Tag: Direct Response

Overdeliver, by Brian Kurtz 📚 (Book Review)

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Thoughts on Direct Response Marketing expert Brian Kurtz book, Overdeliver

Transcription

Overdeliver, by Brian Kurtz – book review.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J Pombo. Live.

This book I just finished, I’ve had it for a while. It’s one of those I knew needed to be read.

Every once in a while, I get these ideas of books that need to be read. I know who Brian Kurtz is, I’ve been following his career a long time.

When he came out with this book, I was one of the first people that ran out and got it.

It really was one that I wanted to read. The problem is, is I have most of the books I own, or books that I want to read.

Although a lot of these I’ve read, and a whole lot of these I haven’t read yet, or haven’t read all the way through some oftentimes books is a really good book, sometimes I won’t read cover to cover.

But I use more of the textbook, or I’ll go to it, it’s so rich, that I’ll go back to it from time to time and look in a random spot, or look up something very specific that I’m looking for.

I consider those great books and good books to own.

This is one of those that really should be read front back. But at the same time has very much a textbook appeal to me, especially if you’re interested in it.

Let me put it this way, if you own a business, and you plan to own businesses for the rest of your life, and you’re passionate about getting a message out there, this is a book you need to read the philosophy alone is worth reading it.

But for all the specifics he goes through with the ideas of direct response and direct response culture are so important. The subtitle here is to build a business for a lifetime playing the long game in direct response marketing.

If you’re unfamiliar with direct response marketing, this may not be the first book you read, but it’s one gonna be one of them that you want to read. So buy it and start reading it.

If it’s confusing at all to you, you might want to start with something else.

We’ve discussed some of those, he also has an amazing list of titles. Also in this book for other reading. It’s one of those textbook elements he covers so many other areas and places for you to go to.

This should definitely be in the beginning times of your studying. This is one of those that isn’t a classic book, even though it’s not that old, it’s only a few years old. Brian Kurtz he worked at Boardroom Inc. and worked with Marty Edelston for years and was their list guy.

He is one of the smartest people you will ever find on the concept of running and grow starting running growing a list a customer list a client list, an ongoing list that you go back to over and over again.

How you go about nurturing that list and taking care of that list and taking it and taking care of it so that it takes care of you in the long run.

He goes through so many concepts of that and what the reality is really behind it.

The humanity behind it having a base of customers that you treat like family, so many important ideas in this book, especially if you got to get all the way to the end.

Some of the final chapters, I found just really captivating.

I’m not going to go into too many specifics, because I’m going to pull out some of this stuff from time to time and have a special episode just on some of the concepts, some of my favorite concepts from this book.

But definitely want to check out Overdeliver, by Brian Kurtz.

Let me see if I could find one. I’ll tell you, those of you who are keen observers will notice I have a little bit of paint on my hands and probably a little bit on my face, I was painting today and yesterday.

I’ve had the physical copy of this book, but I got the audio version. So I can listen to Brian Kurtz himself read it to me.

From time to time, I’d run inside the house to highlight something he had just said, so that I can go back and refer to it easily.

It’s one of the bummers when it comes to audiobooks is that sometimes you just can’t You can’t highlight and you can’t access it quickly, but it’s a great way to to either go through a book the first time or to have continual listenings continual readings of a book if you’re not as if you’re a slow reader like me, it takes me too long to read.

A lot of times I will start with an audio book or something of that sort. This is when I knew I’d have to have a physical copy. And I’m so glad I did.

Well, let me see if I could find something really quick here that really, really caught me especially toward the end, there was a couple of ideas that he put forth.

Embracing that this is one that I I talk about a lot, but not I’ve never heard it. heard it said quite this way embrace competition as coexistence. He has a whole section on this on how to how to do that.

How do you go about doing that, what does that actually mean?

I talk about in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

I sponsored this episode with my own book, you get a free copy over at AmazonProofBook.com.

But that’s the whole idea of not really believing in competition fully.

You gotta go, you gotta go beyond what you would consider competition. And be willing to coexist with others and see how you can you can use them to your benefit. Not I don’t mean use people, but be able to, to work with people who you wouldn’t you’d normally consider an enemy.

Really good stuff here.

There’s so much in here that I want to go over he’s a baseball fan. And so he makes a lot of references. If you are a baseball fan as well, you’ll definitely love some of his references back, comparing a lot of concepts of baseball back into running a business and marketing Overdeliver, by Brian Kurtz.

Go check it out.

I will bring more of this to you in the future. But I want you to go and get it for yourself. It’s one of those you never want to get rid of.

I’m going to have it on my shelf for good. It’s going in my direct response library. It’s one of those things that you just definitely have to have it sparked so many ideas that I was keeping notes on in my phone while I’m painting so I got paint all over my phone while I’m trying to write notes from this fabulous book, but Overdeliver, by Brian Kurtz, that’s all I’ve got for today.

I’ll be back tomorrow in the meantime and get out there and let the magic happen.

Collector’s Items, As Marketing 💪 (Matt Furey Exercise Bible Cards)

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A look at using collector’s items in your marketing with an example piece from Zen Master of the Internet, Matt Furey.

Transcription

Collector’s items, as marketing.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I’ve got this is a pack, this is from 2007, is what it says on it. And I probably got it somewhere around that time not long after. This is Matt Furey for those of you who are unfamiliar, Matt Furey is an exercise health guru online, also very well known for teaching direct response marketing.

He was one of the earliest ones that I saw online really taking advantage of banner ads and email marketing.

Very early on in my internet journeys, I had bought a few of his books, because they were so out of place, they were on a political website of all places that he was advertised. And he just it stood out.

There’s something to be said for that method also, but I wanted to talk specifically about this, this is a pack of cards, it says Matt Furey Exercise Bible.

But what this is, it’s a pack of playing cards, I’m gonna pull some out here, you can see, of course, you got the same thing as that’s on the cover there. Each one you got here.

So here’s the three of hearts, Hindu squats.

So he’s got all his different exercises. Here’s the four of clubs, Tablemaker, right?

You’ve got all his exercises on here. So in a sense, you can use this as, as an exercise, actually learning his exercises, or at least reminding yourself of the exercises that he teaches in his books and other places.

All of these were drawn by Vince Palko, who if you haven’t heard of him is over at AdToons. Really good stuff, brilliant way of marketing.

Here’s his reason why I haven’t thrown this out.

Number one, because I love Matt Furey and his stuff. It’s quirky, it’s corny, it’s got the little cartoon versions of him, there’s an actual picture of him on that side. But it’s who throws away a pack of cards, right?

You keep a pack of cards around forever, it’s like books you tend to keep up. And it’s just one of those things that I can always go back to, if I never used it, I can always go back to it as a marketing lesson if nothing else.

But even if you weren’t into marketing, if you didn’t understand the ability of these, this is going to get around each one of the cards. Even if they got displaced, they’ll have his website on it.

They’ll have his website or a website of the other people that helped help out like lets Vince Palko on there.

So, really great idea collector’s items can be really useful, if they’re clever. If they stand out if they’re different. If you can stand out be different. You have a way of getting into your customers’ lives in a way that other people can’t. They’ll have a tough time getting rid of you have years and years and years, I still have so many of these materials. Not just because I’m a packrat and I am a packrat. But also because it’s just solid marketing.

Those types of things don’t die easily. They stick around, they stick around your households, and they just have a way of never going away.

That’s a really interesting concept. I’ve got other interesting concepts in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business is all about making the competition irrelevant and how to stand out in any marketplace.

You can get. Go pick up a copy at Amazon.com or you can download a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com

That’s all I have for tonight, you have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

What Is Direct Response Marketing? 🤔

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Just what is direct response marketing and why should it matter to your business?

Transcription

What is direct response?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

You know, this is one of those topics that you either are in the know or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, is a great place to start.

So what is direct response?

You may have heard this term used out there it’s a reference to a style of marketing.

So oftentimes you hear it called direct response marketing.

Sometimes it’s been shortened or abbreviated as direct marketing.

What is it?

Why is it different and what is it that it is different?

It’s different than to this day, it’s different than most types of marketing out there.

Although the Internet has definitely weighed it, and made it a whole lot more easier, a whole lot more important, a whole lot more commonplace.

So what is it?

Well, let’s talk about what it isn’t first.

In most cases, your everyday marketing is very much about awareness. And it’s oftentimes referred to as brand awareness, or brand awareness marketing.

And that’s the idea of just getting out there and putting your logo out there and putting your name out there, and hoping to build awareness around your name and logo.

And that works to an extent, especially if you’re dealing with a very small community, you’re dealing with a locality, you’re dealing with something that’s very controllable, then you can kind of get a feel for how aware someone is about your brand and your idea.

But if you’re not giving them reasons to do something specific, then you’re not taking part in what is direct response marketing. direct response marketing is the idea of getting a direct response back from the person that is consuming the marketing.

Whether it be advertising, direct advertising, or whether it be any, any other types of marketing, it’s that the whole goal is to get a response.

And somebody who might be new to business would think well, well, yeah.

Isn’t that what you want?

Don’t you want people to buy things?

Well, yeah, everyone wants something to happen but if the marketing does not direct a person to do anything, that would elicit a response.

And it isn’t really direct response marketing. There’s a lot of amazing material out there about this, you can scour YouTube, you can go and purchase large courses in it.

And you could just pick up books, some of my favorite books that started me in this journey.

I’ve only been involved in the direct response field or understanding it as a professional since 2012, is when I came upon.

One of my first books was Dan Kennedy’s NOBS Guide to Pricing Strategy.

And that blew my mind that there was this distinct difference in the way that certain people thought about marketing and certain other people did it.

And so that took me through the entire series of the no BS Series guides. This is a really good one to start with is a little bit of an older copy an older edition. But this is the no BS guide to direct marketing.

Specifically, it says direct marketing for non-direct marketing businesses.

So if you’re completely unfamiliar with direct marketing, this is a great one to start with. It’s very straightforward, very simple, gives you some very basic rules to to run by and it’s cool, it’s a great, it’s a great place to start is books like this.

You want to get a little bit deeper because nowadays people aren’t as caught up on being very strict one way or the other.

And so you can’t have a whole lot of brand awareness and brand building that goes along with it. And so this was a little bit of a later book, The no BS guide to brand building by direct response.

Okay, so using direct response while also building a brand. Very interesting book.

Early on in my journeys, I was just looking for something that would give me an overall feel for what this is, and what the ideas weren’t before I came across those books. I got this large, phonebook tome.

This is Craig Garber. Craig I don’t believe is is doing any any direct marketing for clients any longer. At least the last I looked, you can still find his he’s got some great stuff out there about music, but this is, How to Make Maximum Money With Minimum Customers.

There’s a play off of Gary Halbert’s book, it but this he talks about everything in this.

And I like it, I really do enjoy this book, I think I bought this for 100 bucks, something like that. And I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

Most people wouldn’t spend that type of money on a book, especially from someone they’ve never heard of online. But I took a shot on it and I’m so happy I did.

Thank you Craig for for putting this out so many years ago, I don’t know if you could still find a copy of this large one, he put out some some nicer looking ones than this. But this is I just love this is a great book, nother book, from a completely different perspective.

If you’re one, you get a very broad based idea of how this has affected the larger markets and how you could take this very international.

This is a great one.

I brought this up before, Buy Now! by Rick Zarya and Ron Ledge. With Tom Kelly.

This is all about the direct response of television into things. So when you’re talking infomercials, when you’re talking the infomercials that are both on the long format, that that were popular for quite a while in the 90s and 2000s.

And also the short format, infomercials, and commercials.

This is an entertaining book because it tells very specific stories about how they went about doing these what worked, what didn’t work.

Very interesting that those would give you a taste of direct response, what direct response is about is about getting an initial response and getting to sales as quickly as possible so that you can tie your advertising directly to an end game.

Now, it may not mean that you’re getting them to purchase something right off the bat. But if you can be able to track your ads to an end game, maybe it’s building leads, and those leads eventually lead to sales.

But having that in the process so that you can get better and better and better at your advertising instead of guessing and guessing and guessing and spending more and more money and just going by your gut on whether something feels like it’d be a good idea or not, or whether it feels like something that would be entertaining or not, instead of having kind having science direct you. That’s what direct response is all about.

So hopefully that makes sense. I definitely subscribe to the concepts of direct response. I think it should be the first place that people work in, especially if you’re on a tight budget.

But there’s no reason why the largest brands should not be spending more time building up direct response advertising. It just makes more sense in the long run.

Hopefully, that makes sense to you. If you’d like ideas on how to not just use direct response, but the entire methodology of direct response I talk about all in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

Amazon-Proof is not about fighting Amazon directly. It’s about making yourself completely resistant to any form of competition, even if that competition is as large and foreboding as amazon.com.

You can get a free copy of my book at amazon proof book.com AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

👉 Content Marketing vs. Info Marketing 👈 (Evergreen Advertising)

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Thoughts on content marketing and info marketing and the value of evergreen advertising.

Transcription

Content Marketing versus Info marketing.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Let’s talk about content marketing, shall we?

Content marketing, as it’s kind of being referred to today, once again, is one of those phrases, that is explaining something that’s always been in existence.

But today has kind of a new turn on things. So when people talk about content marketing, today, what they tend to discuss is the regular marketing that you’re putting out there specifically tends to be on the internet, people tend to refer to content marketing when it comes to your internet marketing.

And it tends to be the stuff that has substance to it, it has content, it has value one to itself, that you’re putting out there, but it also has a marketing message within it.

So one way or the other, that’s kind of how I would go about defining content marketing, just off the top of my head.

Now, info marketing is something a little bit different.

Once again, something that’s always existed, has gone by different terms, by different people. But was really I’ve heard it most often called info marketing or information marketing, by a lot of the direct response marketers that came from kind of the Dan Kennedy School of thought, and that I believe that terminology was really, I know what was at least heavily promoted, and has been used through the years from people coming from that way of thinking when it comes to marketing.

So what is information marketing, basically, is using any type of information to market.

So you have, you have information that within itself is marketing, and can be either given away or purchased. So there’s a little bit of crossover with content marketing versus info marketing, I would say that content marketing tends to be most of the free stuff that’s out there.

And in fact, it probably is easier to call it content advertising, just people aren’t talking about content advertising, they’re talking about content marketing.

But really, it’s more on the advertising side of things.

It is your YouTube page, like this one, or a podcast that you put out a lot of that stuff is all considered content marketing. And then when you start having larger items of pieces of information, seminars and courses and things of that sort, they tend to start blending into the info marketing end.

So things that have so much perceived value that they can be sold separately. Now, it doesn’t matter whether you’re with your info marketing is made up of content marketing.

So I have a book that is sold separately, and it’s all but it’s all built out of content marketing. So I put together I had nine separate videos, you could go way back in the archives and find nine separate videos all about Amazon proofing your business.

I then took the transcripts from those videos, switched them around, actually changed the order around on some of them and made them a little bit more clear add a little bit more content added an introduction and all the rest and I got a block right off of my content marketing came in info marketing book, the whole concept of repurposing, which is a huge deal.

If you don’t understand that, then you’re really missing the boat.

And if you don’t understand the power of content marketing, let alone where it can take you to info marketing, then it I don’t care if you’re selling tires, I don’t care if you’re selling haircuts, it doesn’t matter what it is that you’re trying to get people to buy, having an element of content marketing, and then eventually adding in the element of info marketing can be huge.

And everyone’s going to have different definitions of these. So I don’t need a debate or anything. I’d love to hear what you think you can leave a comment down below wherever you’re watching or listening to this.

Again, if you don’t have a place to comment, go to BrianJPombo.com, find the video, and comment there. But I’d love to hear what you think.

In general, these are vague terms. These are things that everyone’s got a slightly different definition for there is no Webster’s Hoyles definition for this type of thing.

It is what it is, but we use it as kind of a shorthand to start a conversation. And then from there take you to step after step after step.

So I work with business owners and executives and eventually with their staff if we move forward on how to develop long term content marketing, and then if they’re interested in showing them how to then go about developing info marketing Have those content marketing resources that they’ve created assets, in a sense, especially if it’s ongoing.

The whole idea is if you can create something ongoing, and if you’re building things that are so valuable that they have an evergreen background to them, that they have the ability to what we were just discussing today, me and my podcast, producer Sean E. Douglas, we were discussing about how some of our most powerful videos out there most powerful pieces of content that come back out of nowhere and start getting a whole lot of attention are the Evergreen things that aren’t just set in today’s time period.

Yeah, you can get a whole lot of views, you can get a whole lot of lessons, you get a whole lot of clicks on something that is timely, there’s a value in that.

But the Evergreen stuff is something totally different that can go on and on and on and on.

Not only that, you can build products that can go on and on and on and on.

And continue to encourage people to go the next step in your process to becoming a lifelong customer or client or what have you. I hope all that made sense. If it doesn’t, make sure and check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

If you don’t want to buy one you can buy it wherever books are sold Amazon, Barnes and Noble. But you can also go to AmazonProofBook.com, AmazonProofBook.com, get a free copy, just go sign up over there.

I’m going to be back here tomorrow night. We do this on a nightly daily basis, so come on back then.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

1 Thing You Should Be Doing

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Massive action and a book recommendation call The Ultimate Success Secret by Dan Kennedy.

Sign up for a Strategy Session Today➡️ BrianJPombo.com/Amazon