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Michael: For anyone who is listening to this, why don’t you introduce yourself, tell us what you do, how you got into it, and why you got into it. What are some of the things that you offer that you think can help any of my listeners who are new to marketing or even those who are not new to marketing?

Taylor: Okay, my name is Taylor Trump. I’m project manager for my uncle’s construction firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’m also a copywriter, and a small business management specialist, and an on-line and off-line marketing specialist. How I got involved was basically I stumbled onto the Internet and I was like “What is this?” I’d bought a lot of stuff to use for some software I had developed for the construction industry to simplify things, to take ninety percent of the paperwork out of it and to make a job run a lot smoother. In addition, I wanted to add some more sexiness and more money incentives to my job with the construction. So I stumbled onto the Internet and onto some websites and it was all just by happenstance, by chance. I started asking a few questions, and I started seeing that some people were making some real serious money doing something that I had always wanted to do and that was to learn how to write persuasively and learn how market, learn how to understand what marketing was, not on the surface level but on a deeper level, and learn how to do it like the experts did it only better than them eventually.

Michael: How long ago was it that you first got introduced to this stuff?

Taylor: I’d say 2-1/2 to 3 years ago.

Michael: When you saw this stuff, did it hit you like a ton of bricks?

Taylor: Oh, yeah, I was overwhelmed. I was spending I would venture to say 18 hours a day on the Internet. I was on there until 2:00 in the morning. I would get up at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, look at a couple of websites, and then go to my office and look at more websites. I bought two more high-speed laptops and started buying different products and downloading stuff and interacting with different people.

Michael: What concepts did you pick up as far as learning? Who were you most impressed with? Who was your personal favorite out of these marketing gurus?

Taylor: I would have to say, hands down, Jay Abraham.

Michael: What was the first Jay Abraham material that you were exposed to?

Taylor: The first Jay Abraham material I was exposed to, I think I purchased from you, and it might have been “Your Marketing Genius at Work.”

Michael: That was the first Jay Abraham stuff you got?

Taylor: I think so. I have so much of it now that I don’t even know.

Michael: I think you got just about everything you have from me. You did get a lot of stuff from me. Once you started studying, did you apply it to your construction business?

Taylor: Immediately, I went to my uncle and said, “You’re not going to believe this but there are some other ways that we can make a ton of money without having to do any labor. There are deals we can structure, there are all kinds of little things we can do.” He was not interested at all.

Michael: So he wasn’t interested at all at implementing any of that stuff?

Taylor: None of it; he was not interested at all. He handled construction, and that was all he was interested in doing.

Michael: So you didn’t really implement it, you just went ahead and did your own stuff.

Taylor: I run my own part of the business. I implemented it on my own. I had I would say at that time $27M to $30M worth of construction work going on, which is nothing. That’s two or three projects. I had that going on, and I decided “Okay, look I’m building these large spaces, 30.000, 40,000, or 50,000 square foot buildings for these people. They’re going to need other things, like someone to keep their lawn up, someone to supply and install an alarm system, smoke detectors. What if I hooked up with people who did these things, developed my own list I could contact them and tell them I could either give them the leads for this amount of money or we could work out a deal so when they closed the deal the could give me a certain amount of money.” Like a small little indiscriminate joint venture partnership type deal.

Michael: Did you do that?

Taylor: Yes, I did.

Michael: And it worked.

Taylor: And it’s still working.

Michael: That’s great. It’s just a matter of making the phone calls and bringing the service and the vendor together.

Taylor: That’s all it is. I’m bringing the subcontractor together with the owner of the project or the architect.

Michael: Let me ask you this. You’ve studied a lot of Internet stuff. Is there a lot of hype and bull shit out there?

Taylor: Yeah, there is.

Michael: How can someone separate what’s real and what’s not real when they’re surfing the Internet and they’re getting all kinds of offers?

Taylor: The first and most important thing they can do is use their common sense. If you go to a website and they say “We can triple your sales overnight,” there’s nothing that can be done overnight except sleep. There is, Jay Abraham, he can do something overnight for you for thousands of dollars! You’re not going to get those secrets for free. You’re not going to get any secret for free. You’re going to have to pay some money for them, but like Jay said, “If I can show you how to make a dollar, will you give me a quarter? For each dollar I can make you, will you give me a quarter back?” “ Well yeah, that’s a fair proposition. I would give you a quarter back.” That’s what you have to do on the Internet. You’re going to have to invest some money. You’re going to have to invest some time. You’re going to have to do some research. Then you’re going to have to apply and test what you’ve learned.

Michael: I see. When you establish a deal like that and it all does sound very easy, that principle “If I can bring you in a new dollar would you pay me a quarter of it?” How do you structure something like that? Do you do a legal contract? Do you do a handshake, a gentleman’s agreement? What would you advise as far as setting up a deal like that?

Taylor: You always do a contract. There are two companies here in Minneapolis that I do business with. I went to college with these people; we’re the best of friends. At first it was a handshake. When they saw how much money they had to pay me, we had to sit down and sign a contract. Initially the best thing to do is always sign a contract.

Michael: Do you have an attorney draw it up?

Taylor: No, I have a product that I got from you, Jay Abraham’s “Contract Guide.”

Michael: You actually use that as a skeleton for your contracts.

Taylor: Correct, it covers all the bases, and of course you can add to it by addendum or you redraft it.

Michael: What would it cost to have an attorney draw up a contract like that?

Taylor: $25,000 maybe.

Michael: Are you serious?

Taylor: Yeah, yeah. I showed it to my attorney, and I showed it to our corporate attorneys, who are the same attorneys who did the tobacco settlement here in Minnesota. They looked at it and said “Yeah, we can do something like this. It would take us one day but we’d charge you $25,000”.

Michael: That’s incredible! Are you still friends with the guys you did the joint venture with?

Taylor: Well yeah, yeah, we’re still friends.

Michael: It puts a strain on it, doesn’t it?

Taylor: It puts a strain on the friendship. I tell them “Listen I’d just like to discontinue our business relationship and go back to being friends, hanging out doing things we used to do.” And they said “Well you know what? I’d rather not be your friend and we continue with the business.”

Michael: That’s funny! Did you ever have any deals that blew up? I’m sure you’ve had some deals you tried to set up, and it’s not a perfect world. You may have to try and set up five deals to get two. Is that realistic?

Taylor: Well it depends, if the people come and look for you, you’ll set up a lot more deals. You’ll set up four out of five. If you go and look for them and you have to solicit to them, first you have to sell them on the idea. That takes time. Then you have to build a relationship and a rapport. Then their schedules are so hectic because they’re not running their business, they’re just running around in their business. You can’t really help them. I have a client in Hawaii who pays me a lot of money but he doesn’t do anything because he’s so busy. He won’t take any of my advice. He won’t stop and listen. I’m going to fire him because I don’t want to take his money because he’s wasting his own time.

Michael: I understand. Tell anyone listening to this about some of your websites and about some of the products and services that you offer that you think they can benefit from. Give them a web address, and spell it out in case they can’t hear it, so they know how to get there and let us know what you have to offer.

Taylor: I have two, and actually I’m in the process of revamping all my websites because I’m shifting gears to be more helpful to my subscribers. I have a couple of newsletters that have over 30,000 subscribers and the best thing you can do when you have subscribers is to be of value to them, so I’m trying to add more value to our interaction, more value to our relationship.

Michael: How often are you mailing out to your subscribers?

Taylor: Once a week. It was infrequent for a time, but now it’s going to be once a week, each and every week.

Michael: Do you sell advertising, or do you sponsor advertising or have sponsors in your newsletter as another source of income?

Taylor: My own products, the products that I own or that I own rights to.

Michael: What are the differences in the two newsletters?

Taylor: One is a paid newsletter. It’s called “The Marketing Genius Letter.” The website address is www.info-axxess.com .

Michael: What are we going to find there?

Taylor: There you are going to be able to subscribe to “The Marketing Genius Letter” and it is a phenomenal publication. It’s going to teach you how to mine the hidden assets in your business, it’s going to show you how to out market, outwit, outsmart, and crush your competition. It’s going to show you how to take your business to heights that you never, ever imagined you could, with very simple techniques and very simple methods and strategies. It’s nothing too difficult, nothing high-tech, nothing convoluted, very simple everyday strategies that you probably know, but overlook or think they wouldn’t work, and a lot of things you’ve never seen or heard of. These strategies are what the great marketers, the successful marketers use to make millions and millions of dollars and to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for their clients.

Michael: How often is the newsletter sent?

Taylor: Every ten to fifteen days, you will be emailed a URL and a secret password that will take you directly to the newsletter.

Michael: Do you do all the writing, or do your ghostwriters do it?

Taylor: I write every single letter.

Michael: What does it cost?

Taylor: It costs $19.95 a month.

Michael: That sounds like a pretty good deal. Tell us about the other website, the free newsletter.

Taylor: That’s on illuminati.com. That’s my very first website, my first domain game. It’s www.the-illuminati.com . That a no BS marketing, sales and profit money e-journal. I give various marketing strategies, copy writing information and only original content, articles written by me that you won’t see anywhere else, with information you will be hard-pressed to find for free.

Michael: Did I see one of your websites copywriting.com?

Taylor: Onlinecopywriting.com. I’ll start adding content to that website. That’s a brand new one. It’s going to feature some of the most incredible and effective copy writing methods, strategies, insider secrets and tips, techniques that you’ve never heard of.

Michael: That’s incredible. And then there was one more. What was that?

Taylor: That’s another new one. It’s called www.tripleincome.com , and that’s going to be a marketing portal site. Over 100,000 links to articles and resources, marketing information in general, niche marketing, target marketing, just basically how to market. The fundamentals, the higher knowledge, the little-known knowledge, that’s going to be a really remarkable website. I’m looking for that one to really, really take off and make it big time.

Michael: Well that’s great. You’ve been around a long time. I know that when I first started doing the hard-to-find seminars, it’s probably been almost three years now, and you were one of my first great customers, and I know you’re a marketing maniac. I would tell anybody listening to this to check your stuff out because even though the Internet seems like such a huge place the marketing is a small world in a way.

Taylor: It is, and I found out just how small it was when I went to a Gary Halbert seminar in Orlando, Florida a month or two back.

Michael: Tell me.

Taylor: When I was there, there were maybe sixty people there, and I noticed that I was getting more than the usual attention, more than the usual looks, but I am kind of big. I’m almost six feet tall, 280 pounds and in pretty decent shape. After the second day, some people came up to me and said “We have a question we want to ask you. Are you Taylor Trump?” “Yes, I am.” “We thought you were!” After that, one hundred percent of the people at the conference wanted to talk to me or have dinner or “I need help with this” or “I need help with that,” and these people had been marketers for twenty years, had businesses and “how much does it cost to hire you?” And I was like “I’m here to learn right now. Here’s my card. Email me.” Some of those people have become my clients.

Michael: I’m finding out it really is a small world. There are millions of people who want to learn about marketing but only a very small percentage will actually do what it takes to do the studying and put in the late hours and the early mornings and investing in the material and actually reading it and going through it and understanding it. Even those people who may want to study this stuff there’s a small percentage that actually do anything, and it ends up being a real small world, almost like a fraternity.

Taylor: Exactly. I often wonder to myself why is that? Why do people spend $10,000 on a seminar and then don’t do anything with it? What I found out from talking to Gary is that people just want to get close to their dreams. Some of the best selling publications are those boat and RV magazines you get in the 7-Eleven. They sell for about $1.95, and they have boats in them for $200,000. I said to myself, “People who can afford these boats don’t shop in these little convenience stores, but people who dream about owning one do.” They just want to get closer to their dreams and that’s it. Some people just want to know that if they ever need the information, they have access to it.

Michael: It’s like an emergency, like security.

Taylor: Right, so if you can get a person closer to their dreams you have a client.

Michael: Were you able to talk to Gary personally for a while?

Taylor: We had dinner, we stayed two doors down from each other in the hotel, and we talked every single day after the seminar. He wanted me to train him to work out; I wanted him to train me to be a copywriter! We only had three or four days. He is an exceptional individual, brutally honest, with the highest level of integrity. A lot of people would disagree with me because of his brutal honesty. People don’t understand the highest form of mental health is dedication to reality at all costs, and that’s one man who is dedicated to reality. He tells you the truth and people don’t like to hear the truth. People want to hear not necessarily lies, but they want it watered down. He doesn’t water it down.

Michael: The concept about people wanting to get close to their dreams, that’s really powerful. Anything else you can think of off the top of your head, kind of light bulbs that went off that you learned from the seminar?

Taylor: That’s an excellent question. There were so many things. Marketing is not a one-side deal, and people want to be marketed to but they want to be marketed to with consistency and they want to be marketed to with someone who knows what they’re doing. They don’t want a letter, for instance, or a marketing person who comes to them with a weak proposition, who is timid who says, “Well I know you may not be interested in this.” People want solutions to their problems. Since September 11 th, this country has experienced more and more people wanting to solve their problems, more and more people saying “Look life is too short, and it could be over in a split second. I’m going to go buy that Mercedes. Life is too short. I’m going to take that chance and start a small home-based business.” They want solutions to their problems, and they want them now, and they want real solutions. This is one of the most important things I did learn at the seminar, is that if you give a person a solution to their problems, or if you can give a person what they want, not necessarily what they need because people don’t really buy what they need, they buy what they want, you’re going to be in business for a long time.

Michael: Right, and you do it in an honest and direct way without all the bullshit.

Taylor: Right, without all the BS. If you give them what they want, if you give them the information and say “Look this is what I can do for you, I can do A, B, C, D, E, F and G”, and they want those things they’re going to do business with you.

Michael: Let me ask you this, and I’m going to turn now to copywriting. If you’re going to craft a letter, some kind of sales letter for no matter what it is, in all these materials we both study you see all the headlines, some of which are proven. There’s a lot of hype. When I read stuff a lot of it sounds hyped and pushy, you can feel that it’s hyped. Maybe it’s because we see so much of this, but what would you say as far as when you’re creating a letter would you keep with the proven headlines even if they sound hyped, or do you have another angle on writing as far as creating a powerful direct-mail piece or correspondence or email? What would you say are some of the most important ingredients in doing that?

Taylor: The number one secret of top copy writers that they tell you, but they tell you in the smallest chapter in their product, is the first thing you have to do before you do anything, before you write anything is you have to research that target market. They don’t talk a lot about this. If you research your target market, you have to know your customer, your prospect or your client as well as you know your favorite TV character. My wife’s favorite TV character is Homer Simpson. You ask her something about Homer Simpson, she can tell you everything! You need to act like your client is Homer Simpson and what will it take to get him off the couch? You need to know the answer to that question. What would motivate Homer Simpson? If you know and understand what will motivate your client, if you know what you client’s greatest fears are, if you know what your client’s greatest aspirations are, if you understand these things, you can send him the right letter that will motivate him the first time. If you don’t know that, you can craft the most incredible sales letter with the best headline, and you won’t get any response, because you have to hit their hot button. That’s probably the number one secret to effective copy writing, research your target market, see what has worked on them in the past and ninety percent of your work is done. Craft your letter with a similar or same headline, with just as many paragraphs, that says basically the same thing, and you’re there. That’s what ninety-nine percent of the top copywriters won’t tell you free.

Michael: I’ve heard an interview with John Carlton and Jo Polish on some audio tapes and that’s what they talk about. Research is ninety percent of it. You could spend months and months researching your market and then sitting down and writing a letter is a no-brainer, because you know the secret.

Taylor: It writes itself because the market will tell you what it wants. You can go to SRDS, pick a list, find who supplies the list, ask them for the mailing piece that went to the list, look at it, study it, craft one, write one same or similar and get a decent response.

Michael: Have you had much experience renting and marketing to lists out of the SRDS?

Taylor: Yes.

Michael: Can you tell us a success story, tell us one success story in general and then tell us one failure.

Taylor: I haven’t had any failures – not one failure, not yet. The reason I haven’t had any failures is because I do the research first, I cover all my bases. I make sure how frequent the list is; there are three components of the list, price, how current is it, and frequency. I get a hot-line list and get the pieces that were mailed to them before. I look at them, I write them out by hand myself at least ten times, longhand or on my laptop, and I get the feel for what they’re looking for. Then I usually call some of the people on the list if I’m lucky enough to be able to do that, and say, “You know you bought this product. How did you feel about it? Would you buy it again? Would you buy a similar product?” Things like that. Then I craft my letter and send out a small sampling.

Michael: What’s a small sampling – 1,000 letters?

Taylor: Five hundred letters. Usually I get between and four and seven percent response. Then I roll out. The way I really make it a success is when I roll out I might rent that same list again. Then I’ll take out the names of the people that bought and send them a second letter. Then I might rent that list again. Then I’ll get another response. But I’ll milk that list for all it’s worth. The best way to do that is I usually try to send them a direct response letter but it gets them to give me their names. So I can get a high response, and I offer them a free report. That’s what the gist of it is. They don’t get the sales letter. The list that responds, the list that I generate that is now my list because they responded, then I market to them.

Michael: I got you. So if you can pull in a seven percent response on any list, you own that seven percent.

Taylor: Exactly.

Michael: And those are your highest motivated responses anyway.

Taylor: Exactly. They’ve raised their hands; they’ve said “I’m interested.”

Michael: Have you found some good list brokers that you trust? We hear about some people getting ripped off buying lists. What precautions do you take to keep from making a wrong decision in renting or buying a list?

Taylor: Usually what I do is talk to five to ten different list brokers. The one I use online is an excellent list broker, has an excellent reputation, and has never failed me. Off-line, I’m still testing different list brokers, but usually what I do, I’m fortunate enough to be able to call a Gary Halbert type person and get a list broker recommended to me. If you get a list broker recommended to you, you’re a lot safer because what you do is you say, “Mr. Halbert told me to give you a call.” And Mr. Halbert might be one of their biggest clients. They’re not going to screw you over for fear of losing, they don’t know what your relationship is with the person, but they’re not going to take a chance. So that’s the best way to do it, get someone who uses lists, who has a relationship with list brokers and get an introduction from them. “So and so told me to give you a call, said your service worked very well, and they would use you again and suggested that I give you a call and talk about doing business with you.”

Michael: That’s great. Taylor, I’m almost out of time. I don’t want this to go too long but if someone wanted to call you, and I know you’re a busy guy, do you have any kind of voice mail message? What’s your email address so if someone wanted to get in touch with you about some consulting or anything else how could they do that?

Taylor: They could simply go to the first website illumimati.com, and on that website is my contact information or they could give you a call, or they could give me a call at the same number where you reached me.

Michael: Okay. Listen, I really appreciate you taking your time. I think we got a lot of great information. Do I have your permission to put this up on the site for other people to benefit from?

Taylor: Sure.

Michael: You’ve got it! I’ll give you a call once I get it up on the site, I’ll shoot you an email and you can check it out and if you have any other listeners who want to hear some of your great wisdom, you can just direct them to hardtofindseminars.com to the audio clip page. I really appreciate you giving back to people interested in marketing.

Taylor: No problem, thank you.

Michael: All right, Buddy. Take care, and I’ll talk to you soon.