John Bejakovic

F for Frank Abagnale

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My headline today is a play on F For Fake. That was a documentary Orson Wells made about frauds, forgers, and fakers, himself included. And it ties into some real news about Frank Abagnale.

You’ve probably heard that name. Frank Abagnale is the real-life guy whose story was told by Steven Spielberg in Catch Me If You Can.

Between the ages of 16 and 20, Frank impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and a college professor. He traveled all around the world… broke the hearts of lovely stewardesses… and lived rich by passing fake checks.

Even if you don’t approve of Frank’s crimes, I bet you enjoyed the movie based on Frank’s life. And maybe you even had a bit of sympathy for his daring and boyish charm, at least as portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Except… maybe… it never happened?

I don’t mean the movie stretched the truth.

I mean, maybe Frank’s story of fraud and forgery was all a fake, from day one?

According to some guy writing for WHYY, an NPR subsidiary, it’s all a big lie. Frank Abagnale never did any of those exciting and romantic things we know him for. Well, he did pass a few bad checks, and he did stalk a stewardess for a while. But that’s about where the romance ends.

And it gets crazier because:

Apparently this was well-known back in the 70s. That’s when a few newspapers published articles to debunk Frank’s grandiose claims.

But it didn’t hurt none. Frank’s legend grew through self-promotion, and grew, and grew, until he took over Hollywood.

This is similar to the story I wrote about a few weeks ago, about psychic Uri Geller, and James Randi, the guy who debunked him. But my message for you today is less controversial than what I wrote back then.

My message today is simply a business truth:

You don’t succeed because you create and deliver a superior product or service. The world will not beat a path to your door.

Instead, you succeed because you create and deliver superior marketing.

This is true whether you’re a computer engineer, a consultant, a copywriter… or as Frank Abagnale’s story shows, even a con man. As Frank’s dad puts it in a famous scene from Catch Me If You Can:

Frank’s dad: You know why the Yankees always win, Frank?

Frank: Cause they have Mickey Mantle?

Frank’s dad: Nah. It’s cause the other teams can’t stop staring at those damn pinstripes.

And if you need ideas for superior marketing:

You might like the ideas I share in my email newsletter. Click here to give it a try.

Rejection-then-retreat in negotiation, pick up, and sales funnels

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Would you do me a favor real quick? It’s going to be painless and won’t cost you a cent:

​​Would you go on Amazon right now and leave a review for my book The 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters? It doesn’t matter if you’ve read the book or not.

I’m waiting.

What, you’re still here?

No review for me?

That’s too bad. I’m a little saddened to be honest. But then please at least read this article to the end.

I myself have been re-reading Robert Cialdini’s Influence for the past several days. And since I’m a slow reader, I’ve only gotten as far as Chapter 2, Reciprocity.

You know what reciprocity is. It’s when you do somebody a favor… and that way you oblige them to do you a favor in turn. It’s a standard technique of grifters, conmen, and Hare Krishna devotees, because it works even if you force a favor on the other person.

I remembered that much about Cialdini’s book. But I forgot about the other kind of reciprocity Cialdini describes.

Cialdini calls this other method rejection-then-retreat. That’s when, rather than forcing a favor, you force a concession.

It’s simple to do:

You start out with a big first ask. When that’s rejected, you back off to what you really wanted all along. You’ve made a concession… now it’s the other guy’s turn.

Very devious. Very clever. And very familiar, when you think about it.

It’s the standard way people negotiate. “$10k? Oh no, absolutely not. This Miata is worth at least $22k. But I guess I could let it go for 18… 14? No, you’ve gotta be kidding me. 17 and that’s my final offer. 16? Deal.”

It’s also a standard gambit for pickup artists. I won’t give you the salacious details here. You can use your own imagination.

And finally, rejection-and-retreat is in play in every modern sales funnel, which features a front-end offer, some upsells, and inevitably, downsells if you don’t take the upsell:

“All right, so you don’t want the incredibly valuable lifetime subscription to Cat & Mouse Stockpicking Alerts for only $4,999. Will you at least accept a 2-year subscription, for only $387?”

And since you’ve read my post to the end, let me tell you this:

This reciprocity stuff is powerful. Do it right, and you can really manipulate people, even against their own interest. But beware.

Reciprocity is a perfect example of what I wrote about a couple days ago. It’s a technique that can wear out quick if you abuse it. And when it wears out, you won’t just lose that one-time sale. You will also lose the chance to do business with that person, probably for life.

Oh, and if you think I’ve done you any kind of a favor by exposing you to this devious rejection-then retreat stuff… then you know how to repay me. I have an email newsletter. Consider signing up for it. And if you decide you want to, here’s where to go.

The story my clients offered me $0 not to tell

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A few days ago, a mysterious-sounding story bubbled up in several corners of the Internet where I make my home. Its title:

“The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell”

BCG in this case is Boston Consulting Group, a big international consulting company.

And the story sounds mysterious… until you realize that $16k isn’t very much money for a big corporation like BCG. So whatever this guy had to tell can’t be that shocking. Still…

I found the article interesting and surprisingly familiar. And if you are a freelancer or consultant of any sort, I think it can be valuable for you to hear.

In a nutshell, this former BCG-er’s article says three things:

1. Consulting clients often don’t know why they’ve hired a consultant. It’s a kind of cargo cult thing — just something that businesses like them do.

2. Consultants often have to make their work fit the client’s foregone decisions. Even if that means supporting foolish or wasteful actions.

3. As a result, the consultant who wrote the article burned out. His pay was good. His workload was small. And yet, his motivation, as a result of 1 and 2 above, was even smaller.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

I’ve had similar experiences working as a freelance copywriter. Not with all clients. But with enough.

I’ve been hired by clients who only wanted a sales letter because of direct response buzz in their mastermind. Often this meant the client had no real need of a copywriter, because there was zero hope they’d make any money from the copy I wrote.

There were other situations where the client was more experienced… but also very set on doing things that were clearly a bad idea. In this case, whatever expertise I could bring to the project was like trying to stop a runaway train by throwing a pillow at it.

I found both cases to be frustrating and demotivating work — even when it was well-paid.

And so, over time, I started screening out clients like these. But often I still didn’t screen well enough.

That’s one of the reasons why these days I’m trying not to take on new copywriting clients. Instead I just look to partner up with businesses, in a way where I simply get a share of the money that I make for them.

Like I said, I thought the BCG guy’s experiences and my own might be useful to you if you are a freelancer or consultant also.

That said, there is a good chance that you have to simply live all this stuff… and experience it on your own skin before you learn.

Still, I wanted to let you know about it. It might save you some wondering if there’s something uniquely wrong with you… and maybe it will even help you move more quickly towards work freelance or consulting work that’s more motivating, and less frustrating.

And if you want more like this:

I write a daily email newsletter. Mostly about hard-core direct marketing and copywriting topics. But occasionally about the business of copywriting, like today. If you’d like to try it out, here’s where to go.

“It’s like he reads my mind!”: The discipline to not lose your secret marketing edge

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“Could it be real?” Agassi asked himself in wonder. He slowed the tape down. “No… it can’t be true!”

The first three times that Andre Agassi faced Boris Becker, he lost.

The time was the late 1980s. Both Agassi and Becker were rising tennis stars — both future number ones.

But those first three meetings, it was all Becker. Three tight competitive matches. And each time Agassi fell short.

The trouble was Becker’s booming serve. The damn thing was unreadable and unreturnable.

The defeats stung Agassi. So he locked himself away and looked at hours and hours of footage of Becker serving, and winning, and winning.

And then Agassi noticed something. At first, he couldn’t believe it.

So he looked at more video tapes. And then more. On each one. Every damn time.

Becker had a tell.

Right before he served his unreturnable serve, he did this thing with his tongue.

If he stuck his tongue out to the left, it meant he would serve wide.

If he stuck his tongue straight out, it meant he would serve down the middle.

From then on, until the end of their careers, Andre Agassi beat Boris Becker 10 times out of 11. Becker kept telling his wife in disbelief, “It’s like he reads my mind!”

I’m telling you this story for two reasons:

One is to show you how people give away a lot with their physical gestures. And not just in poker or in tennis. Real life, too, or even Zoom. You just gotta pay attention. People can literally give away secrets they think are hidden inside their skulls.

But there’s a second thing. Like Agassi said:

“The hardest part wasn’t returning his serve. The hardest part was not letting him know that I knew this. So I had to resist the temptation of reading his serve for the majority of the match and choose the moments when I was gonna use that information to break the match open.”

So my second thing is to advise you to apply this same restraint to marketing and copywriting.

​​Once you figure out how to read your prospect’s mind, have discipline. And only use that information in those crucial, break-point, match-over opportunities.

​​Otherwise, your prospect will wise up. He will stick his tongue back inside his mouth. And then it’s back to the video room, for hundreds of hours of more research.

For example, I’ve figured out a magic phrase to get people to sign up to my email newsletter. But I can’t use it all the time, or it will lose its magic. I have to save it for special moments.

So for now, if you’d like to get on my email newsletter, so you can learn more about persuasion and marketing and copywriting, let me just say, here’s where you can sign up.

How Gary Bencivenga transforms his counterexamples

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A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once wrote an ad for an agency he worked for. The ad ran in the Wall Street Journal, and the headline read,

“Announcing a direct response advertising agency that will guarantee to outpull your best ad.”

As you might expect from Gary, this ad was packed with all kinds of proof. In fact, a quarter of the ad consisted of eight case studies of previous clients that hired Gary’s agency.

​​Seven of the clients got tremendous results. One did not, and they didn’t pay anything, as per the guarantee in the headline.

I thought of this ad today because of a book I just finished reading, called Transforming Your Self, by Steve Andreas. The book is about our self-concept — how we think about ourselves — and how to change that.

Right now I’ll only share one bit of this valuable book with you. It’s about the raw meat that your self-concept, at least according to Andreas.

​​(And bear with me me for just a bit. Because this does tie into Gary Bencivenga and sales and marketing.)

So say you think of yourself as “smart.” How do you know that? How do you know you’re smart?

Andreas’s answer is that you have a set of mental images, each representing an experience, which back up your claim to being “smart.”

Perhaps you see your parents praising you when you were 7… or some workplace triumph… or getting through a dense book and really grokking it.

Whatever. The point is you have examples that back up your claim to being smart. Probably lots of them.

But what about the counterexamples? What about that time the intimidating college professor asked you a question… and you just sat there squirming, like a sweaty turnip?

That’s the interesting bit.

According to Andreas, your self-concept becomes stronger when you include counterexamples in your mental database.

A counterexample makes your claim to a quality more real and believable. (I’ve tried it out personally… and I believe it.)

And by the way, that’s exactly what’s happening in Gary’s ad above. That one counterexample makes the ad more real and believable.

But what if you have more than one counterexample? What if they start to pile up? What if they rival, or even outnumber your good examples?

That’s what the rest of Andreas’s book is about.

But Gary, master psychologist that he is, figured it out intuitively. And if you read Gary’s ad, you can find the answer, both in the headline and in the offer itself. In case you want to crack the code, here is Gary’s original ad:

https://bejakovic.com/bencivenga-agency-ad

Your first step to achieving natural authority

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I’ve got three quotes about celebrities for you, and then I will tell you about a hack. A hack to make you be seen as a natural-born leader — or at least a necessary ingredient for it.

But first, the quotes.

Quote 1:

“Patton believed that it was critical for a general to stand out and to be seen by his troops, a philosophy that conveniently coincided with his ego. He dressed impeccably in a colourful uniform and knee-high boots, sporting ivory-handled pistols.”

Quote 2:

“Long before ‘mumblecore’ became a film genre, critics complained about Brando’s speech patterns until it finally became clear they were an integral part of his performances.”

Quote 3:

“Prince’s handwriting was beautiful, with a fluidity that suggested it poured out of him almost involuntarily. It also verged on illegible. Even in longhand, he wrote in his signature style, an idiosyncratic precursor of textspeak that he’d perfected back in the eighties: ‘Eye’ for ‘I,” ‘U’ for ‘you,” ‘R’ for ‘are.'”

A few days ago, I started thinking about natural authority.

What makes it so that some people just seem imbued with the royal farr? So that they command obedience or respect or awe, even if they aren’t wearing a uniform… or standing on stage in front of an adoring crowd… or climbing alone, without ropes, up a 3,000-foot cliff of sheer rock?

Well, I wrote down a bunch of ideas. If you like, I’ll share them all with you in time.

Today I’ll just tell you about one. You can see it illustrated in the quotes above.

Got it? It’s just this:

Patton, Brando, and Prince all had a unique style. In some ways, a style completely beyond the pale of what was normal or acceptable.

In one case (Brando), it was probably inborn, or at least unconscious.

In another (Patton), it was clearly cultivated.

In the last (Prince), it was a bit of both.

So that’s your first step to natural authority, should you want that position in other people’s minds.

Maybe you already have your own inborn style. In that case, emphasize it.

Maybe you don’t. Then you can consciously build it.

And style can be anything. How you talk, how you write, how you dress, how you walk, how you spell. Some of them, or all. Whatever your audience can see. And maybe even stuff they can’t, because it’s somehow still likely to shine through.

It might not instantly make you a star or a king or queen. But like I said, I think it’s a necessary ingredient, at least in some form. So you might as well thinking about it now, while I write up the emails about the other bits you’ll need.

Emails? Yes, emails. I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to sign up for it, here’s where to go.

Makepeace, Schwartz, and Dan Kennedy all agree there’s something magic about the number—

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“A piece of alien technology that arrived from the future.”

That’s how one top-level marketer described a sales letter that A-list copywriter Clayton Makepeace wrote back in 2005. Clayton’s sales letter started out with the headline:

“The 23-Cent Life-Saver Heart Surgeons Never Tell You About!”

Beneath that, Clayton had three bullet points:

* So safe, it’s FDA-APPROVED for use in baby food

* So effective, you can actually SEE it working

* So cheap, it’s just PENNIES A DAY

Sounds great, right? But I’m not here to sell you a supplement. Instead, I’m here to sell you a number. For example, consider the following bullet by Gene Schwartz:

“Three things you must never say to your children – but almost everyone does”

Would you like to know what those three things are? I did. So I looked them up in the book that Gene was selling. And by my count, there are either two things or five. But not three. And yet, Gene chose to put three in his bullet.

Why?

For the same reason that Dan Kennedy decided to write the following passage as he did:

“I and my organization NEED honest, ambitious, reliable men and women in your area right now. You can join me and earn profits of $5,000… $10,000… even $20,000 per transaction, implementing my proven and improved Business System — working at it as little as 4 HOURS A WEEK.”

Dan explains the thinking behind this passage:

“Erroneously most people consider themselves honest, they see themselves as reliable, and they believe they are ambitious. What you don’t want to do (unless very deliberately) is use qualifiers that a lot of people would feel ruled them out or that would intimidate or worry them. There is also some magic in 3, not 2 or 4 or more. You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

And now for something completely different:

If you’re interested in persuasion, marketing, or copywriting, and if you are honest, ambitious, and reliable, then you might like my email newsletter. Each email is short, informative, and entertaining. You can sign up to get it here.

The thinking man’s horoscope

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Detailed and Reliable — LOW
Nurturing – LOW
Tough — LOW

Today I went through a part of Ray Dalio’s personality test. It takes 40 minutes to complete. I gave up after just 10. But based on those 10 minutes, Dalio’s test still spit out an uninspiring estimate of who I am (results above).

You’ve probably heard of Dalio. He’s a billionaire investor. A few years ago, he wrote an influential book about his way of thinking, called Principles. Well, now he has released a free online personality test, called Principles You.

Dalio got enthusiastic about personality tests a while back. He started by giving a bunch of his employees the Myers-Briggs.

“It gives you clarity of how people think!” Dalio said.

And to prove his point, he had those same employees fill out a survey after they got the test results. “How accurately does this describe the way you think?” 85% gave it a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1-5.

Impressive, except:

If you’ve been reading my blog over the past few weeks, you’ll know I recently wrote about cold reading. That’s when you tell people something about themselves without knowing anything about them.

In the very first cold reading experiment, all the way back in 1949, 39 students were all given the same personality profile. It came straight out of a horoscope.

And after reading their profile, 34 out of 39 students gave the profile either a 4 or a 5 on a scale of 1-5. That’s 87%. A finding that has been replicated since, and not just by Dalio.

But what the hell do I know?

I’m just some guy. And Ray Dalio is a billionaire.

​​Maybe his Principles You test really is more useful and accurate than a horoscope.

Either way, all I really want to suggest is that, up and down the success and skepticism ladders, people love categorizing others… and they LOOOVE being categorized themselves.

I think those two loves come from very different drives. I won’t get into that here. But I will leave you with this:

Entire businesses have been built by putting people into buckets. (Michael Gerber’s E-Myth comes to mind.) And if you need a unique mechanism… or you need a unique position in the market… then perhaps you can get started by creating a new diagnostic test. My suggestion for a name? Buckets You.

On a related note:

If you are honest, ambitious, and reliable, then you might get a lot of value out of subscribing to my email newsletter. Click here to try it out.

A transparent but effective marketing ploy (thanks, Jay Abraham)

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Yesterday I heard marketing coach Rich Schefren tell a “How did he get away with that?” story about the first time he bought a Jay Abraham product:

The product was supposed to arrive in a month.

But it didn’t arrive in a month. Or in two months. Or three.

When it eventually did arrive, some six months later, it came with a letter written by Jay. The letter said something like:

“Here is the product that you ordered from me and boy, are you lucky I decided to hold off on releasing it! This extra time allowed me to add in all these extra case studies and valuable modules and colored streamers that will do x, y, and z for you!”

And for the record, today, many years after this first experience, Rich counts Jay as one of his two biggest mentors.

My point being:

Jay’s ploy may have been transparent. And yet, just like canned laughter on a TV sitcom, it still served its purpose.

In fact, what Jay did illustrates one of the essential functions of marketing. So let’s see if I can do it:

You’ve probably heard me mention my book 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters. This book is short, only 40 pages. And if I could have, I would have made it even shorter and even easier to read.

But I needed at least this many pages to cover all 10 of these commandments, the best you-won’t-find-em-on-Facebook copywriting strategies I’ve come across so far.

And since I wanted to make each of the commandments crystal clear, I also included 3 supporting real-world examples to make each comandment stick in your mind. So 40 pages really was the minimum to do all that.

Anyways, if you haven’t yet seen this book, you might find it both valuable and a quick and easy read. In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Killing me softly with free stuff

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Last week, while snooping on marketers who sell copywriting courses, I landed on the page of a well-known guy in this space.

He’s got a copywriting course for sale normally. But right now, you can’t buy it.

Instead, you have to sign up with your email for a free mini-course. Which I did, in the hope of getting to see the actual course sales letter.

Instead, I got a bunch of lessons, telling me to do stuff. Videos to watch, and checklists to read, and templates to fill out.

“I don’t have the time,” I tried to argue, “and I really just want to see the sales page.”

No matter. Each day, the emails kept coming. More well-meaning teaching in my inbox, which I didn’t have the time or willpower to absorb.

Eventually I stopped opening them. And then today, I got a follow up:

“I have another free mini-course for you…”

I felt like Lauren Hill when she sings, “I prayed that he would finish… but he just kept right on.”

Now in all fairness, I was never really a prospect for this copywriting course. But even so, I think the following still holds:

A free course, and in general, any free “hard teaching,” is like an earthquake. One is kind of exciting, if it’s small and only happens rarely.

But two or more? Especially if they’re big? You start to wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and panting, because you’re still having flashbacks from the last one, when you felt powerless and out of time.

So if you are trying to shake up your prospects with well-meaning content, full of specific steps they have to read and do… stop it. Be a little kinder.

Send them some other stuff. Which won’t overwhelm or cause PTSD.

What kind of other stuff?

That’s a good question.

But you know. I won’t bother you with that here. However, I might talk about it, at some future time, in my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.