John Bejakovic

Tall Chinese boys and the Zappos case study

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I often wonder why teens seem to be getting taller, even in countries that are not famous for tallness — like Italy or China. Today I found a potential answer.

According to a study published this month in The Lancet, it comes down to nutrition. Improving nutrition is why Chinese boys became 4 inches taller in 35 years, and went from 150th tallest on the list to 65th. Meanwhile, boys in the UK got only one inch taller during that time, which dropped them from 28th place to 39th.

Dr Andrea Rodriguez Martinez, the lead author of this study, concluded by saying:

“Our findings should motivate policies that increase the availability and reduce the cost of nutritious foods, as this will help children grow taller without gaining excessive weight for their height.”

It was the bit about “increasing availability” and “reducing cost” that got my attention. It reminded me of a case study reported in Jonah Berger’s book the Catalyst, about the online shoe retailer Zappos.

In their early days, Zappos was limited in how low they could cut their prices — Nike didn’t want their cool new sneakers being sold cheap.

But even if Zappos could offer lower prices than in retail stores, people would still be wary of buying shoes online.

So what Zappos did instead was remove roadblocks to buying. They offered free shipping instead of lowering prices.

It could have been disastrous for the company… but it was not. Zappos went from struggling ecomm startup to a $1.2 billion buyout from Amazon.

So my message to Dr Rodriguez is, instead of pushing for food voucher programs… advocate for more vending machines selling expensive but delicious dehydrated zucchini chips. And watch those kids shoot up in height rather than width.

But it’s unlikely Dr Rodriguez will listen to me. Maybe you will.

So my message for you is that free shipping makes any offer more enticing… and that price is often not the main objection that you need to address. Rather than trying to compete on price, ask yourself why your prospects are not buying already — and then remove that roadblock directly.

Let me give you an example:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s free, so I can’t cut its price any lower without paying you to sign up. But the fact is, you can subscribe to it and if it’s not right for you… you can unsubscribe any time with just one click. No risk. No hassle. So why not try it out? Click here to sign up now.

Petty but powerful: Wiping the smirk off your frenemy’s face

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Many parts of Europe are entering lockdown these days. Since I do not like being locked down, I am running in hope of avoiding the avalanche.

And so yesterday, I found myself in a local rent-a-car office. The city I was in had entered lockdown, including for travel. But other parts of the country were still open. So I wanted to rent a car.

“To do what?” asked the rent-a-car clerk, barely looking up from his laptop.

“To leave the city,” I answered.

He snorted and went back to looking at his computer screen. “Not possible.” The subtext was that I was stupid even for asking.

And yet, I managed to rent a car today, after asking at two other places. And as I was driving my tiny Citroen and heading towards freedom, I passed by the first rent-a-car office, the one with the “To do what” clerk.

For a moment, I thought about pulling over, popping into the office, and dangling my Citroen keys in his face. “Not possible, huh?” I imagined him looking at me sourly from behind his laptop, with nothing to say.

Petty, I know. But it’s human nature. And that’s what I want to tell you about.

You might have heard already that one dimension you can add to your copy is to is to bring in an audience.

Usually, that means saying something like, “Imagine the excited crowd of pretty girls pushing past each other for the chance to see you drive down the street in your tiny Citroen.”

But an audience can be more specific, and more negative. Because we all have a relative, a frenemy, or just a rent-a-car clerk who scoffed at us once.

If your product can help wipe the condescending smirk off that person’s face — well, then you should say so. For example:

Imagine that first copywriting blowout you got. Maybe it was your first client… or a bit later on… when somebody told you, “This is beneath my standards. I refuse to pay for this.”

Well, imagine that person, and their face, when they see you a successful, in-demand, persuasive copywriting genius.

Tall order, you say? Not if you sign up for my daily email newsletter, which is full of copywriting lessons like the one you just read. So if you want to get back at that person who gave you your first copywriting blowout… click here to subscribe.

The George Costanza method of client seduction

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There’s an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza, the fat short bald loser who is always making up exciting careers for himself to impress women, realizes that everything he has done in life has lead to failure.

Desperate, George takes another tack.

He goes bizarro. He does the opposite of whatever he would normally do.

George starts by ordering the opposite lunch from what he normally gets. He then notices an attractive woman looking at him from across the restaurant.

Bizarro George decided to get up and go talk to her — because normal George never would.

“Excuse me,” George says to the woman, “I couldn’t help but notice you were looking in my direction.”

“Oh yes I was,” the woman explains. “You just ordered the exact same lunch as me.”

George takes a deep breath.

“My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”

The woman turns to face him fully, her eyes sparkling and a smile spreading across her face. “I’m Victoria. Hiii…”

Chris Haddad said in a recent interview that if you are a freelance copywriter, then you should be constantly going on Facebook, bragging about how great you are, and sharing all of your successes and testimonials.

That’s one approach. It can definitely work.

But there’s another approach. It’s when you seek to not impress. Instead, you give clients reasons why you are not a good match for them. You refuse to talk about your experience and successes, or at least you put it off as long as possible.

This is nothing more than a page out of Jim Camp’s negotiation system. You’re looking for a no. More importantly, you are eliminating any neediness that’s typical when freelancers talk to clients.

Very likely, this approach is not right for you.

But if you find that the typical advice of confidence and bragging has lead you to failure over and over… then this bizarro George approach is worth a shot. Because it can work, and not on just on TV.

Here’s another thing that is very likely not right for you:

My daily email newsletter. Very few people subscribe to it. Even fewer read it.

How to “remember” your way out of the hard labor of writing

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Samuel Coleridge awoke from a deep opium slumber, grabbed a pen and paper, and scribbled down three stanzas that he says he composed in his dream.

At that moment, an unidentified person from Porlock interrupted Coleridge.

Once Coleridge made it back to his pen and paper, he found that the visions had vanished and he couldn’t complete the poem he had started.

The poem that Colerdige had written lingered unfinished for years, when at the suggestion of Lord Byron, it was published under the title Kubla Khan. It remains famous to this day, some two hundred years later.

Meanwhile, “the person from Porlock” has entered the lexicon as an unwanted intruder who disrupts inspiration or a moment of creativity.

If you ever struggle to write something, there’s a lesson hidden there in the story of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. At least I think so.

I personally often write by “remembering” the finished product — before it is written.

Of course, this is a complete trick and a lie. But it works for me. It might work for you too. Here’s what to do:

Basically, instead of outlining or writing what you have to write, you pretend you’ve already written it. It’s there vaguely in your memory, as though you dreamt it.

So you grab a pen and paper, or more likely your laptop, and start furiously writing down whatever you can remember.

If you’ve already forgotten some part, just leave some XXXs to be filled in later.

The key is to get as much of your structure and individual words down as you can before your poem — or your sales copy or whatever — disappears into the darkness of the night.

And of course, beware of the person from Porlock. Any kind of distraction — whether checking your mail, doing a bit of research, or picking up your phone — can kill your visions. And then you are left with the hard labor of writing, instead of the easy act of remembering what was already written.

Do you think this was a useless suggestion? In that case, you probably won’t be interested in signing up for my daily email newsletter. But in case you are interested, click here and face the window that magically appears.

The biggest and baddest dog in the direct response junkyard

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Two days ago, I set up an A/B email test and the results came back conclusive:

Version A made three times as many sales as version B — and this wasn’t a statistical fluke.

So here’s the background of the test:

The subject lines of the two emails were the same. The body copy was the same. So was the copy on the landing page.

There was a difference between the the two funnels…

But it’s so obvious that you will probably roll your eyes when you hear it.

The difference came all the way on the order page — funnel B had a $59.99 price point, while funnel A was only $39.99. That’s why the number of sales (3x) and revenue (2x) in funnel A were so much higher.

You might think this is one of those “dog bites man” pieces of news.

And it is.

Except in the world of sexy direct response copywriting techniques, people often forget about the tendency of dogs to bite.

Fact is, your offer is the biggest and baddest dog in the direct response junkyard.

And from what I see, few businesses give enough thought to this big bad mutt — the fundamental promise of it… the price… the name… the format… the bonuses.

That’s not just an opportunity for business owners. Copywriters too can profit by pushing back on a mild and toothless offer — thanks to the win-win-win nature of the direct response game.

But let’s get to business:

I have a daily email newsletter. It’s about direct response copywriting and marketing – the sexy as well as the profitable. If you’d like to sign up for it, click here.

How to sell a broccoli-of-the-month subscription program

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One of my copywriting clients has a marketing conundrum:

He sells an app that helps real estate investors track down info on vacant houses. He charges $49 a month for the app. It’s a good product and customers love it. But it’s too practical and too unsexy to sell to people who just click over from YouTube or Facebook.

So what to do?

I had an idea. I told him to create a course on getting hot seller leads… price it at 10x the cost of the app… and put it up for sale on his site.

It doesn’t matter if anybody buys the course. What matters is that he can now legitimately say, “Here’s how to get my premium $497 course on getting hot leads for FREE.” The answer, of course, is that the prospect has to sign up for a trial of the app.

This is not my idea, by the way. It’s been in use in one form or another since prehistoric times, when some Neanderthal started selling a newsletter on mammoth-hunting strategies. But I thought of it because I once saw a Frank Kern VSL that did this exact same thing.

Frank was selling a $397 membership program for consultants and clients. That’s a tough sell to cold traffic.

What wasn’t a tough sell was getting somebody to accept a FREE gift of Frank’s $4k course on getting clients. Of course, the way to get this FREE gift was with a risk-free trial of the $397 membership course.

My point is this:

If you’re in the business of selling a broccoli-of-the-month subscription program, give away a FREE 10-layer chocolate cake to get people to sign up.

You can even offer crazy bribes if you’re giving your broccoli away.

For example, I write a daily email newsletter. It’s totally free to sign up for it. But if you sign up for it here, and you reply to the welcome email and refer to this blog post, I’ll give you a FREE half-hour consult on any topic you may want — such as writing horror-story advertorials… daily emails that bring in the bacon for ecommerce businesses… or getting started as a copywriter and marketer.

A technique for $100k+ copywriters only

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How’s this for under-the-radar persuasion:

In 1999, tobacco company Lorillard (which owns brands like Newport and Kent) ran an ad campaign to keep teens from smoking.

This was part of Lorillard’s public relations work. Officially, the goal was to make the company seem like your alcoholic but benevolent uncle, trying to steer you away from his own wayward path.

But beneath the surface, something else was lurking.

The ad campaign featured the message, “Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen.” This might sound awkward or quaint, or like a typical example of brand advertising with a stupid slogan.

But it’s not that at all. Dig it:

A later statistical study found that each exposure to this ad increased the intention of middleschoolers to try cigarettes by 3%. In other words, if your kid sees this ad 30 times, his or her odds of trying a cigarette double.

What’s going on?

Well, it’s the tail of that message. “… if you’re a teen.” Which by extension means, tobacco ain’t whacko if you’re grown up. In that case, tobacco is cool-o and sexy-o. No wonder millennial McLovins figured it was time to light up.

My point being:

In traditional direct response marketing, you can’t mess around. You tell people what you’ve got and all the irrefutable reasons why they need it.

But in today’s world, you’ve email and youtube vids and instagram posts. These media are free, so it pays to experiment with alternate messaging. For example…

Instead of telling your prospects your offer is perfect for them, tell them your offer is not right for them. At least not yet, because they are not yet the person they want to become. And then hit them with that same message thirty more times — and your odds of making the sale might double.

And now let me come clean:

My daily email newsletter is totally whacko unless you’re already making $100k+ as a copywriter. But if you don’t believe me, click here and subscribe.

A scary story for Halloween

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It being Halloween today, I want to tell you a scary story from my own life:

Many years ago, I had an ill-advised one-night stand with a friend of a friend. The next morning, as I was leaving the girl’s house, she told me she was flying home for two weeks. She lived in another country.

“Thank God,” I said to myself. “I won’t have to pretend to want to see her again.” So I told her to have a safe flight and I walked out of her life.

Or so I thought.

Because about six weeks later, I got a text message.

“Hi Bejako. It’s A. [Common friend] gave me your number. Could we meet? I have to talk to you and I’d rather do it in person.”

I could clearly hear a baby wailing somewhere nearby. Images of a shotgun wedding fired in my head.

We agreed to meet that evening in a cafe. I was there on time, she was not. With each passing minute, life drained out of my body and by the time the girl arrived, I had sunk so far in my chair that just my eyes were above the level of the table.

She sat down. She ran on for a few minutes, chipper and chatty.

I eventually collected enough strength to speak. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Yeah…” she said with a bit of embarrassment. “I guess we should really get to it.”

It turned out she had started working with a life coach. And as part of her transformation, she was supposed to contact people from her past — such as one-night stand partners — and ask them,

“Do you have any feedback for me?”

That was it. No pregnancy. No marriage. No on Golden Pond.

At this point, I brightened considerably. I told her my feedback was she shouldn’t scare people like that. I also ordered four drinks in about 15 minutes and — lesson never learned — even tried to take the girl home again.

So what’s my point?

Well, for the past few days, I’ve been writing about ideas taken from NLP. And the scary story above popped up in my head when I read one such idea:

“Failure is only feedback.”

This is a way to reframe an instance of rejection or failure… take the sting out… and maybe even get something useful out of it.

Whenever I practice this approach to life, I always come out amazed and amused. Thing is, I often forget.

So I wanted to remind myself, and maybe you, to treat failure as feedback. And no better way to remember something than to tie it to a scary story.

And now for something even more scary:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s filled with gruesome persuasion ideas to make you gasp and to chill your blood. If you want in on this haunted house, click here to subscribe.

How to make $75 million with an email newsletter

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News broke today that Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider.

Morning Brew, as you might know, is a daily email newsletter started a few years ago. The insight behind it was to take business news — a boring topic, thanks for nothing, Wall Street Journal — and make it more millennial-friendly.

Well it worked. Business Insider paid $75 million for a controlling stake in Morning Brew. Not bad for an email newsletter.

I bring this up for reasons one and two.

Reason one is that it fits my post from yesterday. That’s where I suggested that if you take a dry but useful topic and sexy it up, you can become a star. Or in the case of Morning Brew, you can earn yourself a $75 million buyout in about five years’ time.

Reason two has to do with my current romp through NLP axioms. The axiom I have in mind is,

“The past does not equal the future.”

In other words, even if a shadow has trailed you all your life — I mean a phobia, or some limiting belief, or just “how you are” — that doesn’t mean you cannot change, and change quickly.

That, in theory, is what NLP is all about. Of course, there are also other ways to effect change quickly.

For example, a few months ago I listened to an interview with Alex Lieberman, the founder of Morning Brew. Lieberman said how he can’t see any reason to sell his company.

Well, $75 million later, he found a reason.

“The past does not equal the future.”

Human brains love patterns and trends. But that’s not how the world works much of the time. Things can stay the same, day after day after day, and then suddenly — your tomorrow can be different.

Speaking of a different tomorrow:

I have a daily email newsletter. Its current valuation is -$39.17, which is what I’ve paid for the software to send the emails.

The insight behind my newsletter is to take the boring topics of marketing and copywriting and sexy them up. If you’d like to get on this rocket ship before it shoots to the moon, click here to subscribe.

Tony Robbins leaves clues

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In a recent post, I used the phrase, “Success leaves clues.” I didn’t realize somebody had colonized my mind and those words were not my own.

This phrase, as far as I could find, goes back to Tony Robbins. It makes sense he would say it. After all, the idea of success leaving clues is basically the central idea of neuro linguistic programming — NLP — and NLP is where Tony Robbins got his start.

I’ve been curious about NLP for a long time. Unfortunately, from what I see, the field is filled with blowhards and snake oil salesmen.

​​The first, the blowhards, are people who use fancy words like “Primary Representational System” to impress their seriousness and authority on you.

​​The second, the snake oil salesmen, make ridiculous claims like “if any human being can do anything, so can you.”

That’s a shame, because NLP is interesting and in my experience works. The reason I know is that I’ve gone through and applied Tony Robbins’s Personal Power, which is pretty much NLP for the masses.

And that’s my message for you for today:

If you can take a dry, inaccessible, but useful topic, and simply sexy it up without venturing into snake oil territory, you can become a star. (Maybe not Tony Robbins, but you know what I mean…) The good news is that right now, there are more such dry but useful topics than ever.

Let me leave you with a quote from the book Positioning by Jack Ries and Al Trout. This is basically what I’m trying to say but more concise — just swap “blowhardness” for “poetry” and “credibility-destroying hype” for “creativity”:

“For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.”

For more clues about success, you might like my daily email newsletter. To try it out, click here.