Copywriting

The Trick

by

Yesterday, I was critiquing an email from one of the students in my Write & Profit coaching group.

After a genuinely interesting top two-thirds of the email which talked about Pan Am Airlines, my student concluded his email by saying:

“I’m thinking of putting together a small group coaching program where I get down to the nitty-gritty of this understanding.”

I screwed up my face. “Which understanding was this again?” I asked myself.

I started scrolling back up through the email to see exactly what promise, realization, secret this was referring to, which I had either missed or forgotten.

Of course, your own readers will not read your emails with the patience and diligence of a writing coach.

If your readers find that they are lost as to what you mean, odds are really fantastic that they won’t scroll back up through your copy to figure it out.

​​Instead, they will simply click away, and they will mentally mark your emails as making them feel dumb. “Note to self: avoid in the future.”

As I told my student, the way to deal with this is to use the Trick.

The Trick takes away confusion. The Trick makes your emails easier to read. In many cases, the Trick can drive sales itself, even if the rest of your copy isn’t as interesting and persuasive as my student’s Pan Am story was.

Best of all:

The Trick really is a trick. It takes all of a few seconds to apply. And if you’re feeling particularly uninspired, the Trick can simply be a matter of formatting, without changing your copy in any way.

For all these reasons, the Trick is an immensely powerful and versatile copywriting tool.

​​That’s why the best copywriters use the Trick so often, and that’s why I’ve devoted an entire round — round 5 — of my Copy Riddles program to all the different variations of the Trick.

​​For more information on Copy Riddles and the Trick:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Climate change is bullshit

by

If you identify as right-leaning, at least in the American sense, then there’s a good chance you already suspect climate change is bullshit.

In that case, I’m not telling you anything new.

On the other hand, if you identify as left-leaning, at least in the American sense, then you should know that “climate change” is in fact bullshit.

The term was a kind of red herring proposed back in 2002 by a Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, in a memo to the administration of President George W. Bush. Luntz wrote:

“‘Climate change’ is less frightening than ‘global warming.’ As one focus group participant noted, climate change ‘sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.’ While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”

Luntz later distanced himself from this memo and the effects it may have had. But it was too little, too late.

The Bush administration had already taken up the fight for “climate change” at the expense of “global warming.”

​​Over the course of 2023, they started seeing results.

​​Climate change gradually became the standard way to talk about the environment — not just in Bush administration press releases, but among news media, left-leaning politicians, and ultimately the general population.

It’s now 20+ years later.

​​Yesterday was Earth Day.

Mainstream media like the BBC and CNN wrote about the occasion.

So did left-leaning media like NPR and the New York Times.

They all bewailed the fact that not enough is being done. And they all used the term “climate change.”

I have no interest in trying to change your mind one way or another about the environment. I identify as neither right- nor left-leaning, but upright, like a refrigerator.

​​My point is simply to talk about the persuasion aspect of all this, and to highlight what it means for you.
​
Because you might think the lesson here is to simply come up with a sneaky new phrase like “climate change” and snap your finger to make your customers, constituents, or even competitors play the game you want them to play.

Not at all. Here’s a story from George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and a kind of Democrat version of Frank Luntz. Lakoff wrote:

“I was once asked if I could reframe — that is, provide a winning slogan for — a global warming bill “by next Tuesday.” I laughed. Effective reframing is the changing of millions of brains to be prepared to recognize a reality. That preparation hadn’t been done.”

It’s possible to reframe the minds of thousands of your customers and even your competitors so they play your game… use your preferred language… and fume against you in a way that only serves you and reinforces what you want.

But it takes some preparation to do that.

There are lots of ways to do that preparation. I’m sure many of them are fine. But my preferred one is simple daily emails like the one you’re reading now.

If you haven’t tried writing daily emails yet, I can recommend it.

​​If you have tried writing daily emails, I can recommend keeping it up.

And if you want some guidance on how to keep it up, and what to put in your emails so you prepare all those minds to recognize a new reality, here’s my “intro to daily emailing” course:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Daily emails for non-creative people in 20 minutes or less

by

There’s a famous full-page newspaper ad that ran thousands of times with the headline:

“They Thought I Was Crazy To Ship
LIVE MAINE LOBSTERS
As Far As 1,800 Miles From The Ocean”

The lesson from that famous ad is:

​If there’s a killer objection your prospect will have as soon as he hears your offer (“Lobsters in the mail???”), it can make good sense to call out that objection before your reader has a chance to think it, right in your headline (“Yes!!! Lobsters in the mail!”).

Today, print advertising isn’t what it used to be. Instead, today we have email. And in my experience, email has become the new headlines for your sales message.

And since you’re still reading, let me tell you that last summer, when I was putting together the training that eventually became my Simple Money Emails course, I asked my readers for input.

​​One of them, a business owner with a long-running and successful brick-and-mortar business, wrote me to say:

“I’m told that a sales email should be in a story format that tells the story about the client’s fears, concerns, what keeps them up at night etc. Your product or service should solve your prospect’s problem. My challenge is not being creative enough to produce these emails on a consistent basis with relevant content.”

The fact is, you don’t gotta be creative to write daily emails that pull in sales today, and even keep readers reading tomorrow. That’s really a story that people tell themselves because they are thinking too much.

In reality, you can follow the same formula day in and day out. No creativity required. And people will never notice.

I do it pretty much every day. Nobody ever complains. Sales come in. And people read again tomorrow.

If you’d like to find out how you can do it too, take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Red-hot tip for great names for your new offers

by

A new reader/buyer writes in with something notable:

===

Hey John,

I found your blog through google a few days ago and I just read the email you sent yesterday about copyhour.

I just purchased trough your link so I was wondering if you could send me access to the Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets bundle?

Thank you!

===

Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets is the name I gave in my email yesterday to the bundle of five free bonuses I’m giving away to people who join CopyHour via my affiliate link.

Here’s why I took note when my reader asked for that by name:

My #1 test for a great name is whether people feed it back to me.

I seed a name somewhere in an email. And if days, weeks, or months later, people still feed that name back to me, I know I’m on to something good.

It’s not a lot of surprise that Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets turned out to be a sticky name. I actually got the “Red-Hot” part from that Gary Bencivenga ad I was talking about in yesterday’s email.

Which is another reason to study and even hand copy old and successful ads like Gary’s. And on that note:

My promo of CopyHour continues, but it will end soon, specifically, tomorrow, Thursday, at 8:31pm CET.

If you join CopyHour before then, I will give you five free bonuses, each of which I previously sold for good money:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

That said, don’t join CopyHour just to get my free bonuses. Join because you decide that you will do the work involved in CopyHour, and that you will benefit from it.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do join CopyHour, write me and say so. Also write me in case you already have bought via my affiliate link. The affiliate portal only lets me see the first name of who’s bought and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll send over your bonuses.

How CopyHour changed my life (no joke)

by

This week, until Thursday at 8:31pm CET, I am promoting Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program. I’ve never gone through CopyHour myself. And yet it changed my life.

By the time I found out about CopyHour, around 2017, I had already been handcopying successful ads and sales letters on my own.

That’s what CopyHour is about, and it’s a worthwhile exercise.

Maybe I can say more about hand copying ads in a future email. But not now, because that’s not how CopyHour changed my life.

Back in 2017, there was not the the glut of copywriting courses and education that there is now. So I eagerly joined the CopyHour group Facebook group to see if I could maybe learn something on the sly.

Back then, the Facebook group was where Derek delivered the trainings that go with the handcopying work. I could see Derek was legit, had experience and expertise, and had put in time and effort to make CopyHour a really great program.

For example, this group was where I first got exposed to the book Great Leads. It’s a valuable book. But more importantly, it turned on some light in my dim brain and turned me on to the idea that maybe I should find some classic books about copywriting and read those.

This led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading and research which helped make me a drastically better copywriter in time.

But that still not how CopyHour changed my life.

How CopyHour changed my life is that I got on Derek’s email list.

During the next launch of CopyHour, Derek sent a bunch of emails to promote the program. One of those emails was actually not written by him but by a copywriter named Dan Ferrari.

At the time, Dan was a star copywriter at financial publisher Motley Fool. Dan’s story is classic bizopp rags to riches — from subsisting on four teaspoon of olive oil for breakfast because that’s all he could afford, to writing a control with his second sales letter at Motley Fool and soon pulling in millions of dollars in copywriting royalties.

“Hm,” I said, “maybe I should see if this dude has his own email list.”

I found Dan’s site. I signed up to his list. And what followed was… nothing. No emails. Not for almost two years.

Long story even longer, one day in 2019, Dan finally sent out an email asking his list if anyone was in the Baltimore-Washington area at the moment. As luck would have it, I was there at the time.

That email led to me joining Dan’s small coaching group a few months later… learning directly from Dan… hitching my wagon in part to Dan’s rising star… and making, as a direct consequence of a few words of Dan’s advice inside that coaching program, some hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But let’s wrap this story up:

The program that Dan credits for taking him from the olive oil subsistence breakfast to being a control-beating star copywriter at Motely Fool is — CopyHour.

The reason I found Dan and ended up learning copywriting from him is — CopyHour.

That’s my story.

Yours, I don’t know? Maybe it can start today.

Derek has opened the doors to CopyHour today. He will close them on Sunday because CopyHour is a real-time program.

But while Derek’s doors will stay open until Sunday, I will give you a reason to act now. If you join CopyHour before this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, and you do so using my affiliate link below, I will give you the following five free bonuses:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

In the past, I’ve sold each of these trainings at the prices listed. When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

That said, don’t join CopyHour just to get my free bonuses. Join because you decide that you will do the work involved in CopyHour, and that you will benefit from it.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

The oddest info product creators on my list

by

Last night, I sent an email asking my readers if they sell their own info products. That email got a LOT of response.

Of course, most people on my list sell familiar info products — ebooks and courses on marketing, writing, bizopp.

But some people wrote in and managed to surprise me. A few standouts:

#1: “My wife and I are developing theatre training courses, mainly to sell to school teachers who are not drama teachers by trade, but have been ‘elected’ to teach the courses and put on the productions.”

#2: “Am currently writing some digital reports requested by our specialist cancer research audience although I have no real idea how to do this!”

#3: “I sell Numerology info products, such as relationship forecasts, life forecasts, name adviser, lucky numbers and in depth reports. I sell to business owners, individuals and women looking for alternative angle to motivate and advise on current situation.”

This morning, I sat down to reply to these folks and to everyone else who had written me. But before I did so, I asked myself:

“What do I want out of this interaction? Why did I even ask this question?”

The following reasons poured out of me. Maybe they will be of some interest or value to you:

1. Find out who’s doing well

2. Connect with more people

3. Find out what problems people are having

4. Find out what problems their customers are having

5. Find out if they have [CENSORED but keep reading, trust me]

6. Find out what’s currently working for them, what’s not working

7. Maintain or rather enhance my reputation

8. See if any opportunities [CENSORED again, but still keep reading, I promise I won’t keep doing this much more]

9. Get possible ideas for new offers to create

10. See if there are any good offers that [CENSORED, last censored thing, keep reading to find out how to uncensor]

11. See if there are people I could connect with each other, either as some kind of broker or just to help out

I’m not sure whether the list above can be useful to you in any way.

Whatever the case may be, my offer from yesterday still stands.

So if you sell your own info products:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you a genuine secret way to sell more of what you’ve created.

I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

If you watch this free training, the CENSORED bits above will become clear as day.

And who knows. If you just reply to this email, maybe we can connect or exchange some ideas along the way.

Do you sell info products?

by

If you sell your own info products — courses, ebooks, big boxes of DVDs and workbooks to go with them — then I’d like to share a genuine secret to help you sell more of what you’ve created.

This secret has nothing to do with writing more emails, or creating promotions, or running ads to get more leads, or affiliate marketing.

My guess is this is a method of selling info products that you’ve never heard of or thought about. At least that’s how it was for me until about a week ago.

​​This method requires almost no work on your part, and yet it could bring in hundreds or even thousands of new sales of your info products each month.

So here’s the deal:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you this secret. I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

The world’s simplest, most powerful conversion tool

by

This past Saturday, I got hypnotized by a master hypnotist.

One minute, I was just watching a free video inside the hypnotist’s free Skool group.

The next minute, I found myself rooting through the hypnotist’s website and skimming through his sales pages.

A few minutes after that, I had gotten out my credit card and paid for a $2,900 bundle of digital products.

The master hypnotist in question is Travis Sago. I’ve written about him often in these emails.

Travis would probably claim he’s not a hypnotist. Instead, he would claim to be just a marketing guy.

He’s even modest about his skills there. But if that’s true, then I don’t know how he got me to give him $2,900, without asking. I was even happy and excited about it.

Anyways, that’s all a preamble to the fact that, earlier today, I was watching one of Travis’s videos inside that $2,900 bundle I bought.

Travis promised to reveal the world’s simplest, most powerful conversion tool.

​​He put out up his index finger and held it level. And he said:

“It all goes back to this simple, diabolically redneck, Arkansas, best conversion-tool-ever index finger.”

Travis was saying you have to be able to point to your prospect’s problem. Or rather, to your prospect’s present pain.

In other words, Travis was just repeating the standard advice to be specific, concrete, visual in your copy. Except none of those words are actually specific, concrete, or visual. An index finger is.

Another example:

Your cart software. Imagine it right now. How many sales came in yesterday?

A couple?

​​Just one?

​​Zero?

You might have great offers. You might have a great relationship with your list. You might even have great copy. Bit if your cart software is showing just a couple sales yesterday, or one, or zero, there’s some “act now” magic that’s missing.

And on that note:

Tonight at 12 midnight PST is the last moment to raise your hand, or at the very least an index finger, to indicate your interest in my Secret Demand live training this Friday.

I will close off signups for that training tomorrow. But before I send anyone to the sales page, I want to talk to them, or rather exchange one email to see if could be a fit or not.

​​Since that emailing is going to take a bit of time, the last time to actually express interest is tonight. ​​After tonight at 12 midnight PST, the doors to the front lobby of the Bejakovic theater will close. If you want to see the show, you’ll have to be inside before then.

So ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email.

I’ll have a couple questions for you. And if it sounds like a fit, I’ll send you the full details about this training. You can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

Sophistication, awareness… what’s missing?

by

Last night, I was walking around my neighborhood, listening for the third time to a talk by Internet marketer Jeff Walker, of Product Launch Formula fame.

Jeff’s talk is incredible. Each time I have come at it, I’ve found new valuable things inside. Such as, for example, the following oddity:

Jeff once created a completely new offer, unlike anything else in his market.

He first launched this new offer to his own list.

He opened that launch with a video of himself in the woods, on his property up in the Colorado mountains. He has a private tennis court there. Every Friday, he and his buddies play tennis there and drink margaritas afterwards.

This campaign opened with zero promises and zero hype. The implied message of the opening video was simply, “This is how life and business are really meant to be.”

​​This first campaign was a big success.

Later, Jeff launched that same offer to JV lists.

Again, he opened the launch with a video of himself in the woods. Except this time, there was no tennis court, and no margaritas. Instead, straight away, Jeff jumped into hype and promises, about making a ton of money without a list and without a product.

This second campaign was also a big success.

Strange, no?

Because back during the Cold War, direct marketing legend Gene Schwartz told us there are exactly two factors for figuring out how to position and open up a marketing message.

One is sophistication — how many ads/claims people have seen before in your market.

The other is awareness — how much time people in your market have spent thinking and researching this particular problem or desire.

But these two Jeff Walker campaigns say different.

Both of these campaigns sold a completely new offer, unlike anything else in the the market.

​​Both went out to audiences of fiending internet marketing junkies.

​​In other words, the sophistication and awareness were exactly the same for the audiences of both campaigns.

And yet, one campaign opened with zero hype or promises… while the other opened with 100% hype and promises.

My point being:

Sophistication and awareness are not the only two factors for figuring out how to position and open up a marketing message.

There’s a third, equally important factor. You can probably guess what this factor is. I won’t belabor it here.

​​I’ll just say:

Get this factor working in your favor, ​​and not only will you be able to make marketing messages that are less hypey… but your sales will come more easily… and price resistance will largely fly out the window.​​

And if you want some help with that:​​
​
https://bejakovic.com/sme/

I got a hot date tonight HONK

by

Yeah, about my hot date… I’ll get to that in a second.

First, here’s a scene from the animated TV show The Simpsons. The scene illustrates a valuable/funny point about influence. But hold on.

I grew up watching The Simpsons. If you didn’t, that’s no problem. You don’t need to like The Simpsons or even to have ever seen a single episode to get what this scene is about, or to understand the underlying point.

Scene:

Moe the bartender is being interrogated by the police for shooting the local billionaire, Mr. Burns.

Moe is hooked up to a lie detector machine. He’s asked if he ever held a grudge against Mr. Burns. He answers no. But the lie detector machine HONKS to indicate he’s lying.

“All right,” Moe says. “Maybe I did. But I didn’t shoot him!” Sure enough, the lie detector machine DINGS to confirm Moe’s statement as true.

“Checks out,” says the cop. “Ok sir, you’re free to go.”

So far, so conventional. But then, Moe executes the following rapid-fire descent into humiliation, to the sounds of the lie detector machine:

“Good,” he says. “Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

“A date.” HONK

“Dinner with Fred.” HONK

“Dinner alone.” HONK

“Watching TV alone!” HONK

“All right!!!” Moe says. “I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue!” HONK

Moe hangs his head. “Sears catalogue.” DING

“Now would you unhook this already please! I don’t deserve this kind of shabby treatment!” HONK

That’s the end of the scene. Maybe you found it funny even in my transcript above. But if you didn’t, trust me that it’s funny in the original version.

The question is… why?

Is it just funny to find out Moe is a loser? That’s part of it. But would it have been as funny if the scene simply went:

“Good. Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

[Moe hangs head] “Actually, I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Sears catalogue.” DING

My contention is no. That wouldn’t be nearly as funny. Which brings me to the following valuable point that I promised you:

“We build interest by adding more: more movement, more color, more sound, more light, more people, more intensity, more concentration, more excitement. In short, anything whatever that the spectators regard as increasing will also increase their interest.”

That comes from a book about magic and showmanship. In other words, the above advice about adding more is how expert magicians build the audience’s interest.

But it works the same for comedy.

And in fact, it works the same for copywriting.

Stack a bunch of moderately interesting, or funny, or insightful stuff on top of each other… and the effect is multiplicative, not additive.

And with that punchline, we conclude today’s episode. DING

But if by any chance you want more simple tips on building interest and desire in your readers, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/