John Bejakovic

A real-life Joker triggered my Spidey sense today

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I had a surreal experience today:

I heard a well-known, madly successful guru tell his origin story in a semi-private setting. It all sounded very credible except — only a few days earlier, I had heard him tell the same origin story in another semi-private setting. And the critical details were completely different.

It felt like the scene in The Dark Knight, where the Joker explains how he became the Joker because his daddy cut him up when he was a kid… and then a while later in the movie, he says he became the Joker because he slashed himself up with a razor blade to please his wife.

I’m not sure if the guru in question really was lying. But it’s certainly possible.

Because there are genuine psychos in the business world. And my guess is they are over-represented in the rogues’ gallery of successful gurus, particularly in various marketing and “make money” niches.

Only, unlike in comic books, these real-life psychos don’t dress like the Joker and don’t telegraph their psychopathy with a mad grin. Quite the opposite. As copywriter John Carlton once wrote:

“First, don’t get fooled by people with impeccable manners and loads of charm. I’ve run into more than my share of sociopaths in life, and I’ve actually enjoyed being around them (before I realized what I was dealing with)… These hard-core mofo’s are tough to identify, because they’re good at lying… and good at telling you what they think you want to hear. They’re like ‘Human Whisperers’… they observe humans the way horse whisperers observe and get into the heads of horses… and they can be very, very good at passing themselves off as caring, loving people.”

I’m certainly not telling you to become paranoid and suspicious of everyone you meet.

But when it comes to people who sell online, it’s good to remember that your instincts for who’s trustworthy and who’s not can be manipulated. Perversely, the more quickly and instinctively you trust an online personality, the more your Spidey sense (Batman signal? — apologies for mixing comic book universes) should be going off.

Anyways, here’s another tip:

It’s hard to maintain a psycho facade after a lot of contact over a long period of time. Therefore, if you want to demonstrate your non-psychopathy, one way to do that is to communicate regularly with your audience.

Which is one reason why I write a daily email newsletter, mostly about persuasion, marketing, and manipulation — for psychopaths or not. If you’re interested in trying this newsletter out, click here.

Today’s magic announcement

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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
— Arthur C. Clarke

Maybe you heard today’s news:

This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry is going to UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna for her 2011 discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 mechanism.

From what I understand, CRISPR is a set of “genetic scissors” that allow you to turn an elephant into a mouse, and a mouse into a louse. In other words, it’s pure magic.

I don’t doubt CRISPR works or that it might one day cure HIV, Huntington’s disease, or sickle cell anemia. But the fact is, I have no idea how it works. On a deep level, I never will. And yet, I’m incredibly excited to read about it, and marvel at the sorcery that is possible today.

My point in bringing this up is something I heard copywriter Parris Lampropoulos say once:

We all believe in magic in one form or another.

Maybe it’s your brand of religion… maybe it’s 34th-century science like CRISPR… maybe it’s karma or vibrations or Wicca or whatever.

But one way or another, human beings want magic in their lives.

They don’t want mundane solutions that improve things a reasonable amount. They want magic — a button to push or a wand to wave or a pill to swallow — which will achieve the impossible, and thrill them in the process.

You might think that’s a tall order. But it’s a good target to shoot for, if you’re in the business of selling people what they want.

Speaking of which:

If you’re looking to be thrilled and surprised, every day, then you might like my email newsletter. To make it magically appear in your inbox, simply click here and fill out the form which pops up out of nowhere.

Surviving the Straits of Upwork with a little help from Pelorous John

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There was once a dolphin nicknamed Pelorous Jack.

For 30 years, he guided ships through a dangerous sea passage around one of the islands of New Zealand.

At one point, some scabby sailor tried to shoot Jack with a rifle. Jack survived, and he kept helping ships find their way to safety.

​​But not that ship, the one the sailor tried to shoot him from. That one sank after shipwrecking in Cook Strait. Which you might interpret a lesson about not spitting on free help or tossing away golden opportunities.

Anyways, I would like to propose I be your Pelorous Jack, I mean John, guiding you through the dangerous Straits of Upwork.

As you might know, I got my copywriting start on Upwork. I even wrote a book about my experiences. It tells how I got all the work I wanted (I didn’t want too much) and how I eventually charged $150/hr for that work.

But I’m not here to pitch you this book.

Instead, I want to tell you about an article I’ve put up on my site. It’s about my method for applying to Upwork jobs using stupid-simple, 3-sentences proposals.

If you’re on Upwork, or even if you’re not but you’re pitching clients somewhere else, then Pelorous John can help you navigate to richer waters.

So don’t be a scabby and ungrateful sailor. Take your opportunities when they are given, and if you want help getting freelance jobs, set sail to the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-proposal-sample/

“Manipulative tactics are the norm”

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Here’s a confession:

I’ve long dreamed of taking my copywriting and marketing skills beyond.

Beyond what?

Beyond selling dog seat belts and online real estate investing courses and herbal supplements that make aged skin look less aged.

Yes, I’ve dreamed of getting into politics and fundraising. But except for a spurt of advertorials that I wrote during the 2016 election for a now-arrested scammer, I haven’t had much opportunity to do political work.

Even so, the field continues to fascinate me. And that’s what I want to tell you about today.

A friend just sent me a link to a website created by some nerds at Princeton University. They collected over 259,000 political emails, and they made this giant corpus available and searchable online.

What’s more, they did some analysis. And they found that “Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails.”

No shit.

It turns out fake urgency (“FEC deadline!”)… fake reasons why (“matching your contribution”)… fake subject lines (“NOT asking for money”)… and fake offers (“please donate to complete your survey response”)… are all very standard.

Maybe you find that revolting, and a sign of the times. But I am a cynical donkey, so this made me think just two things:

1) The basics of manipulation are all you really need to get decent results, and

2) There is opportunity to squeeze out more money out of people with better marketing

And that is why I am now announcing my candidacy as a marketing and fundraising consultant, available for hire by any political party.

If you are interested, please submit your inquiries by email immediately, because I’ve already been contacted by all the major campaigns, and I need to make my decision before the FEC deadline at midnight tonight.

And if you are not yet ready to hire me to help with your campaign… or if you have no campaign to help… then maybe you still share my perverse fascination with the world of politics and fundraising. In that case, you might like my daily email newsletter, which deals with the seedy side of marketing and copywriting. You can sign up for it here.

Connecting the dots for the “good” class of prospect

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“Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehended; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

As Machiavelli says in the quote above, there are three classes of prospect.

The first will seek out your offer and figure out for themselves that this is just what they need.

The second will see the light with a bit of help from you.

The third really aren’t your prospects at all, and no amount of clever persuasion will get them to buy.

The trouble is that many marketers only speak to the first group. They present features and benefits of their offer as they themselves imagine them.

But expert persuaders take it one level further.

​​They connect the dots for people. They provide imagination and logic that the prospect himself won’t bother with — and they create a problem where the prospect doesn’t see one yet.

Copywriter Victor Schwab said this connecting the dots is “usually either completely ignored or underestimated by the preceptors of advertising and its practitioners.”

Don’t be among these lazy practitioners of marketing. Connect the dots for your readers, and do the work for them, because large rewards await you if you do.

But perhaps I’m not connecting the dots for you on how to do that. In that case, you might like to sign up for my daily email newsletter.

The trouble with “writing how you talk”

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“Pitbulls are like a gun you can pet.”
— Bill Burr

I read a question on a copywriter message board recently:

“Should you write copy the way you speak?”

It’s certainly common advice to do so. And it can help people who fear writing to get over their phobia.

​​But I don’t agree that you can speak your way to good writing, or even to good copy.

Fact is, copy should use simple words and paint word pictures.

But except for a few talented communicators, most people don’t talk like that.

Sure, when it’s all done and done, somebody reading your copy should be able to convince themselves they might say this when speaking. But they never really would, any more than your random schmuck off the street would deliver a Bill Burr-level rant while jiving with his friends at the bar.

A top comedian like Burr will put in dozens or hundreds of hours of work to polish and perfect a joke that lasts only a few minutes.

​​And if you want similar success with your copy, you too will have to work harder on your copy than just “writing how you talk.”

Or you can just write daily emails. The rules for those are often different than for traditional sales letters. And if you want to see what I have in mind, you might like to sign up for my daily email newsletter. You can do so by clicking here.

An admission about my own incompetence

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“I’ve started to write short stories,” a friend told me today.

I asked him to tell me more.

“I wrote the first one three weeks ago. It’s about a man who believes inanimate objects have souls. So he goes around giving proper burials to chairs and tables. He finds an old wardrobe left out next to the trash and that’s when the story begins.”

I listened to him summarize the adventures of the man as he drags the wardrobe to his back yard. I leaned in and I laughed and I was pleased with the ending. Which reminds me of something I read recently,

“Genius is as common as dirt.”

That comes from an essay titled, “Against school.” John Taylor Gatto, the guy who wrote the essay, was the New York State Teacher of the Year way back when. But he turned against the school system once he realized the real problem.

It’s not apathetic kids… or underpaid teachers… or an outdated curriculum.

The problem is that the purpose of school is, first and foremost, to break kids, so they become fit to serve.

Maybe you don’t agree with this. So let it just sit there as an idea to be aware of. But here’s a personal admission:

I feel I have zero creativity or ability to solve problems. Of course, that’s not really how I am. I’ve solved problems before and I’ve created stuff, too.

But I sure feel uncreative and incompetent. I think the reason why is that, through long and arduous training in the school system, I’ve learned there is always a right answer, and you either have it at your fingertips or you don’t. And I almost never do.

Of course, having the right answer at your fingertips is not really how creativity works. And if you ever doubt your own creative abilities, maybe it will be worth turning a critical eye towards your school years, and looking for a bit of that “common as dirt” genius that’s probably sleeping somewhere inside you.

But let’s get to business:

Remember how I mentioned I create stuff on occasion? One thing I create every day is an email about copywriting, marketing, and, now and again, Marxist ideas about the education system. If you’d like to test out this newsletter in your inbox, click here.

The “philosopher’s stone” tactic for transmuting dull content into sparkling subject lines

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A few days ago, marketer Ben Settle sent out an email with the subject line:

“Email Players subscriber does hostile takeover of the UK childcare industry market”

The body of this email was mostly a standard testimonial from one of Ben’s customers. This guy said he used Ben’s marketing methods to capture 25% of the nursery owners market in the UK. To which Ben added,

“Smells like a hostile takeover of the market to me.”

And that’s where the “hostile takeover” subject line came from.

I thought this was clever. It brought to mind the philosopher’s stone, the magical artifact that allows you to take a bunch of dull lead and turn it into a few ounces of sparkling gold.

Except what Ben was doing was taking a bunch of solid and dull content… and transmuting it into a sparkling subject line.

All it took was free-associating a dramatic phrase, somewhat connected to the topic. It didn’t even have to be too logically connected.

Maybe that’s something you too can try if you write emails for sales and profit.

But you can use this same technique not just for subject lines.

It works for writing bullets, too. (You just might have to tweak the underlying editorial a bit, to make sure you’re not cheating readers when you hand them the dull lead.)

I bring all this up because I promised yesterday to tell you about a free online repository of 1) good bullets and 2) the underlying content those bullets were distilled and conjured from.

Well, that resource is Ben Settle’s daily emails.

Not all of Ben’s subject lines and emails demonstrate bullet-writing tactics.

But many do. And any young and ambitious student who just got accepted into copywriting Hogwarts would do well to stay up late, under candle light, and study these magical texts.

I’ve done it myself, and I continue to do it.

And I apply many of Ben’s marketing lessons — along with some I discovered myself — in my own daily email newsletter. If you want to get on board that train, it takes off from platform 9 1/2.

The most important “do or die” copywriting skill

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Some time back in the 2000s, Internet marketer Ken McCarthy put on a 3-day seminar titled, Advanced Copywriting for Serious Info Marketers.

This seminar has a kind of cult following in the marketing world today. Some of the most successful copywriters out there — people like Dan Ferrari and Ben Settle — say this is one of the best resources for really understanding what copywriting is all about.

Anyways, during this seminar, Ken asked the participants about the most important “do or die” copywriting skill.

“It’s a mechanical skill,” Ken explained. In other words, he wasn’t talking about secret ways of conducting research… or building desire… or even closing the sale.

All those are important. But there’s a single, mechanical skill that all good-to-great copywriters must master.

If I remember correctly, Ken teased this for over 10 minutes. I won’t do the same, because I feel I’ve teased you enough already. So let me just tell you:

This “do or die” skill is writing bullets.

Bullets? Yes, bullets.

Many sales letters are all bullets. But good bullet-writing skill will also mean you can write great headlines (what is a headline but your best bullet?) and subheads.

​​On an deeper level, being able to write good bullets means you can evoke curiosity in your reader, and focus his attention where you want it to go. That’s something you can use in your body copy too, or even in the structure of your sales letter.

But let’s assume Ken is right, and bullets are where it’s at.

So how do you get great at writing bullets?

Copywriter Gary Halbert had a solution for you:

Find a successful sales letter chock full o’ bullets… then get the book or newsletter or course they were selling… then reverse engineer how the copywriter “twisted” the original content to create the sexy bullet.

Thing is, the golden age of bullet-heavy magalogs has passed. And maybe you’re not keen on going on eBay and hunting for 90’s sales letters and the books they sold.

Fear not.

You can get access to some of the best bullets running today, along with the content that spawned them, for free, and in a pretty entertaining package. I’ll tell you all about it in my email tomorrow.

What, you don’t get my daily emails? Well, if you want ’em, you can sign up here.

Try not to enjoy reading this post

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Hypnotist Mike Mandel says that there is a magic power word, which you can use to get people to fail. What’s more, if you find yourself using this word to describe your own actions, expect that you will fail also.

What is this magic word?

I’ll tell you but be careful. The word is “try.”

Mike has all sorts of technical explanations for the destructive power of try. But my best evidence (and maybe yours, if you give it a try) is just by looking inside my own brain software. Whenever I found myself saying, “I’ll give it a try,” or “I’ll try my best,” deep down, I found I was expecting to fail. And often, fail I did.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

First, it might be worth kicking the word “try” out of your own vocabulary, down to the curb with the rest of the head trash. It might take some time to find other words that will express what you want to say. But when you do, you will probably find the effort was worth it.

Second, if you write copy, then you can use the word “try” to get other people to fail. Why would you want to do such a cruel thing? Well, a classic example is the three-pronged road at the end of so many sales letters:

“So here are your options now. Option one is you can go back to what you were doing before, pulling your hair out and picking at your skin while your unsolved problem mounts and your family looks at you with growing suspicion each passing day.

“​​Option two is you take the breakthrough system I’ve just described to you and TRY to implement it yourself. But you know how that’s going to turn out, don’t you?

“​​And then finally, you’ve got option three, which is to accept the risk-free offer I’m making you today. And then just try not to shout with joy when your problem is finally solved…”

Finally, I’d like to announce that I write a daily email newsletter. Try not to sign up for it. But if you find you aren’t successful, then click here and follow the instructions.