it online continuously, one page, they didn’t even click through.

So we learned tricks about creating html tables where you’ve got your first table up there and it showed your first bit of your text and the rest was still loading down below. I think video is a must and I think for beginning marketers, David, it’s easier. There are some things that have changed. I know people would argue with me but what I’m finding, empirical evidence selling people information on how to make money is, they’re not responding to much of the hype anymore.

I want to temper myself there because I’m an old marketer and I’m used to direct response copy, I’m used to crazy headlines of all kinds. I still use crazy headlines to get people’s attention but my sales letters are very much just like you guys have heard on this interview today, this recording, the same language.

It took me many years and anybody who has studied any copywriting has been taught to pretend you’re writing to one person. Try to picture your person and I can do that now. I’ve met so many of them through seminars, I can picture one of them and I write to one person because I know only one person is going to be opening my email at a time. It’s extremely hard to do for people. It’s so hard to do. You just have to rewrite and rewrite.

I’ve had emails David, that have put fifteen hundred people on a webinar and it’s taken me five minutes to write. I’ve had emails that have put people on a teleseminar or sent them to an order page that have brought in $50, $60, $300, $460,000 and they’ve taken me ten minutes to write.

David Jenyns: It’s the 10,000 hours that you had to put in to get to that point now, because it is almost like you are unconsciously competent.

Jim Fleck: Now don’t let the cat out of the bag for everybody! But I tell you what, it is only partly the 10,000 hours because I don’t go through and say, right, am I using the right headlines, am I using the right call to actions? Some of that, you’re right, comes out automatically. I will tell you what the key is, it’s real, down to earth speaking to people. Let me see here if I can just pull up a couple of emails, a couple of short ones. I will use a headline.

Here’s an email I just sent out: Three Killer Deals in Thirty Minutes or Less, Can You Do It? So you’ve got a little curiosity in there. Three Killer Deals, so I don’t want to say I’m not using any kind of copywriting technique anymore. You’ve still got to get people to read the email. So that’s a decent subject line and my from field by the way is Jim Fleck, they know it’s from me. There are no doubts about it.

It says, ‘Hello David. I haven’t given out any juicy, secret tool I use in quite a while. I want to show you one of the things I use every single day. It helps me do things much faster than it did even six months ago. My competition is valuating properties in a certain way. I got this software tool that I use every single day. It allows me to duplicate my strategies and multiply my strategies and techniques which gets the same amount of work done in a lot less time. It makes my hours of work become minutes. I just want you to join me tonight so I can reveal this tool. I’m going to show you how I use it everyday. It is one of my most valued real estate tools.

Let me ask you, how many offers did you write this week? How about this month? If you’re like most average investors, the answer is probably zero to one. It’s an absolute fact that the amount of offers you make is a direct reflection of how much money your make in this business. You want to know how many we made? Over two hundred. So the bottom line is if you’re not writing offers, you’re not making money.’ I didn’t use a whole lot of headlines in there and a lot of superlatives. That’s just me speaking and getting a point across. Now this email is just killing.

I’ve got another one that says, I’ve got one here, this is one of my favourites.

David Jenyns: It’s funny as you read these, that first one it still felt like for people who have studied old school direct marketing, you can still get elements of it. I can see it’s toned down hugely to where Dan Kennedy and Jay Abrahams used to write these really outrageous sales letters. But it feels like a lot toned down version but you can still feel some of that language in there.

Jim Fleck: Yes, and I think that’s where you hit it on the head. There is no doubt I’ve written these for years. Maybe it is harder to write this way than the old way. I find it easier to write this way but again I’ve been writing for twenty years. They do say in the old days when we did mail order and we did sales letters, you had to pay someone more money to write a four page sales letter than a twelve page, because it was harder to sell in four pages. You didn’t have enough room.

I have another one, the subject line of this, ‘The response was overwhelming.’ This was for a replay of a webinar. ‘The response was overwhelming. Here is the replay you asked for.’ So there are definitely some copywriting techniques in there. I’m being assumptive. ‘You asked for it’. Oh, people are asking for this, I need to go check this out. ‘Response was overwhelming’. What did I miss? Inside the email it says, ‘Finally the government and banks help us do deals.’ This is real estate related. ‘And I have the program to make it happen. The government is beginning to realize that without us investors, this real estate mess will never turn around. The government needs you. Jim Fleck needs you. Hear my sold out webinar tomorrow. Go here. Thank you. Jim.’ That was it. This probably brought in $17, $18,000 over the space of the first twenty-four hours.

I wouldn’t say much hype. I try to go for sound bites. I try to go for short sentences. My emails are all cut in about fifty characters wide and very rarely do they go over three lines. There’s ‘Finally the government and banks help us do deals.’ That’s one line. ‘And I have the program to make it happen.’ That’s another line. ‘The government needs you’ is a line.’ Jim Fleck needs you’ that’s a line. Obviously in regular writing that is all one paragraph. People like the short sound bites.

But I think the thing to take away from this, the people that have not really done much copywriting is to start out talking like yourself. My favourite book is John Caple’s Tested Advertising Methods. Personally I think that is the only book you need. Take my advice in trying to sound personable and I think you’ll find you’re very successful with your email communications for sure.

David Jenyns: Yes, you touched on some key things there and some great advice for people to get started. The idea of keeping them short and simple. Everybody these days is running out of time. We’ve always been busy but there are so many different things fighting for our attention now, so those shorter emails are really what people need to actually read through it. Sometimes seeing that really long form sales copy can turn them off. People who have had that old teaching, it’s like you talked about, two things came out of the old teaching.

One is maybe those really long form sales letters and the second thing you mentioned was the idea of people following that old teaching. We’re getting it around the wrong way; they were focusing a lot more on the back end than they were on that front end. Do you see any other really big mistakes when people are getting online, where they’re missing the boat because they’re just not focusing on a particular part of their business?

Jim Fleck: Yes, there are certainly .lots and let me say something about the long form. I’m not saying long form is dead. Obviously if there is a video, even if it is seven or eight minutes or nine and a half minutes, that could be eight, twelve pages of copy. So that is really long form. I’m guilty of it myself. I can’t read eight or twelve pages of sales copy on the internet anymore. I’m too used to the videos. We’re of the YouTube generation now.

It’s no different to sitting down to your TV and flipping through. Think about it, if you’re watching TV and you flip through to a commercial and they were scrolling text, how much of it would you read on a commercial for something? You wouldn’t read any of it. It should be as long as needed.

I’ve got good at being very short and getting to the point in my emails. There are some technical reasons for that. First, the fewer words I have in my email, the less chance there is of being caught up in a spam filter. If you write it enough and create just enough curiosity, people’s internet and everything is so fast they will look at it and say, I don’t know what this is, but it’s from Jim so let me click through. Then you do the rest of the selling on the site. Those are some of the reasons behind my short emails also.

Everybody makes this mistake and I’ve made this mistake, and it’s planning out the company or planning out a promotion. More than anything else, you’ve got to get clear on the purpose of your business. I’ve got an entire document that says why I’m in business. If not, you’re just working a lot and you’ve got a different job.

A business should give you everything you want out of life. As much as I love writing copy and I love teaching real estate and I love investing in real estate, you know I like coaching Little League, I like lifting weight, I like going on vacation with my kids, sitting first row at the Yankee game, going out to the Rocky mountains and seeing Mount Rushmore and vacations and fun things we do here in the States. The business isn’t my life. I can walk out of the office and forget about it until the next day or several days for that matter.

So you have to have a purpose and then you have to design that, and I would say it is about lifestyle not work style. It’s called lifestyle. Designing that is really important to do up front. I see most people actually ignoring that and not paying attention. There are five steps. You’ve go to get clarity on what it is. You’ve got to define what you want out of life. Then you’ve got to start looking at what kind of customer or client am I going after for whatever I’m selling. You can’t just say I’m going to sell this and that’s it. You’ve got to determine who you’re going to go after.

We have a very clear vision, and we do every other year, it doesn’t change a lot but we take our customer list and we send it off to a company that does the demographics of it and comes back and tells us the average age of your customer is fifty-five, they make $45,000 a year, they’re male and whatever. So we know who buys from us. We have that clear vision. When you create things in your business, you truly have to measure them.

I don’t know how many, again, even big names that I’ve consulted with, I shouldn’t say secretly, but behind the scenes, that I sit down and say, alright, well, what are your numbers like we talked about earlier, what are your front end numbers and back end numbers? If you’re not doing it now, you’ve got to start right away. If you’ve got to be brand new, you’ve got to start from the very beginning at measuring what you’re doing so that you know what you’re trying to improve.

If you just try different campaigns, at the end of the day all you’re looking at is how much money is in the account. I assure you at some point, money won’t be in the account and you won’t know what is wrong, so you won’t know where to improve it.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think you mentioned, not wanting to put you on the spot there, I think you said there were five steps. Did I miss one there? You mentioned measuring things in your business.

Jim Fleck: I think I mentioned measuring and analyzing. Did I leave a step out?

David Jenyns: You had, to get the clarity, define what it is you want. What customer are you going after and then the measure.

Jim Fleck: My five steps are getting clarity for what you want and designing your life. They are a couple of personal steps. If you don’t do that first, you know what, the next thing is you’re sixty-five years old, seventy years old and you never had any time. You didn’t do it first. I know. I worked in corporations and I was into my thirties working for other people and killing myself and kept saying I’m going to do this and that.

Then I started my own businesses and just made a lot of money. It wasn’t until the last five years when I said, wait a minute, this is just crazy. I’ve made more and more money. I went from making pennies to millions and I’m just too busy. I’m not enjoying life. So I gave up $40,000 a month business, got out of it and started over. I just gave it away. It wasn’t easy but I gave it up and designed everything and said this is what I want. This is the end result and this is the kind of business I want. I really got good clarity there.
I said here is what I want in my life and I want to be done working at 3.00pm in the afternoon because my kids get home at 3.20pm. I want to have already been to the gym for a couple of hours. I don’t want to be waking up with an alarm clock and I don’t want to be tied down every day by meetings.

That was step two and three was, I said, alright, this is going to be my business and I got clarity on which direction I wanted to head. What is the client and customer I’m looking for? This is a little bit different. People start thinking about what am I going to sell? I kind of have an idea what I’m going to sell but I really want to look at the customer. I want someone who really wants to change their life. In this case, in this business, they want to do it through real estate and buying and selling houses or apartment complexes, it doesn’t matter.

From there, then I start thinking about the product and the company and the vision, this is step four, the vision that will support those clients and customers. I think that is the step I left out. From there, in that vision I’m really creating the company and the products, the ideas for them anyway. The fifth step is to measure everything.

David Jenyns: That’s a really clear set of actions. It’s interesting to hear those different insights that you made over the years. When you look back over your really extensive career, are there any key points where you can identify something important? Obviously putting this five step plan into place would have been one of them. Were there any other key discoveries or key points where you say, as soon as I started to do this, building my team or whatever it may be, those were those key leverage points that had a huge impact on your career?

Jim Fleck: Sure. A couple of key points are whatever I’m doing full on, play full out. If I’m going to coach a group of people on real estate and maybe I’ve got a group that has only twenty people in it and I wanted fifty, I can’t complain. I’ve got twenty people who have paid me to help them. So I don’t care that there are twenty when I wanted to do a promotion and I wanted to put fifty in there. My focus now is the best job, in this case it’s a kind of service as much of a product, although they get a product. Make that service the best it can be and get inside it be involved in it and enjoy it.

Get inside it and really enjoy it and experience it and don’t let it just be a task. In that process, depending again on what your product or service is, in this case it’s a service and it’s teaching someone, I have to get into it.

You have to be focused on that customer and you need to make sure they’re getting it. I don’t get annoyed when people don’t get it and I have to repeat it. I just don’t get annoyed. I’m hearing myself explain it and they’re not getting it and I’m asking them and trying to explain it a different way and sometimes I have to have a private conversation with them outside of the coaching group in order to, and these are usually done by phone, in order to get them over a certain point.

But I won’t give up. It’s almost like no student left behind, only I actually do it. So that is one thing. Letting go of things is right up there as one of the biggest things possibly ever. What I mean by letting go of things is first of all, of course, getting quality people. Sometimes you don’ know if they’re a quality person yet, maybe they aren’t and they end up being replaced down the road but you’ve got to let go of things and let other people flourish and have a chance to do what you’re doing. Let them grow and be and experience and flourish also.

I have a woman. Natalie, now who works for me. You have a meeting set up with her David. She can write copy, she can organize webinars, she comes up with product ideas, she makes my company money without me having to have anything to do with it. She’s been with me for about five or six years and when she came on she was more or less just a customer support admin. She’s pretty much capable of being a CEO at this point or at least a marketing manager.

She would just say, hey I’ve got this idea and I would say, for a long time I had all this past direct marketing and direct response and copywriting knowledge and I would say, well, you know, that really doesn’t work. Now that you’ve given me an idea, let’s try it this way. Now I look at things and sometimes the things she was trying through experience would work. But you get into the habit of thinking you are the expert. You know what? I just know a lot of things, but you know what? Natalie knows a lot of things. She’s learning on her own and she’s got an interest in the business. She wants to make it work.

Letting go and letting people, your team do things, that’s probably the best piece of advice I could give anybody David, is to do that. There’s something a friend of mine sent me and I don’t know where it came from, but I tell you, if you’ll indulge me, I might read it.

David Jenyns: Yes, please.

Jim Fleck: It says, ‘One day I had a date with friends for lunch. May, a little old blue hair about eighty years old came alone with them, all in all a pleasant bunch. When the menus were presented, we ordered salads, sandwiches and soups, except May who said,’ Ice cream please, two scoops, chocolate.’ I wasn’t sure my ears heard right and the others were aghast. ‘Along with heated apple pie’, May added, completely unabashed. We tried to act quite nonchalant as if people did this all the time, but when our orders were brought out, I didn’t enjoy mine. I couldn’t take my eyes off May as her pie a la mode went down.

The other ladies showed dismay. They ate their lunches silently and frowned. The next time I went out to eat, I called and invited May. I lunched on white meat tuna. She ordered a parfait. I smiled. She asked if she amused me, and I answered, ‘Yes, you do, but also you confuse me. How come you order rich desserts while I feel I must be sensible?’ She laughed and said with wanton mirth, ‘I’m tasting all that is possible. I try to eat the things I need and do the things I should, but life is so short my friend, I hate missing out on something good. This year I realized how old I was.’ She grinned.

‘I haven’t been this old before. So before I die, I’ve got to try those things that for years I had ignored. I haven’t smelled all the flowers yet, there are too many books I haven’t read, there are more fudge sundaes to wolf down and kites to be flown overhead. There are many malls I haven’t shopped and I’ve not laughed at all the jokes. I’ve missed a lot of Broadway hits and potato chips and cokes. I want to wade again in water and feel ocean spray on my face. I want to sit in a country church once more and thank God for His grace.

I want peanut butter everyday, spread on morning toast. I want untimed long distance calls to the folks I love most. I haven’t cried at all the movies yet, or walked in the morning rain. I need to feel wind in my hair. I want to fall in love again. So if I choose to have dessert instead of having dinner, then should I die before nightfall, I’d say I’d died a winner because I missed out on nothing. I fulfilled my heart’s desire, I had my final chocolate mousse before my life expired.’

With that, I called the waitress over, I’ve changed my mind I said, I want what she’s having, only add some more whipped cream.’

This is my gift to you. We need an annual Friend’s Day is what my friend said, if you get this twice, you’ve got more than one friend. So it’s just one of those emails that gets sent around. They typically don’t last but it came from a very close friend of mine. I’m at an age now David, where if I indulge in all those things I’m not going to be able to get out of my chair, without going to the gym for a little bit.

But the point is, you’ve got to remember what it’s all for. I didn’t always do that when I was younger. Of course I didn’t have children either. But there was my spouse and there were times that maybe our relationship was strained or friendships were strained because you don’t remember what it’s all for. It’s not about business. It’s not about making money. And yes, maybe it’s easy for me to say that now that I have it, but there have certainly been ups and downs.

I see now that it’s about lifestyle, not work style. So if you can remember that, that’s why we’re here on earth. We’re here to experience earth itself and our friends and loved ones, and we’re not here to work. That’s not what we’re here for. I’m nor an advocate of just finding what you love and you’ll be paid a fortune. I love baseball but I’m forty-six years old and I don’t think I’ll be breaking into the big league. But I do love teaching people and I’m fortunate that I get paid to do it. So I know we went overtime here, but once I start teaching, I just love to do it. Hopefully I’ve helped your listeners.

David Jenyns: Yes, a tremendous insight there and a great way to finish. I know you’re someone people should probably keep an eye on, even if they’re not necessarily interested in the real estate area, or if they are interested in the real estate area. What are some of the ways people can find out more about you and see what you’re up to and just experience more of your content?

Jim Fleck: By the way I do several times a year teach internet marketing and do a number of things like that, so the best way to get onto to my list is just simply to go to my name jimfleck.com. You’ll see a landing page there which talks about earning extra cash and simply fill that out. You don’t have to put your phone number, just put your name and email address in.

You’ll find out about my real estate things, get my regular newsletters where I just talk about the economy and things going on in the world and what I think is going on. Then you’ll see marketing that I do and periodically you’ll see back end pitches and you’ll see funnels. At the very least it will be educational, but I’ve got to warn you, you’ll probably buy something.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well, I’d like to thank you very much for your time Jim. You’re very generous with your time and you’re extremely busy as well so I appreciate the time we’ve had today, so thanks again.

Jim Fleck: You’re welcome David, it was my pleasure.

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