John Bejakovic

How to sound smarter

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There’s a well-known guy in the copywriting space who loves to use million-dollar words. He does it a lot in writing. He does it even more when giving a speech.

I’ve always wondered at this. It seems out of place in the quick-cheap-easy world of direct response. Like some kind of insecurity. Like he’s trying to prove he’s educated and smart.

If so, then bad move, at least if you go by a study I just read.

Back in 2005, a scientist at Princeton University jiggered a bunch of texts. He put in longer words into some. He put in shorter words into others. And then he put these texts in front of Stanford undergrads, to see what they would say.

I’m sure you can guess one part of what the students said. The texts with the longer words were harder to read. No surprise there.

But get this:

Students also said that longer words made the author sound less smart. And vice versa. Shorter words made the author sound more smart.

Of course, if you like, there are holes you can poke in this study:

It was only done on Stanford students, an unusual bunch. And it’s only about written texts, and not about speech.

But to my lazy mind, the conclusion is clear:

Use short words. Make your writing and speaking simple. Not because you want to sell more. That’s a nice side effect. But the real benefit is that short and simple will make you sound smarter.

And now the punchline:

Are you impressed by my 1- and 2- syllable words? Then you will love, I say love, my email news-letter. It’s full of short words. You can sign up for it here.

Man, or mouse?

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Marketer Andre Chaperon once wrote an intriguing email/article titled, Chefs vs. Cooks. Here’s the gist in Andre’s words:

When you go to a restaurant: there are two types of people who cook the food that diners order.

One type typically works in Michelin star establishments, like the Aviary in Chicago, or Gordon Ramsay in London, or the Mirazur in Menton, France.

These people are called chefs.

The other type are cooks.

You’ll find them in places like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Chili’s Grill & Bar. Even your local “pretty good” restaurant.

The difference between the two is vast, of course.

Andre’s point is that there are chefs and cooks among marketers too. “Nothing wrong with that,” Andre suggests. “The world needs both!”

Thanks, Andre. But who the hell wants to be the marketing equivalent of a pimply 16-year-old, wearing a Wendy’s paper hat, shoveling out 15 lbs. of french fries from a cauldron of bubbling canola oil?

Nobody, of course. Not if they have a choice. Which is why Andre offers you the choice to join his course for creators at the end of his Chefs vs. Cooks pitch.

Dan Kennedy calls this man-or-mouse copy. And he explains how this isn’t just about men, or mice, or chefs, or cooks:

Great direct response copy makes people identify themselves as one or the other. Great direct response copy is all about divide and conquer. It is all about, you tell us who you are — smart/dumb, winner/loser, etc. — and then we’ll tell you the behavior that matches who you just said you are.

Dan says this is one of the four governing principles at the heart of each of his hundreds of successful campaigns.

Which brings up a man-or-mouse moment for you:

A lot of marketers have a certain contempt for their market. “Make them pay,” these marketers whisper. “Because when they pay, they pay attention.”

In other words, these marketers think most people are too stupid to value a thing properly if it’s given away for free.

And you know what? There’s probably truth to this.

But I hope you’re smarter than that.

Because that Dan Kennedy quote above, about making people identify themselves, is from Dan’s speech that I linked to yesterday.

This was the keynote speech at the Titans of Direct Response. The Titans event cost something like $5k to attend… and it still costs several thousand if you want to get the tapes.

But for some reason, at some point, Brian Kurtz, who put on the Titans event, made Dan’s keynote presentation available for free online. In my opinion, Dan’s is the most valuable presentation of the lot. And if that’s something you can appreciate, you can find it at this link. But before you go —

I also have an email newsletter. If you got value out of this post, and if you’re about to go watch Dan Kennedy’s presentation, there’s a good chance you will like the emails I send. If you want to try it out, you can sign up quickly here. And then go and watch that Dan Kennedy presentation.

Hollywood tear-jerker: Billion-dollar psychology lesson for cheap

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“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”

You recognize that? It’s from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. One of the biggest movies of all time.

When I was a kid, the main movie theater in my town for some reason kept the marquee for E.T. long after the movie had stopped playing.

I was too young to see it when it came out. And I suffered for years, seeing that marquee. I wanted to watch the movie so badly — a real life alien, and cute too! On Earth! Makes friends with a little boy and gets the boy’s bike airborne!

It’s everything my 5-year-old self wanted in life. But the movie was no longer in theaters, and there was no VHS either.

So a few weeks ago, I downloaded E.T. to finally heal this childhood wound and to see why this Spielberg fantasy is called the #24 greatest film of all time.

Unfortunately, the moment has passed.

I couldn’t really get into E.T. But I did get some use out of it. That scene above.

That’s when E.T. dies, about nine-tenths of the way through the movie. And the boy, Elliott, who had a psychic link with E.T. and who has felt everything E.T. has felt, suddenly cannot feel anything any more.

I can imagine that when E.T. played in movie theaters, both the kids and the parents choked up at this point. The kids, because the cute little extraterrestrial is dead. The parents, because they felt on some level how this scene might be about their childhood dreams, hopes, and capacity for joy and wonder… which have been drained out of them as they grew up and became adults.

And then of course, E.T. comes back to life and everything works out just fine. Which is the insight I want to leave you with today.

I recently re-watched Dan Kennedy’s Titans of Direct Response keynote speech. In one part of this amazing presentation, Dan tells an Earl Nightingale story. Two farmers each thought the other guy’s farm had the greener pasture. And when they get their wish and swap farms, it turns out the other pasture is no greener.

Dan: “Earl didn’t tell that story to be a marketing lesson… but I got the marketing lesson out of it.”

And you can too.

If a story reaches mass popularity — greener pastures, E.T., Bad Santa — it’s because it makes people vibrate. The thing is, social order must be maintained. That’s why each mass-market story either has a happy ending (if the characters were deep-down deserving) or a moral to be learned (if they were not).

Don’t let that fool you.

Market-proven tear-jerkers like E.T. can really show you true human nature — if you don’t wait until the end. The end is just tacked on to muddy the waters. But the psychology lesson is all the emotional buildup that happens before the turnaround.

That buildup shows you how people really are. Those are the real problems and desires people respond to, and that’s what you should speak to. Everything else is just Hollywood.

By the way, Brian Kurtz generously made Dan Kennedy’s keynote speech freely available online. If you haven’t watched it yet (or in the past month), it’s time to fix that.

But in case you need more convincing about the value hidden inside this speech, you might like to sign up for my email newsletter. In the coming days, there’s where I’ll be sharing some more Dan-inspired marketing ideas, like the one you just read.

Tom Cleveland continues his productive NYT snooping

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How do veterans of #vanlife feel about all the newbies? Can you make a statement about your gender, when there’s no one there to watch you? And is that “maskne” on your face, or is it plain old acne?

In case you want answers to any of these questions, head on over to the New York Times website. As I write, these stories are all up on the home page.

A guy named Tom Cleveland has been snooping on the Times. I wrote about him a few weeks ago. Through his snooping, he discovered how the NYT makes its headlines more dramatic through A/B testing.

Now Cleveland has put out a part two to his research. It’s about which stories linger on the Times digital front page. And the breakdown is this:

News: 46.6%
Opinion: 22.2%
Feature: 31.1%

“Categories and numbers, huh?” Let me translate what I think this means.

“News” you’re probably familiar with. “U.S. Adds 916,000 Jobs in Sign of Surging Labor Market.” No thrills there.

“Opinion” is a little more fluid. It includes hard-hitting editorial such as “The unsettling power of Easter” (also on the NYT front page right now) as well as the “If a gender falls in the forest” piece above.

And then there’s “Features.” This is apparently an industry term for pure fluff — your typical #vanlife and maskne pieces.

So adding up Opinion and Feature, we get that the NY Times shows this type of content 54.3% of the time on its front page. In other words, this is most of what they show — because it’s most of what people want to see.

Please believe me:

This is not my ant-sized attack on the elephant that is the New York Times. Instead, I just want to point out that people always want human-interest stuff, first and foremost.

If you’re in the business of feeding people whatever, just to sell subscriptions and ads, they you might as well stick to fluff or tabloid content.

On the other hand, perhaps you have an important message to share with the world. But you worry that your topic puts people to sleep. Or gives them a headache.

Don’t worry. It’s an easy problem to fix. Just wrap your dry, complex topic in a thick human-interest sandwich. People will happily devour it, all the way to the end. ​​Here’s an example from an email I wrote last year:

“It’s a story of family betrayal… of breakthrough ideas, conceived in prison… of a small group of desperate visionaries who took an almost occult science… and combined it with a strange, untested new technology… to create the foundations of an industry worth over a quarter trillion dollars.”

Do you know what that paragraph was about? It’s about dry, technical topic. Namely, direct marketing, told through the colorful characters who dun it — Claude Hopkins, Gary Halbert, Ken McCarthy. And if you want to know how that story developed, you might like to sign up to my very human-friendly email newsletter.

Coming soon — The Destiny & Power Newsletter

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I meant to publish this post yesterday, but you know what? It’s not a joke. So here goes:

Some time in the long-lost 1970s, a guy named Uri Geller became a worldwide star by going on different TV shows and doing the impossible.

Under bright studio lights, with millions watching, Geller bent solid metal spoons, made stopped watches run again, and saw through walls and closed doors — using only the power of his mind.

(Yes, this is from the video I shared a few days ago, if you managed to watch it till the end.)

Then there was this second guy, a former stage magician named The Great Randi.

Randi started following Geller around from TV show to TV show. He’d appear a week later, and expose every one of Geller’s mysterious and transcendent acts for what they really were.

“It’s just parlor tricks,” said Randi. “Don’t believe this guy or his lies. He’s trying to con you, prey on your weaknesses, and probably steal your money.” And he showed exactly how Geller did did his illusions.

So what do you think happened?

Maybe you’ll say it was predictable. But it was eye-opening to me:

Uri’s popularity was unharmed.

Meanwhile, people starting booing poor Randi and chasing him off TV. “We’re going to commercial break,” shouted one TV host at Randi, “and you can piss off!”

Now that you know this interesting story, you can do with it what you will.

I know what I will do.

My conclusion is that hitting the road with an “Enlightened Rationalist” act is a sucker’s game.

I’d much rather win the love and loyalty of people who have the urge to believe — and fight for what they believe.

And that’s why I’ll be changing my own skeptical and cynical ways. I don’t expect the change to be immediate, but it will come, and soon.

You’ll be able to find it in my new newsletter, which I’ll call Destiny & Power. If you want to read this new newsletter, joining it is free and easy. You can do it right here, in just a few seconds.

And if you don’t want to read it, well, I hope you’ll change your mind. Because Destiny & Power welcomes and embraces everyone.

The awesome selling power of a good almanac

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Here’s a thrilling and true historical anecdote:

When Christopher Columbus made his fourth and final voyage to the New World, his boats were eaten away by an attack of boat-eating shipworms. Columbus had to make an emergency landing, and he did, in what is today Jamaica.

The locals initially welcomed Columbus and his men, and supplied them with food for a while. But how long would this go on? After many months of warm hospitality, the locals said enough’s enough, get your own fish.

Columbus and his men grew hungry and desperate. Fortunately, Columbus had his almanac. Specifically, he had the Regiomontanus almanac, which had all kinds of useful info about the stars and planets.

By studying this almanac, Columbus spotted an upcoming lunar eclipse. Maybe he could use to his advantage.

“Our Christian god is very angry with you,” Columbus said to the local chief. “He’s angry you’re keeping us hungry. Where’s the fish? If the fish doesn’t start flowing again soon, our god will punish you heavily. To show his might and his ill will, he will make the moon appear inflamed with wrath, three days hence.”

Three days passed. The moon rose. And sure enough, just as Columbus had threatened, it soon turned to an eerie blood-red color.

The locals realized the Christian god wasn’t fooling. They hurried to Columbus with new supplies of fish, and begged him to intercede on their behalf.

Columbus checked his almanac again, and said he would mull over the locals’ request. And he mulled, for about 48 minutes. That’s how long his almanac said the eclipse would last.

“I’ve spoken to my god,” Columbus finally said, right before the moon turned white again. “He has decided to withdraw his punishment from you. But don’t make him angry again.”

You can bet the locals listened. They kept Columbus and his men full of fish until six months later, when relief came, in the form of a Spanish ship from Hispaniola.

So that’s my message for you for today. Make a big prediction, and if you guess right, you get a lot of influence.

Perhaps you find that a little underwhelming. So let me sketch out just how scary powerful this can really be:

First of all, prediction is a very loose word. You don’t have to predict the outcome of the next election of where the Dow will be in two months time. Prediction can include very manageable things, like we talked about yesterday and the day before.

For example, find out what symptoms your prospect has, but hasn’t articulated yet. Call that out, and give it a name.

Or:

T​ell your prospect something new about himself that also sounds true and unique. It doesn’t matter if it’s not so true, or if it can apply to every other living creature in the world. All you have to do is make it sound true and unique.

Second, you can focus that influence and awe on an object, a process, or God forbid, a product.

Example: Bertram Forer’s case from yesterday. Students rated Forer’s personality questionnaire as highly valuable. Even though it had nothing to do with the actual personality sketches they were given.

And while Columbus wasn’t in the direct response business, can you imagine? I mean, imagine if Columbus had held up his almanac — “available for $49.99, call now” — and said it was the path to communicating with his powerful god?

When you put those two things together… well, perhaps you see where I’m going. In any case, I won’t spell it out further, because I feel like I’m on thin ice here in terms of ethics. But use this responsibly, and nobody gets hurt.

Finally, here’s a prediction:

You pride yourself on being an independent thinker. That’s why you don’t accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.

Was I right? If yes, and you want to know the system I used to figure that out about you, then sign up for my email newsletter. It’s where all my secrets are revealed.

At times, you find yourself susceptible to hot reading

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Roughly 72 years ago, a young man we will call J.R. sat down for his “Intro to Psych” class. J.R. was smiling. Today, he would finally get his promised personality evaluation. What would it say?

The professor who taught the class was a certain Bertram Forer. Forer was an expert in personality analysis. A few weeks earlier, he had given each of his students a simple questionnaire to fill out — hobbies, reading interests, that kind of thing. Based on this, and using his expertise, Forer promised to come up with a brief personality sketch for each student.

The end of the school year was nearing, and J.R. had been having trouble deciding what to do over the summer. “Maybe this will help me clear things up,” he thought.

Professor Forer walked around the classroom. He placed each student’s personality evaluation face down on the student’s desk.

J.R. flipped his over as soon as he got it. He saw his name printed at the top. And then, heart beating, he started to read down the page:

1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.

2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.

3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.

…

There were 13 items in total. When he read them all, J.R. sat there, feeling a bit dazed.

There was deep insight there on the page. Stuff that J.R.’s close friends did not know about. Even things he had never articulated himself, but that was undeniably true. (How the hell did Forer guess the sexual stuff?)

Sure, the evaluation wasn’t 100% perfect. For example, J.R. really didn’t agree with no. 12, “Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.”

But still, the personality sketch was powerful and accurate overall. “And all from a few innocent questions,” thought J.R. “This Professor Forer really is a personality magician.”

Perhaps you see where this is going. Because J.R.’s personality evaluation has become famous since. Today, it’s known as the standard “cold reading” script.

It turns out Profesor Forer didn’t do much analyzing. Instead, he pulled J.R.’s personality sketch out of a newsstand horoscope book. Not only that, but each student in the class got the same evaluation.

And yet, the vast majority of the students did just like J.R. did. They thought the evaluation described them very well. And they gave high marks to Forer’s little questionnaire for evaluating personality.

There is (I believe) a powerful persuasion technique that comes out of this. I will share that in my email newsletter tomorrow. For now, let me just admit that I’ve known about this cold reading script for years. But I never bothered to find out the history behind it.

I only discovered that today. It was thanks to a very entertaining but insightful video about how psychics, mediums, and faith healers do their work.

That’s also where I found out that, as powerful as cold reading is, there’s something even more powerful. It’s a technique known as “hot reading.” And if you’re reading this, then I suspect that, at times, you’ve found yourself susceptible to it.

Watch the video if you want to find out more about hot reading. And if you want to know about the persuasion technique I will share tomorrow, you might want to sign up for my email newsletter.

Persuasive vemödalen

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I’m staying in a beautiful coast town these days so I just went for a walk along the shore. The sun was shining, the trees were doing their thing, and the sea, a few cliffs below where I was walking, was shuffling restlessly from side to side. I got tempted — for just a moment — to take out my phone and take a picture.

“But what’s the point?” I told myself.

Because I realized a long time ago that the only time I think to take a picture is when I come across a scene that looks like pictures I’ve seen before.

“Gee, this looks just like a postcard. Better create another postcard myself!”

If you love to take pictures with your phone, my point is not to razz on you. Instead, I just want to point out, in case you feel like I feel — that so much photography is repetitive and redundant — that there’s a word for this.

The word was coined in 2014 by a guy named John Koenig. ​Koenig called this vague intuition many of us have probably had — he called it vemödalen.

​​So now, when you and I talk to our friends, we can call this feeling by its name and we can communicate it to others. We have a handle on it, and it’s much more real in our minds. (Well, it would be, if we could only remember the word vemödalen and know how to pronounce it.)

Before you start thinking I’m getting sentimental, let me turn things around to hard-core direct marketing. Specifically, something marketer Travis Sago shared once in a podcast, about how he does email marketing:

What’s different and what I found works really well and takes a lot of lifting off the writing is bringing out what symptoms do they have, what symptoms are they seeing or feeling or hearing in their life? What is he saying? What’s happening in their life and starting out with the symptoms.

[…]

I’ll have to admit, some days I’m just brain dead and I’ll just go with the problem. But it’s way more powerful to go with the symptom.

What Travis doesn’t say in this quote is that when he talks about a symptom, he will often focus on a “new” symptom. Not new in the sense that it just popped up… but new in the sense that nobody else has talked about it, and even his prospect might not have a conscious awareness of it.

​​Even better if you can give it a name. Kind of like vemödalen. That’s what Travis does — and he manages to convert something like 25% of his list over time.

But speaking of unnamed symptoms:

Do you know that feeling when you’re nearing the end of a novel, and you start to feel a bittersweet angst, knowing that the characters you’ve made friends with over the past weeks will disappear from your life? I checked, and it’s called lithatonophobia.

The good news is, you never need to feel lithatonophobia at the end of one of my blog posts. Because I write a new email each day with new marketing and copywriting content. And if you’d like to keep that in your life, here’s where you can join my newsletter.

The trouble with selling to late 50s white guys with money

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Brian Kurtz sent an interesting email today about list selection, with the following thought:

The question I wanted an answer to, in living color, although a black and white copy would do:

‘What was the promotion that got the name.’

I believe the logic behind this kind of list research applies to all media today even though most of the lists you use online don’t have data cards attached to them.

Lists are people too… and finding out as much about them — how they think, how they respond, how they read, what they read — are components you can find out before you ever send a promotion to them.

Like Brian says, this is still relevant today, as long as you’re selling anything to anybody.

Because the standard advice is to do a bunch of research on your customers or prospects. Who they are. What problems they have. What language they use.

Not bad. And certainly much better than just pulling your advertising out of your own head.

Better still is knowing what these people bought. (If they bought one copywriting course, there’s a good chance they will buy another.)

But what’s best is what Brian says. Find out “how they think, how they respond, how they read, what they read.” You get that from the type of advertising these people bought from — or didn’t buy from.

Some people respond to hype- and intrigue-filled direct response copy. Others respond to quick and brandy TV-style commercials. Others still might not respond to either, but will respond to independent recommendations, or stuff that they find through their own research.

Because lists are people too. And two people can have the same demographics… the same buying history… and yet still be very different, in the kinds of things that get them stirred to action.

James Hetfield (of Metallica) and George Clooney (of ER) are both late 50s white guys with millions of dollars in the bank. They are also both Tesla owners.

And yet, I imagine it might take a whole different appeal to move George than to move Papa Het — and vice versa. It’s something to be mindful of, if you run any kind of advertising, and if you don’t want to go bankrupt.

D. Trump’s first pillar of persuasive power

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Twigger warning:

This post is about billionaire businessman, master persuader, and father of five D. Trump. Because while working on some secret stuff today, I had the feeling that Trump uses repetition as a persuasive tool.

But it was just a hunch. And then I found a transcript of the third presidential debate between Trump and H. Clinton. In the first few seconds, Trump said the following:

Something happened recently where Justice Ginsburg made some very, very inappropriate statements toward me and toward a tremendous number of people, many, many millions of people that I represent. And she was forced to apologize and apologize she did.

But these were statements that should never, ever have been made. We need a Supreme Court that in my opinion, is going to uphold the Second Amendment and all amendments, but the Second Amendment, which is under absolute siege.

I believe if my opponent should win this race, which I truly don’t think will happen, we will have a Second Amendment, which will be a very, very small replica of what it is right now. But I feel that it’s absolutely important that we uphold because of the fact that it is under such trauma.

By my count, this short snippet features:

– 6 instances of words repeated for effect

– 2 instances of phrases repeated for effect

– 4 instances of ideas repeated for effect

So I think my hunch about Trump and repetition was spot on.

(I only found out later that I was not the first to spot Trump’s use of repetition. Far from it. It turns out Scott Adams wrote about it in his book Win Bigly, all the way back in 2017. According to Adams, repetition is the key pillar of Trump’s persuasive power, along with simplicity and images.)

Now maybe you don’t like Trump. Even so, you might still be able to learn something from the man. Because you too can use repetition at different levels of your persuasive message. Words. Phrases. Ideas. Across space and time.

It’s worth trying. Because repetition creates belief… it increases desire… and it makes sure your message actually reaches your prospect.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote about it in another post a few months ago. But it’s a very valuable lesson… and worth repeating.

And here’s something I repeat at the end of each of my posts:

I have an email newsletter. It’s the best. Really. If you’d like to try it out, you can sign up here.