Tyler Jorgenson 0:01
You’re listening to biz ninja entrepreneur radio. This show was created for entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers and dreamers who want to learn from the experts of today and drastically shortcut their own success to build a business that supports their dream lifestyle. Since 2011, Tyler Jorgensen has been interviewing business thought leaders from around the world, a serial entrepreneur himself, Tyler also shares his personal insights into what’s working in business today. Welcome to biz Ninja, entrepreneur radio. Welcome out to biz ninja entrepreneur radio. I am your host, Tyler Jorgensen. And today I have the legendary the one, the only Jim Edwards out on the show and want to welcome you, warmly to the show. Jim, thanks for coming on.
Jim Edwards 0:54
Well, thanks for having me. I’m excited. I’m also excited to see we’re using the same kind of microphone, which means we’re both pros.
Tyler Jorgenson 0:59
We are both super pros. And so I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you on stage, Jim and met you a couple of times at funnel hacking live. And you know, I was really inspired by your story. Because a lot of the people that we see speaking on stages and doing all these things, you know, feels like they’ve always known exactly what they wanted to do. It’s hard for us to relate. But you started off one of your presentations by showing a single wide trailer, you want to tell us just a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and how you got to got started as an entrepreneur?
Unknown Speaker 1:36
Well, you know, it’s funny, I was always I was actually raised in an entrepreneurial family. And my parents worked from home when it wasn’t cool to work from home. It’s like my friends made fun of me like what’s wrong with your parents, their home working. And so I just thought it was normal to work from home. But I then, you know, did the whole thing of, Hey, I’m going to go to college, and I got a degree from an Ivy League or a public Ivy school, you wouldn’t know it to me looking at me, you think, Wow, he’s this redneck. But I mean, I actually have an education. But you know, I thought that education was going to take me further than it really did. And when I got out of school, I quit or got fired from seven different jobs. But they all involve commission sales. Because when you have a degree in history, no one will hire you for a salary unless you want to be a teacher. So the funny thing happened, though, was I learned how to sell. And I got really good at selling. In fact, when I was 23 years old, I was working for a mortgage company, I was making over $100,000 a year, back in the early 90s, when 100 grand was 100 grand, right? And the thing is, I learned how to sell but I didn’t know how to run a business. And so I thought to myself, you know, I know how to sell, I’m gonna go start a web development company with a friend of mine, my best friend at the time, who I’m totally a strange from now, because the fact I didn’t know how to run a business, landed me in bankruptcy and with a heart condition, because I got so stressed out and everything just went to hell so fast. And so that launched me on a many year journey of learning how to run a business, because being good at sales and knowing how to run a business are two totally different things. So um, you know, I went from owning a house, driving an accurate $400 suits to living in a trailer park with my new wife going, Oh, dear god, what are we going to do to be able to pay the bills, and I ended up really going into a dark place of, you know, life just sucks, I suck, I’m no good. And then I just slowly crawled my way out with the first thing I really started selling. The first thing I started selling online was a book I’d written on how to sell your house yourself from my days in real estate. And the funny thing is, is I was actually I wasn’t, I wasn’t so much trying to make a ton of money. I was just trying to make a little bit of extra money. And I started figuring stuff out. And so I took it from just this little thing. Now, I was one of the first people on the internet selling in ebook. And so I just started selling this ebook, started figuring out SEO started figuring out some sales copy stuff. And it just it kind of snowballed, and it only took me four years to get it up to the point where it was enough to cover a house payment and two car payments and the electric bill. So I was able to move out of the trailer park but I still had a job. And the funny thing is, is I was working for a company that was doing SEO and I figured out really started figuring out info publishing and digital marketing and and I was one of the first people to create a in fact here it is a multimedia CD and this got a paper label on it. We printed, we had these done that messes back in 2001, though, so it was a big deal. We had these Office Depot, we were we were doing them ourselves and all this stuff. Long story short, in three months, we sold 100 or $100,000 of these $97 a pop. And then so I moved out of my my trailer and moved in the house hadn’t made the first house payment yet dude fired me. And I’m so I’m like, Oh my god, I mean fired. This is back when you used to pay by the minute on your cell phone. So he fired me over my cell phone while I’m sitting in traffic, I was paying 33 cents a minute to get fired. From my job driving home to the house. I hadn’t made the first house payment on so I get home. And I told my wife I got fired. And she said, Well, you got basically 30 days to make this work to figure something out. Or you’re going to have to go get a job at Lowe’s or something. I was like,
Unknown Speaker 5:58
Can I say she
Unknown Speaker 6:00
does go on to Broadway.
Unknown Speaker 6:02
So I was like, gosh, darn, there’s no way that I’m gonna go work at Lowe’s. So I mean, I just I just hit it as hard as I could. But I had paid my dues as far as learning the skills. And I had, you know, made connections have been doing it then for you know, for almost five years had been, but I didn’t believe in myself. So in that moment, desperation forced me to, to believe in myself and just to do it, because and she also said to me, you know, if you could do a third as well for us over the course of a year as you did for this guy, in just three months, we’ll be fine. And I was like, dang, I think I can do that. Right long story short, in the last four months of 2001, I made more money than I had made the previous four years combined. Because I finally just put it into action. I got rid of the mental. There was a mental block. I had paid my dues and gotten the skills, I figured it out. But there was just a mental block that got pushed through out of desperation. So I don’t know, if you need to take a commercial break now or I
Tyler Jorgenson 7:12
don’t know. That’s so what I think is really interesting. There is one that desperation, I think, that concept that sometimes entrepreneurs are always entrepreneurs, and sometimes we it’s almost like it, it gets unlocked in us out of necessity. But another thing was that you had a really strong support piece and that your wife said, like she supported you and going and figuring it out. She gave you 30 days, right? Yeah, do it. But she didn’t say hey, go start applying go find a job today. She kind of like gave you that freedom in that room. But she had been supporting me for the previous five years figuring stuff out. So it wasn’t like it was just, you know, I’m only giving you 30 days, she’s like, Look, I’ve seen what you can do over the last five years. I think if anything, she kind of knew that if she pushed me it would be like, hey, you can do this. Just go do it. Do you think she believed in you at that point? A little bit more than you even believe in yourself?
Unknown Speaker 8:06
Yeah. And still does to this day?
Tyler Jorgenson 8:08
Very cool. Yeah. And how like, kind of taken that tangent a little bit? How important do you think it is for the entrepreneur to have that kind of a support piece who can kind of steady the arc a little bit when things get crazy,
Unknown Speaker 8:22
that I will just sum it up for you as I tell anyone, okay, and I’m, you know, if I offend people with gender stuff, be offended. I’m the right woman is the making of you. And the wrong woman is the breaking of you. And there is no in between. If you’re with the right person, you can do anything. If you’re with the wrong person, you will never do much of anything and you’ll be miserable.
Tyler Jorgenson 8:49
Yeah, I think I think that’s incredibly true. And, you know, the same thing applies into any partnerships that we enter into, right? Like, we enter into the wrong business relationships are injured or the wrong other kinds. And so, um, you know, if hope for those of you listening that haven’t made that choice yet, choose wisely. I’m not going to give you advice if you’ve already made a choice. That’s, that’s a different I do have
Unknown Speaker 9:12
a marital advice product coming out soon that No, I’m just kidding.
Tyler Jorgenson 9:15
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um, so you when one of your presentations you covered like the three major sticking points to why an offer doesn’t work. Right. And you talked about, you know, there’s there’s the product and then there’s the copywriting. How important is the copywriting into you know, for a physical product for any kind of product to be sold online.
Unknown Speaker 9:41
It’s It’s everything because you’re not there. So what copywriting really is, is, is it salesmanship in print, it’s salesmanship in video, it’s salesmanship online, and in the real world. For sales you need to go out and find people, and then be able to tell them about your product about your service and how it’s going to help them online, you don’t really have that opportunity, all you can do is put your best foot forward and try to put a message out there that will cause people to pull out their wallet and buy something from you. And the key is that, unlike in the real world, where you can only really realistically do that 12 hours a day, in when you’re young, when you get older, you can’t do it 12 hours a day, you have to be strategic. But there’s also only one of you, there’s only so many people you can see. But the cool thing online is once you have a sales message that works, you can show it to hundreds of thousands, millions of people it will sell for you and always give the best presentation 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they’re in there 65 days a year. And if you have the right message to market match, you can sell something for five years, 10 years, 15 years, I have one product I’ve been selling now for 21 years online. Now I’ve updated occasionally and done some other stuff. But pretty much that sales message has remained unchanged. I have another one that I’ve been selling for 17 years that I will sell until the day I stopped selling online. So that’s the great thing is that the right offer made to the right audience can can feed you for years. So that’s why it’s so important to learn that skill.
Tyler Jorgenson 11:35
Absolutely. There’s there’s an old adage that gets thrown around and these like entrepreneurial events and things that I see usually coming out of academia. And the concept of is if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat down a path to your door to buy it. Nope, never liked that thing. Because my thing is if you don’t know how to communicate the benefits of this new product, no one will ever even care.
Unknown Speaker 12:01
No One No one cares if it’s better if they can understand how it’s better. And there are plenty of people that have inferior products but have don’t just just amazing sales copy that consistently outsell people who have a better product who don’t have a don’t have a sales message or B have a cruddy sales message. So if you want to sell whatever you’re selling, you need to have an amazing sales message whether it’s a video sales letter, long form sales letter, short form sales letter, you know, your posts on social media, pretty much everything is sales copy. Now that’s what people need to understand. There’s really no line between content and sales copy anymore. It’s whatever you’re putting out there is constantly selling you trying to get people to share your story, share your product story, and in order for them to come back around to you and hopefully buy from you. So it’s it’s everything plus a better mousetrap to me. Just as an aside, I did a whole big speech to a bunch of inventors. I said to me, the perfect mousetrap is one where the mouse dies in excruciating pain. Because if you’ve ever had a mouse, do something to your property, you want them to die with extreme prejudice. I’m just saying.
Tyler Jorgenson 13:18
Yes. So and by implication, what you’re saying there is that the better mousetrap is different for everyone. So yeah, exactly. differently to different groups. And that’s hard to do.
Unknown Speaker 13:28
And and that’s just to finish the point, you may have the perfect sales message you to sell your product, you may have four or five different sales messages depending on the audience that you’re going after, and the different segments of them and how ready they are not ready they are for that particular sales methods at that particular time.
Tyler Jorgenson 13:50
So obviously, if you’re new to the world of Jim Edwards, you may not know how big copywriting is for him. So he is the inventor of funnel scripts, which a lot of us in the clickfunnels community use to write ad copy and Amazon headlines and an entire webinars and all kinds of stuff. How did you get that idea to do funnel scripts?
Unknown Speaker 14:14
You know, I, it’s funny.
Unknown Speaker 14:18
I think about this a lot. And I actually got the idea to do this. I was the kid in 11th grade English class that love diagramming sentences I’ve always just been fascinated with with language and also with patterns of language. And then when I got into sales, I realized that if if that person said things a certain way, and they got results, then what I needed to do was learn what they were saying and apply it to what I was doing. And that’s when I learned about scripts, and then scripts that just kind of one day Honestly, I was sitting in my office, and I don’t even live in that house anymore, but I remember exactly where I was where I had the idea for Creating the software that would allow me to to take and synthesize all of these sales letters and all of these headlines and all these bullets and all these different things, and I could synthesize them, and then how I could pluck it out of people’s heads, and be able to take the information out of their heads, put it into this synthesized, copy, and have it spit out something that made sense no matter what you sold, whether it was product service, or what have you. And I remember where I was when I had the idea. And it took me almost eight years to bring it to fruition. And then for the last three years, we’ve been just, you know, honing it in and honing in and honing it in. And now, I mean, honestly, we’ve got it down to the point where literally, if you can just answer questions and fill out a form online, No experience required, you can whack a button and you can create amazing copy and compelling content.
Unknown Speaker 16:05
You’re muted.
Tyler Jorgenson 16:08
One of the kind of side benefits that I realized of funnel scripts, the first few times that I used it was that it prompted me to like to answer questions that I maybe hadn’t thought of about my offer or my product yet. And if I couldn’t answer that question, for fun just did like mad libs, funnel scripts, right, then, then I wasn’t ready. I didn’t understand it enough. Or I didn’t understand the audience enough. And so it almost forced me to like, if I can’t get through funnel scripts, I’m not it’s not ready. Right. I don’t know, that probably wasn’t intentional, but it had a great side effect.
Unknown Speaker 16:42
It’s very intentional, because when it comes down to scripts, and blueprints and things like that, it comes down to what I call building blocks. And we play with Legos a lot here at my house, because I’ve got two, three grandkids, two of whom are boys. So we play a lot with Legos, and we make our own stuff. And then we usually end up breaking it. But the The key is to think in terms of building blocks, because all of these different elements, especially with sales, copy, and also with content, are made up of interchangeable reusable building blocks. So it’s not like the benefits that you’re going to tell people in a sales letter are different than the benefits that you’re going to tell them in a bullet that you’re going to tell them in an email teaser. It’s getting them out in the right way, and then being able to use them in all those different areas. That’s and that’s kind of my superpower to been a but I’ve been thinking differently for the last 50 years. So I mean, I’ve just I’ve always just taken things apart and put them back together sometimes not successfully, I still get told when I was seven, I got a transistor radio back when that was a big deal and an expensive gift. within two hours. I had ripped the thing apart to see what was in it. And my mom said, well, no big deal. My dad’s freaking out. But my mom’s like, well, it was his he can do whatever he wants with it. Right? That’s that’s always been my thing is to just pull things apart, and then see how I can put them back together. And then the challenge is seeing how I can do it. so other people can put it back together.
Tyler Jorgenson 18:13
Yeah, and that’s been fascinating kind of watching as you’ve grown funnel scripts, and as you’ve you know spoken about on this subject is that it’s allowing people who really have no who don’t have the years and years of sales experience and years of sales training, but who have a proud product or service that they’re passionate about, be able to kind of use funnel scripts to be a bridge to being able to like to think like a salesperson just for a little while,
Unknown Speaker 18:39
right? Or not even to have to think like a salesperson, but to have a really good salesperson interview them about their product or service, get the right information out of it. And then out of them. They don’t have to think they can plug into that salesperson scripts.
Tyler Jorgenson 18:54
So when you I missed, you know, you guys do funnel Fridays, or at least you did for a long time and you’ve seen a lot of people’s funnels. Do you think that? Is there one common thing or
Unknown Speaker 19:05
Yeah, their headlines suck
Tyler Jorgenson 19:07
that has. And isn’t that interesting? they skip the headline, they worry about the pictures, they worry about how the funnel looks aesthetically, they worry about the pricing. They worry about all these things. But no one’s even scrolling past the headline,
Unknown Speaker 19:19
right? And here’s here’s the here’s a truth. Here’s a maxim not that magazine with scantily clad women, but a maximum that you can take to the bank. And amazing headline with mediocre copy will always always outperform amazing copy with a mediocre headline. And the reason for that is an amazing headline stops people in their tracks and get them gets them to pay attention to your sales letter to your video to your video sales letter to your article, to your content to your post to your tweet to your whatever, okay, it’s what stops them in their tracks and makes them pay attention to you Where we live now in a feed mentality, the news feed mentality, the world is scrolling by on our screen, right, and you have to stop them. Now you can do it with pictures, and you can do it with words. But the headline, those are the words that are going to stop them and make them pay attention if they never stop, they’re just going right on by. So the headline is the number one thing that you’ve got to get right. And the cool thing now is that there are so many tools that you can use to test your headlines to see which ones are the best that it just makes it it’s a no brainer. The one challenge is, how do you come up with more than one headline because most people like, got me a headline, right? fixed, I’m cool. And they don’t realize that by testing headlines, you can really I mean, I personally have increased my profit by 500%, just by changing a headline five times the profit just by changing a headline and nothing else. And so you know, that’s one of the cool things we do with funnel scripts is that you can create dozens, if not hundreds of different headlines that you can choose from to test if anything, we do people a disservice, because we give you so many amazing proven bright lines that it can be hard to choose. But I’d rather have a hard time choosing then sweating my brain trying to come up with,
Unknown Speaker 21:30
you know, to.
Tyler Jorgenson 21:32
So you know, obviously Click Funnels makes it easy to test headlines, Facebook ads and things like that you can run variants, when you first got started advertising online, how I mean had to be a lot harder at that time to test. So you know, what were you using to kind of get through those iterations then and, you know, I was that change, right?
Unknown Speaker 21:52
Dude, when I started, I was processing my ebook sales through my art store at the craft mall. I had to print the order out, call her on the phone, manually processed the thing she would tell me it was okay. And then I would email the people in their ebook. Okay, that’s the level of sophistication we had, we’re using front page 97. This was all before the turn of the century, okay. And the turn of the century was like, almost 19 years ago now. So the amazing thing now is nobody has an excuse. The tools that make it easy. You can you can split tests till the cows come home. There are people that let you process a million dollars without even doing a credit check on you before. I mean, I felt like I was trying to get a national security clearance just trying to get a $2,000 a month merchant account back in the day. It’s it’s night and day, the only thing that’s standing between you and making millions of dollars is an amazing idea and some awesome sales copy and fulfilling on your promises and having good customer support and all that stuff. But But dude, it has never been easier to to get rolling. And people think wow, you know, there wasn’t it’s crowded when you were doing a gym. Well, that’s true. But there weren’t as many people online, and you had to spend half your sales letter convincing people that you weren’t a crook. And it was okay to spend $29 with you. And you were going to send them a PDF. In fact, I was selling ebooks, dude, they even have PDFs PDF was vented. I was sending people A d o. c file, the word file. They could they had all my text in a Word file was how they were getting my ebook. But we didn’t use it as an excuse. So you young uns got no excuse for making this happen. They answer your question.
Tyler Jorgenson 23:50
It did. It’s great. I you know, and I think that’s a good point, right is that so many times the one shoprunner is stuck in the in the reasons why something won’t work or why the barriers that they haven’t even explored. They’ve just assumed and I’ve always chosen to live in an environment of assume the best right? assume that the opportunities
Unknown Speaker 24:14
do you get your dog all stirred up, man?
Tyler Jorgenson 24:17
Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna splice this car, hold on.
Unknown Speaker 24:21
I want to do a pet related product. That’s what the dog is saying. But, you know, the cool thing is that people say, you know, there weren’t as many people online but there weren’t as many potential customers back then. And the other thing is that even though there are more people online now, e selling it’s all this churning noise and a great message, if anything will will make you stand out even more because you don’t have the stuff of Hey, Is this legit? Is the internet real? Is it gonna last all that stuff? It’s just like, here’s somebody that’s got their mess together and They’ve got a great message and they’re helping people and everything’s congruent. And that’s why you see people that every once in a while they pop out of nowhere. And it’s like they’re a star. It’s not because they’re getting lucky. I’m not talking about like, internet YouTube stars. I’m talking about someone who just shows up and they’re like, where did this person come from? But it’s like everything they’re saying and everything they’re doing is congruent. And it just works.
Tyler Jorgenson 25:25
Absolutely. So you’ve got some really cool things coming out. You’ve got copywriting secrets, the book, copywriting secrets, the flame thrower, no, it just the book. And so you’ve got and then obviously, you guys are continuing to grow and improve funnel scripts tell us about why did you decide to write a book.
Unknown Speaker 25:45
Um, you know, the reason I decided to write a book is because and I’ve actually written dozens of other books and and self published them, but this is the first one that we’ve gone through, you know, with, with like a real type publisher. Um, and the reason I decided is because there are so many people online trying to sell, who have no clue how to sell what sales is all about. So even though the title of the book is copywriting secrets, as we established earlier in the in the interview, in order to sell you have to know copywriting. But you also need to understand sales techniques, you need to understand psychology, you need to understand why people buy. So it’s it’s as much a book about sales for non salespeople, as it is a copywriting book. And so that was the this is the book I wanted to write. If I could have reached back 20 some odd years to my old my younger self, and say, Look, dude, this is the stuff you need to know, this is what matters. This is why people buy this is how you get clicks. This is how you write ads quickly that work. This is how you create amazing headlines, amazing emails, this is you know, these are the things you need to do to get people to pull out their wallet and spend money with you. So that’s why I decided to write the book.
Tyler Jorgenson 27:07
Yeah, I’m ordering three today. I don’t know where but I’ll find it I’ll figure it out. That sounds awesome. What. So to me, Jim, life and business is is all about at least like building the life that we want. Right? So there’s no joy in building a business that in the end, you end up despising and not having good life. So I always ask this question, what’s one major item on your personal bucket list that you’re gonna accomplish in the next 12 months.
Unknown Speaker 27:31
Um, I hadn’t really thought about that, because I pretty much every day and living the day living the life that I want to live, um, you know, my wife and I may go to may go to Egypt, and to a Nile River Cruise next year. But I mean, honestly, I’ve I live my bucket list every day. And I don’t know if this is more detailed than when you want to know about it. But I’m very conscious of mortality. And so there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think you know what Sunday I’m not going to be here, I need to make an impact and impact on my family, and impact on my grandkids and impact on my people that follow me online. It’s all about impact when I was in my 30s it was all about Hey, can I really you know, could I get super rich and then in my 40s I was like, now I need to really get my health back because I spent my 30s wasting my health trying to make money right now in my 50s It’s like I’m doing this because I want to and I’m I’m doing stuff every day to make a difference in the world. Some days I work 18 hours a day. Other days. I’ll work two days. Do I do I do everything perfectly? No. Should I spend more time with my wife? Absolutely. Um, but I’m getting better.
Tyler Jorgenson 28:52
That’s awesome. And I agree really, it’s not about like living our life for what big bucket list checks, but really living the life that we want every day.
Unknown Speaker 29:00
I share one last thought
Tyler Jorgenson 29:01
would love to Yeah, and also
Unknown Speaker 29:02
something that I learned the hard way that almost killed me. And this especially for entrepreneurs, what I just said there, don’t let it go by I said I spent my 30s trying to make money in my 40s trying to recover my health. I wish that I could go back to my 20s and remind myself to exercise every day. You know, seven years ago, I weighed two almost 260 pounds and was getting winded walking down to the mailbox. Now I can do 33 pull ups in a row without stopping. But I wish that I had not gone through the pain of the last seven years reclaiming my health. I wish I had just kept it all along. So please make physical fitness a part of your everyday life. Even if it’s just walking. Take care of your body. Watch your diet get enough rest because doesn’t do any good to come in first at the end of your life, and, you know, be rich and dead. So I just really want to be the one who maybe somebody will hear that and go dang it. Maybe I better walk every day or something. So just
Tyler Jorgenson 30:16
know that’s huge. And I can echo that from personal experience as well. I see, it seems like sometimes, you know, the pendulum will swing in the end and energy and focus goes into finances and then the pendulum swings and it goes into health. And you know, you got to find a way to focus to not lose health or finances and find that balance. So make an appointment with yourself
Unknown Speaker 30:36
every day to do something.
Tyler Jorgenson 30:38
Absolutely. So I encourage you guys please go check out the Jim Edwards method.com. Learn more about Jim he’s awesome. And now it’s your turn to go out and do something. Thank you for tuning in to biz ninja entrepreneur radio. What you didn’t hear was one more very important question that Tyler asks each guest if you want to be a fly on the wall when the real secrets are shared, go to biz ninja.com slash VIP and get your access today. Remember to subscribe so that you don’t miss any future episodes. And our one last favor. If this episode was meaningful to you, please share this podcast with a fellow entrepreneur so they can grow along with us is ninjas. It’s your turn to go out and do something