Today, I’m reviewing the book Take Their Money by Kyle Milligan as part of the new series of copywriting resource reviews I’m working on.
Now, I’ll be honest with you…
When I polled y’all last month and asked which resources you wanted me to spend $1,000 buying and reviewing for you, this one shocked me.
Because I’d never heard of Kyle or this book.
And to get so many people asking about it, I figured either:
1) Kyle must have secretly bribed you to get me to promote it…
(You thought you could pull a fast one on me? Did you not see my internet detective skills when I busted that Catfish!)
Or…
2) It must be crazy expensive (like The 16 Word Sales Letter or Breakthrough Advertising).
Turns out, neither things were true.
Kyle’s legit. He’s worked with Agora, created top promotions, has a cool YouTube channel.
And the book was only $12!
So before we get into my review, I need to share a quick tip with anyone questioning this purchase. This something Ramit Sethi drilled in my head for years.
If you’re thinking about buying a book, just do it.
Even one idea will pay for itself many times over. And there’s really no point in deliberating a $12 book. You should spend your time thinking about $12,000 decisions instead.
Nevertheless, since this one came so highly requested, I bought it and am sharing my notes today.
And the first thing I’ll say is ….
SCAM!
Well, the book isn’t a scam.
But the landing page where you can buy it, definitely makes you question putting in your credit card info:
When you see “$$$ MORE $$$” in the headline, it’s generally a safe bet to stay far, far away.
And if that’s the reason you hesitated buying, I guess I need to eat my own words.
LOL.
But hey!
This is also kind of what you expect from a classically trained Agora copywriter.
So honestly, his target market probably loves this landing page.
And if you can look past the crazy income claims and literal dollar signs in the headline, the book is actually one of the best manuals that you could give to anyone who wants to write for Agora that I’ve come across.
Here’s a little secret…
As someone who spent the first part of their career WANTING to write for Agora and then finally had the chance, I have a very different perspective than most people.
I used to believe there was some kind of “copy bootcamp” or intense training program they put copywriters through to get up to speed quickly.
But (at least for the branch I wrote for) that was not the case.
It was very much a “throw you into the fire” and “learn on the fly” kind of thing.
So it can be very difficult to orient or know the big picture of what you’d doing when you start writing for these companies.
But if someone had handed me something like this when I got started, it would have made writing promotions make so, so much more sense. He breaks down what goes into creating a big idea for a VSL and even shares the goals of front-end vs back-end promotions.
One of my favorite parts of the book is how meticulous Kyle is about documenting the CORE elements of every promotion you’ll write at Agora.
I found myself nodding and saying, “Dang, yeah, he’s right,” a lot.
If you have aspirations to write for these companies, you could seriously jot down the nuts and bolts he teaches and have a really solid outline for a VSL that would crush.
I also LOVE that he uses tons of examples of real promotions throughout the book.
With copywriting books, it’s easy to get so stuck teaching theory and feel more confused than when you started.
With this book, that’s NOT the case. If anything, the examples he chose to use are so specific that you might think he wrote the rule based on the example he pulled (and not the other way around).
And trust me when I say this: the examples he chose are some of the best you could possibly study!
Night Trader and Money Zone are CRAZY good.
I know because I actually know the copywriters who wrote them and how much they grossed (in some cases $30 million +).
This book is pretty short (at just 140 pages with LOTS of screenshots taking up more than half of that space).
And this brevity actually lines up the core theme of the book: which is STOP reading books and START immersing yourself in good copy.
Kyle argues you don’t learn a language by just reading books. So don’t try it with copywriting. Instead, learn by immersing yourself in good copy that’s being used to sell products right now.
I agree with this a lot.
Because it’s easy to get trapped in the cycle of consuming books and thinking there’s some secret info in a course that’s holding you back.
But so much of the learning you’ll do with copy comes from actually practicing.
So If Kyle’s lessons around immersion and practice can wake you up to doing more writing and less consuming, it’ll be worth the purchase 10x over.
The one major flaw of the book is that a lot of these rules and paradigms don’t make any sense outside the world of Agora or Agora-style businesses.
For example, in one whole section of the book, he talks about how you need to position your report as free with the subscription to the core service.
If you’ve seen an Agora offer, you know this is how all of them go.
But if you’ve never seen one, you might be like, “WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT ROB?”
There’s a couple more examples of things like this in the book that just don’t make sense outside the Agora model.
So if you were to take the template and try to apply it to an ordinary VSL or sales page, you’d be left out to the cold and clueless how to wrap up your offer.
Now, I’d be fine to look over this flaw, if the book were sold as “The Single Greatest Manual for Aspiring Agora Writers That You Can Read In Under 1 Hour.”
But it’s not. It’s positioned as “The $7.1 Million Secrets to Getting $$$ MORE $$$ …from your advertising and marketing … in any market.”
And I think even Kyle would agree, that’s just not true.
But also…
You can’t be an Agora writer without a little hyperbole 🙂
So I don’t really fault him for that.
I just think he’d create better customers (with better expectations), gobble up even more aspiring Agora writers, and possibly even be able to command a 10-20x higher price if he’d niche down the offer to who he’s actually writing to.
Perhaps that’s why so many people thought about buying and didn’t pull the trigger?
But what do I know?
So that’s my review. What’d you think? Do you agree/disagree? I’ll be back in your inbox soon with more of the most popular resources you wanted me to buy.
Rob “Please don’t take their money Kyle! Let them give it to you instead.” Allen