[GET] Jay Abraham - What I Learned In 30 Years About Copywriting
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What I've Learned (from Jay Abraham) about Copywriting and Business Building
Jay Abraham regaled the luncheon audience on the last day of the 2005 AWAI Copywriting Bootcamp in Delray Beach, FL with very succinct advice and anecdotes.
Jay was introduced as the most masterful marketing mind, bar none, in the opinion of Michael Masterson (one of the founders of the American Artists and Writers Institute). Jay is responsible for the marketing of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. (Astonishingly, only the Bible surpasses this book in the number of copies sold.)
Jay's own site has this to say: "As the founder and CEO of Abraham Group, Inc. in Los Angeles, California, Jay has spent the last 25 years solving problems and significantly increasing the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries worldwide. Jay has seen and dealt with every type of business you can imagine. And he has studied and solved every kind of business question, problem, challenge and opportunity."
I've summarized below a couple points from his presentation that I think can benefit your business.
4 Opportunities for a Breakthrough in your Business
Change one of these components, and you change your results:
Marketing
Strategy- must understand the difference between tactics and strategy
Innovation - doesn't have to be high tech - just gives greater value to the marketplace
Management
12 Pillars of Strategic Business Growth
Build your foundational mindset on these pillars to build your business:
1. Continuously identifying and discovering hidden assets and overlooked opportunities in your business.
2. Mining cash windfalls each and every month of your business.
3. Engineering success into every action you take or decision you make.
4. Building your business on multiple profit sources instead of depending on one single revenue generating source.
5. Being different, special, and advantageous in the eyes of your customers and clients.
6. Creating real value for your clients and employees for maximum loyalty and results.
7. Gaining the maximum personal leverage from every action, investment, time or energy commitment you ever make. (Be sure to test your approaches systematically. Testing conducted for phrases used in customer greetings in a furniture store showed that greeting the customer with the phrase "What ad brought you into the store today?" resulted in a 300% increase in sales over any other greetings!)
8. Networking, masterminding, brainstorming with like-minded, success-driven people who share real life experiences and shortcuts with you.
9. Turning yourself into an idea generator and recognized innovator within your industry, field or market.
10. Making growth-thinking a natural part of your everyday business philosophy. (Most people don't reach their goals because they don't have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish or, if they do, they're not doing anything to reach it.)
11. Reversing the risk for both you and your clients in everything you do (so the downside is almost zero, and the upside potential nearly infinite).
12. Using small, safe tests to eliminate dangerous risks and adopting funnel vision instead of tunnel vision in your thinking.
Abraham covered much more ground than I can go into here, like the 9 Business Drivers, Items You Can Leverage and Maximize, The Power of Testing to Multiply Results, 5 Keys to Winning Business Around the World, and even more. If these topics whet your appetite for more, I suspect you would enjoy his books.
Our opening keynote speaker on Thursday, Brian Tracy, also recommends books by Jay Abraham and other marketing legends on his website. (Brian Tracy is the most listened to audio author on personal and business success in the world today.)
Review: This is a 26-page transcript from Boot Camp 2005, “What I’ve Learned About Copywriting
and Business Building In 30 Years.” This is NOT an easy read. It is 26 full pages and Jay Abraham's stuff is always top notch. But it will take you time to read and absorb this. He talks at a high level and this is full of good info. He is arguably the top martketing consultant in the world - maybe not the best copywriter- but a superior marketer. It is old info - but not dated - this stuff still works.
My grade: 4.5 / 5 stars. Excellent.
You have to learn the rules of the game. Then you have to play better than anyone else. -Albert Einstein
