Why AI Content Isn’t Converting: John Benson on Persuasion, Values & What Actually Converts

We're the only AI that's even talking about it, but it's also just conceptual for people and that's why I love helping people do this for free To find their values to see what words and phrases work for them and what words and phrases probably won't work for the people They want to attract that's a big thing to make AI more humanized also just more in tune with who you are as a person That's super important. Otherwise, it's just gonna become this robotic slop that no one wants. We've been pushing against that from day one This is right about now with Ryan Alfred a Radcast Network production We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes You ready to start snapping next and cash and checks? Well, it starts right about now Right about AI is making it easier than ever to create content, but not necessarily better So the real question becomes what actually makes something resonate John Benson the founder of Benson dot AI be in SN dot AI and is credited with inventing the video sales letter one of the most effective Formulas in online marketing in history now. He's focused on how human creativity and AI work together. John. Welcome Hey, thanks. Hey, appreciate it. Ryan. Thanks for having me, man We don't get like creators of inventors of necessarily certain marketing formats every day the VSL I hear it was an accident. Yeah, it was as much of an accident as you can happen It was one of those things out of necessity. I was doing YouTube videos But before YouTube videos were a thing to do really and I was trying to sell my second book My first book did really really well because I didn't write the copy. I wasn't a copywriter I was selling half a percent conversion So doing videos and it was in the fitness space. I'll do it I don't want to do another video. I was burned out on it So I decided I would just talk this is back in 2005. There wasn't any BSL at all It wasn't a big demand for graphically oriented videos That was a big thing YouTube was only going so fast back then that was spanned with was an issue I decided well just talk and then put the words on the screen and what's the worst that could happen and that it ended up being the first VSL And it crushed my conversions first time I said now So what if we do one longer and then it's kept getting longer and longer and so thing ended up being the long-form ugly VSL that Everybody knows about today I'm old enough to remember what that was I was about to be moving to New York or an eight-year stint doing newspaper ads for multiple wireless carriers and other things That was a glamorous advertising job. Let me tell you that everybody thanks the ad agency We're old as glamorous. I'm thinking back to 2005 print ads in 467 newspapers we toyled over the littlest details now things moving so fast and I'm hearing this job I see how you create the VSL you were ahead of that you were headed this AI curve Which we're gonna talk a lot about but you can see yourself a pioneer like I sense a humbleness in you that's kind of like Well, you know kind of accidentally created I mean is it it's got to be something there that's driven you towards platforms That ultimately become what they've become now the VSL was sure luck Well, the sheer luck combined with those fact I studied NLP of all weird things in college I was fast and by the psychology of persuasion and not in a manipulative sense But how you can win friends and influence people so to say and I started studying NLP a Richard Banneler just came out with his It was a mail order course. This was like before Tony Robbins and all that stuff was really big I mean Tony was out not that old but I didn't know much about his stuff and then got into Tony and his stuff I took that NLP and also ironically I owned an advertising agency in Dallas as you know red and black They were the colors that everyone used for everything if you wanted something convert for 15 20 30 years That's why the red and black and the title case came from the idea of Originally every slide was a title case. I'll take credit for this everyone reads the headline So what if everything looked like a headline and I know that sounds ridiculous to say this out loud But that's literally what was it my turn if I was so I made every slide a headline every slide had to be only about 15 to 18 words and that ended up being that very hypnotic pattern to this very day I still see via cells that are all title case. I stopped doing that like a long time ago thinking maybe that wasn't a thing But it worked really well originally the AI was very intentional back in 2010 trying to figure out how can we break language down into Something a computer can understand and people don't have to learn this ridiculous skill and art of copywriting because it's very hard We started as almost a madlibs project of filling in the blanks and then walking people through how to fill in blanks And how to think through language patterns and the software would do the rest and that was early nascent wasn't AI It was just very nascent for the training of what he eventually was going to be used in a lot of the large language models And then what started working with the early LLM's and I couldn't do anything back then and couldn't complete a sentence So we've been in this for a while and figured out I think what works and what doesn't work But especially how to make it sound human we had the very first long form VSL out of an AI and definitely the ones that convert It's pretty bad if you go to Claude or Chad and say write me a VSL even if you say write it in the style of me or Gary or whomever you want to pick as your favorite copy It's going to do it. It's going to miss a lot of things because it's pulling from its knowledge source Which is knowledge sources the internet and when you train something on the internet as far as how well to write copy It's going to suck because most copies suck So you have to be really specific training and we figured that out really early on We built the first rag system for copywriting software with AI and it went on from there Founder of BNSN.ai I paid for your software when it first came out BNSN the first duration I don't know how long that's been I feel like it's been four or five years ago Has it been longer than that three and a half yeah three and a half yeah I got hit on the Facebook we were doing something at the time and I paid for it for like six months It was very much worth it I had a client at the time with the agency that I was like all right I need something to automate some of the work with social captions other things and it helped I was like a six month project the client's only reason I didn't keep using it But it was good. It's someone from your PR team. I saw your name pop up I said no we're getting John on here. I've paid for his content. I know how good he is Literally the best thing was your Facebook ad used probably your own sauce Yeah, they say eating your own dog food like using your own secret sauce Yeah, it was great. It got me in but then the product was great. I did use it. It helped I Was ahead of my time too like you were way ahead. I was ahead using a I'd write some coffee like I was like hey Hey get ahead you're gonna be throwing back three and a half years ago You're totally worth it was right at the birth of chat GPT and wasn't even in the consciousness of everyone And it was a year later before anyone even knew really what chat GPT was and into this very day A lot of people think AI they think chat We're still very very early on this curve It seems like we're not with all the agentic stuff going on and if you go back and listen to my podcast in the coaching That we've done for three and a half years. We were talking agentic AI almost two years ago And we've been on this for a long time knowing where it's going and pretty good track record of pointing out What's coming up next and what people need to be focusing on? This is when we really made a shift recently about six or seven months ago And it was this aha moment my wife and I went to Spain and we were coming back from this festival We went to where everybody is like in this peace and love vibe and everybody's happy It's like where you get out of your own way for a little while and we're on the plane ride back to Rome And it's just kind of dawn of mass said you know what we live and die by our core values And with the greatest group of people Why would we want to attract anyone else and I always taught and copywriting you should just write according to your values Because when somebody reads it, it's gonna seep out But I would teach all these strategies for using phrases and words that align with certain values And now there's a whole science behind it You look at spiraled dynamics or you look at gerards work on this So I said what if we just made the AI do this? What if we just started talking about because we were doing it from the position of the value should come from What we call a blueprint but what if we actually use somebody's actual real values Either their personal values or their business values whatever they want or both And what if we weave that into the copy so that when somebody reads it They're going like whatever this guy is selling I want or I'm gonna go out and have a beer with this dude or Or I this doesn't resonate with me at all And so you immediately just shut down people that you don't want as customers But you massively attract the ones that you do And we started doing this and just everything started clicking And we realized how poorly general AI Even really good writing AI like Claude is probably one of the best writers It has to understand your values and how to subtly weave it in there Took us six months of training which is a long time to be training an agent So that's really what we're proud of right now We're the only AI that's even talking about it But it's also just conceptual for people and that's why I love helping people do this for free To find their values to see what words and phrases work for them And what words and phrases probably won't work for the people that want to attract That's a big thing to make AI more humanized Also just more in tune with who you are as a person that's super important Otherwise it's just gonna become this robotic slop that no one wants We've been pushing against that from day one John the word persuasion comes to mind We're talking sales copy The art of persuasion always in sales Can I actually understand persuasion or is it just mimicking it Understanding is a loaded term for short because you're dancing on AGI general intelligence and I would say that it understands it better than A minus list copywriter understands it In the same way that copy raiders understand things We can mimic things a lot of times and you'll find copy raiders that will just go out And find a Gary Halbert letter and change all the words to a different offer They don't understand what's making that work They're just making it work and it might work and it might not work To understand it that takes a lot more And now over the past six months in particular We've the rise of the agentic stuff AI starting to what I would consider understand Benson has understood it for two years But we had to build agents before agents were around They were called chains We had our own name for them We came up with nomenclature that is now used in the industry But we had to figure out This really needs to be like it needs to start with them With a baseline and it needs to edit it It needs to be smart enough to figure out if this is right or wrong And that's what agents do And they're calling tools and skills or whatever they call them We were doing that before that In that sense it would understand it But in the sense that it understands it The way that we use in human terms Probably not But it does it so well that the line is really narrow And it's getting more and more narrow toward the point that you can't tell the difference If you put your value What we call your buyer profile is a value alignment profile If you put that into your AI copy It sounds immediately different And you don't know why Unless you're a massive student of psychology And it'll pee and all this If you don't know why it sounds different It just does Because it's not obvious If they'll say that you value freedom It's not going to start off like Hey listen if you dig freedom You're going to love this new product It's nothing like that It's nothing is so pamphisted It's not a sledgehammer at all But when it's really subtle What do people that love freedom say How do they say this versus somebody else The sentence being whatever And that takes a lot of data That takes a lot of thinking Understanding to that point Yeah I think that you could qualify that as understanding And I've been saying this from day one I still think people need to know copywriting Meaning understand the basics of it Because it doesn't matter how good the AI is You need to understand if it's good or not It may sound like you It may but it is a good copy There are certain things that you simply don't know you have to test it But there are certain things that are just categorically Not the best copy that you could look at And I think that's why I'm big on education We do live coaching once a week Because we're just so big on teaching people Everything we can It's a massive thing for us And it's been a massive thing for us And we'll always be I don't think it should ever be a machine It should be a human working with a machine as a power tool And this is the power tool to end all power tools This is industrial revolution scale Change of the world kind of thing Yeah You're on the forefront of it You live in the rabbit hole You're definitely probably going down a daily Thinking of persuasion What are the core elements That have never changed In sort of that art In the skill of persuasion Persuasion is rather than Trying to course somebody into making a decision You compel them into making the decision That aligns with their values Is how do you compel someone to take action Based on what they already believe is true And the already believe is true part Is should be underlined And highlighted and circled And tattooed on somebody's forehead Because they need to already believe That the base of what you're saying The conclusion to your argument is true I've studied, it was a philosophy major So I've studied rhetoric And building a syllogism and copy Is incredibly important Primus one, primus two, conclusion People do this all the time And I just had the podcast with Todd Brown He said the argument is the most important part of it And I don't think it is I think the argument is essential For the most important part of persuasion Most important part of persuasion Is compelling someone based on emotion Based on what they believe to be true But that has to be centered around An emotional state It's the same thing litigators do during a trial case They will say the evidence points here The DNA is here You've got the fingerprints here But when they go to the jury They go now you know all this But what would it be like If you let this man go Can you picture the next family That this man may encounter Would you want that guilt on your conscience? Well, that's all emotion They're using emotion To solidify the argument that they made They're using emotion Not based on something that they don't believe It's something they already believe They didn't believe before the trial Started that the fingerprints were on the weapon They didn't know They just simply didn't have a belief They were agnostic But now that they believe this That's great What do they believe this never changed They believe in family They believe in justice They believe in etc That's why you feel like it How litigators pick juries If they know the case is a little flimsy They're not going to lean on somebody That has a high value of mercy They're going to lean on somebody That has a high value of justice And then they will talk to them Based on what they already believe So that is to me the essence of persuasion Is you make the argument But then you justify it emotionally Based on what people already believe I've always said The people think with their head And they buy with their heart I had a dream once That I made that statement up I don't think I did I think I heard it from someone really smart Like 10 years ago Probably someone like yourself When you were talking I was thinking about mentalists They're really strong of persuasion And making you believe you see something Even if you really didn't That's where the ethical part comes in Where we're not trying to fool anyone Into believing something That they don't ultimately believe We're trying to dig into And elevate beliefs, core values And other things that align To persuade them to buy something Matching aces here Versus we're not trying to make a diamond a spade Am I getting it? You are very, very succinctly too The one thing that I want to say Is this philosophy of selling things Based on ethical persuasion Is harder to pull off in say the e-commerce space Where you've got your selling t-shirts Okay, why should they buy this t-shirt Or this t-shirt when they're just basically identical Okay, let's say they're identical t-shirts Well, that's much harder to pull this off with You can still use the same principles By simply saying A t-shirt in general will give you x, y, and z When you already believe That this emotional state of ab and c is already true But it's much more difficult To do this people buy an impulse And they just wanted the best deal And those kind of things Where this comes in handy And where it's essential Is when these products That can be competitive But there's something that really does Or it has the potential to alter somebody's life On a fundamental level A t-shirt probably won't do that Unless you don't have any clothes Then you would just give somebody the t-shirt But talk about somebody who wants to take a fish oil capsule Something where I wrote a lot in the fitness space When I originally started in So there was a lot of weight loss Kind of offers Somebody needs to lose weight Somebody wants to improve their heart health etc We focus as copywriters on Not just the weight loss Or in the fish oil case Not just this is going to help you lower triglycerides You're not getting enough of these essential fatty acids Which are important for metabolic health and all that We focus on all that stuff is a given We just ask one question And this is a great formula for persuasion All of what I just said You can lower your triglycerides And I just always teach people the simple sentence So that you can Fill in the gap So now you can or so you can Or so that you can or whatever you want to say You can lower your triglycerides So now you can What? That's the thing that matters The lower triglycerides is the syllogism Is the logic You can rest easier next time you go to your Partiologist your heart doctor It's going to look at you and go Wow I haven't seen your labs look this good in 10 years Well the heart like this you might live to 100 That means just think about how many more years Decades you can have with your grandkids And maybe even their children Nothing I'm saying is not true It's just all completely rational logical But it's emotional And it's something they already believe It's because they already believe They have a value of family I know that I know the avatar inside now For this offer Not every offer is going to have a value of family If you're writing for the pick-up audience And you're writing the single guy The value of kids is going to be way down on the scale It might be there kind of hidden underneath the surface It probably is there They're trying to get to it in a roundabout kind of way But a lot of people just don't share it So you need to figure out what their values are Confidence, freedom, power These are if you wanted to write to that audience That's basically what we do with AI now What we used to have to do through lots and lots and lots of research Lots of practice Which is kind of cool When I think of so that you can I feel like we're tapping into the why And a lot of times you hear people say You know what's your why People that have no why they do things And what matters to them Which is these avatars That's what we're tapping into the why Why they take it is because of why they do anything Because these core values, core tenets Matter to them Isn't so that you can't Isn't that a why It is the why But it's a series of why So many people think for example I could take a visual example For those that are not going to bore you with fish oil They'd have I used to take it And then I was like Is this even doing anything for me Yeah, it's incredibly important Especially if you have any sort of Nordic genes in you Like I do It's like I ridiculously low levels of omega-3s in my diet It's for one thing that the way I eat for fitness Training and stuff It's not high It's not very conducive to that But also if you have naturally higher triglycerides And there's a lot of reasons Why people take them and make it through fatty acids But so many people as a copywriter You would write You would talk to that Because a lot of people They're educated now Not when the fish oil first came out But now they're educated enough to know That okay, I know I want to take this Because I want my lipids to improve I want my heart health to improve They know the general basics What kind of a story can you tell Around what an improved heart looks like Because people know that it's like Well, yeah, of course you want to avoid a heart attack Of course you want to not end up a heart crippled These are kind of obvious But if you stayed it like that in the copy It's like when I first looked into this I was looking into it because I'm like you I want to avoid an early heart attack who doesn't And I don't want to end up a heart No one wants to end up a heart crippled I want to have a long, healthy, wonderful life What's the one thing you didn't think about Was to X I didn't think about how awesome this was going to be For allowing me to eat more of my favorite foods Without spiking my insulin levels Because believe it or not, here's how this works Now I can eat my occasional Oreos And my insulin stays I'm just giving you any example What I'll be talking about I can have this other benefit And I as a copywriter You would have these series of benefits And another thing I didn't know about this Which is crazy Is it really helps target some of the stubborn Valley fat Because this fat is made of this brown adipose tissue But you can see where research is super super important And I'm just riffing stuff off the top of my head But what AI does very well Yes, how well does I understand AI is like what Benson in particular Is very good at digging into this research And it's about to be even better Because we're about to unload a research assistant People can tap onto If they want the extra research stuff To go out and dig up all this data And you can know like here are nine extra things This thing will do that you didn't know about And then you could say Just now write it in benefit form Oh this now lets me do this Well now it feels like this But now it's still filtering through people's core values And so now it's going to sound like It's going to sound like me Versus sound like somebody else So yeah, so that's where the art of copywriting needs science It's like there's a science there That you need to be persuaded You need to have data You need to have evidence People really do By how they do make decisions That center around evidence But are triggered by emotion People say you buy on logic You justify an emotion That's another way of saying it Look honey, I got this car I bought this car You're like buying it complete Because you want it But you're going to justify Sorry, but you buy an emotion You justify a reason But it gets 62 miles to the gallon We're going to save tons And look it's electric It's great for the environment So that we can help save the environment And help save the rounds I'm thinking of my head So I can go 0 to 60 in three freaking seconds How should entrepreneurs think about collaborating with AI more And instead of like this notion of It's competing for their job Or it's going to take over the world It's something I've been saying for a long time But it just one of these things I just spit out And it just kind of came out I'm working with a guy named Rich Shefferen You may know And then we're like okay How do we explain what we're doing to people That know a little bit about AI But they're certainly not talking about Creating MCP server They don't know all the jargon And what open claw does And getting external And they don't know that stuff How do we cram it into the middle here And I said Basically what we're doing Is we're creating a second brain We're actually cloning ourselves But how many times have you said Man, I wish you were two of me And then I thought a little deeper Because my wife pro me on this one And I say it's not a clone of you It's a drastically improved clone of you That never forgets anything That's how I think of working with AI Now you don't have to go to the The link that we're talking about Where you dump your entire life Into obsidian folders Or anything like that But when people come working with tools Like Benson or whatever This is just simply allowing you to have a tool That can be an improved version of you In the art of copywriting So obviously just one thing But it's one that doesn't forget It's one that doesn't Because you will forget I will forget most of what I know about copywriting Even as a teacher of it Unless I'm teaching it all the time Or using it all the time I have a guarantee you I've forgotten things that could make me a million dollars That's the one thing I talk to people That are a little AI afraid I say look AI will help you remember something That will eventually make you a lot of money Because you have forgotten so many things That could make you millions of dollars You have forgotten it You simply buried the treasure somewhere And you don't know where the map is You don't know And it's not your fault Because human memory is flawed It's just the way If you look at how we remember things Our memories are incredibly flaky So many false memories We will experience the memory Then we'll re-remember it in a different way And that will get stored as the memory It just happens to every human on the planet AI doesn't have the problem So your clone of yourself Won't have the sum of the hangups that you have And most of all it will integrate things You can delegate it to do things It will do things that you won't do Because you're lazy We all would rather do something else Than to do that And the AI doesn't have that preference So that's the way I kind of coach entrepreneurs through it So think of it as like the ultimate partner And if everyone on your team It isn't about firing your team I think that's a ridiculous way of looking at it My team I'm giving every single person the task of learning this stuff Because now they're getting stuff done That they couldn't even fathom doing four months ago My CMO guy just built our own CRM He did it in less than a week Now that wasn't possible even four months ago He's not a coder He's never coded anything in his life How much more can the people on my team do And how much faster can they do it If they can do it faster That just has more time with their families That's the way that we're looking at it Yeah, I have a totally different thing If we're going to talk about copy How you should look at AI and copy We're very specific about that But it needs to be more human Which is what you're doing And it's like that human layer over top of Pulling all that memory And using all those values But then humanizing it People are going to lose jobs over AI And it's not as simple as saying Well people that use AI will not lose No, it's people that are really like Continue to be what we are as human Ingenuity Creativity And those that keep that And push it with the AI I did the same thing Retail store for collectibles now And built the whole platform That's both CRM Inventory management All kinds of things We're moving into this land of app One of one app software Literally you can build what you want That you need exactly We've been in a world where we use this platform Because it does eight tenths of what we need But you can build exactly what you need Now affordably and fast And deploy it John, we could talk for days about this stuff B-N-S-N-D-A-I You want to get some details on that Vincent, by the way, is my last name without the vowels That's how that came out And it's just kind of one of those things That just happened Everyone loved the name So we kept it I was like, okay, cryptic and cool I kind of like it But as far as what we've been talking about About getting people's values Your company or your personal values I use my personal values I want people in my tribe That resonate with me That doesn't mean that they have to believe everything I believe their core values Are essentially going to be mirrored with mine What happens is As you end up with far fewer refunds Your traffic costs go way down Because I can target much more effectively And I just get rid of tire kickers So there's a lot of things that go on here What I wanted to do is create a tool That would give that to everyone that wanted it for free If you go to free buyer profile.com You can go through our process Basically you'll be answering questions For about 10 or 15 minutes At the end of it You'll get a 15 or so page report Of the words and phrases That you should use to attract your audio buyers And the words of read you should not be using The psychology behind it The NLP Everything you can think of It's a really really thorough report I think it would really help you marketing out a whole lot I love I really appreciate that offer John We'll have that in the show notes And anything else Any other ways that they can learn more We drop the website We'll have all that in the show notes Any other details we should mention John If JohnBenson.com reports us YouTube Brother That's my YouTube channel If they want to check out hundreds of videos On a ton of copywriting topics John, I really appreciate you coming on This is my pleasure, right This is a blast Thanks for having me Hey guys, you want to find us Ryan is right.com We'll have that free offer from John Let me tell you I've used his stuff It was three and a half years ago I can only imagine I'm going to get on there now I'm going to go check it out myself Because he is a master at copy But also humanizing in a way That ultimately persuades the right people In the right ways We appreciate you for listening We'll see you next time I'm right about now This has been right about now With Ryan Alford A Radcast Network production Visit Ryanisright.com for full audio And video versions of the show Order one choir about sponsorship opportunities Thanks for listening You