How to cut your unsubscribes almost in half

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In this email, I’ll write about an idea you’re probably heard before. It might not be anything new to you. In fact, you might not want to read this email at all.

Yesterday I was talking to a coaching client. He recently took over the management of an email list with 50k subscribers.

That’s my preferred position, by the way — a kind of Harry Hopkins-like figure, a back-end advisor and scheme man rather than a front-facing figurehead.

​​Unfortunately I can’t do that with my own emails. Still, I continue to write this newsletter simply because I find the practice so personally valuable.

But back to the coaching call. My coaching client took over the management of this sizable list, and he started sending more regular emails.

At first, he put a paragraph at the top of these emails, warning his audience they would be getting emails more often, along with a link in case they wanted to unsubscribe.

Unsubscribe link right at the start of the email. Result? 50-60 unsubscribes each time.

He then took that paragraph out. Just the usual unsubscribe link left at the end of the email. Result? The unsubscribes jumped to 100.

That’s the idea I warned you about at the start. You’ve probably heard it before.

Really, it’s a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme. But these days, it mostly gets attributed to Jim Camp’s book Start With No.

Says Camp, never take away your adversary’s right to say no. In fact, go out of your way, make a show, above and beyond, to assure your adversary you respect his or her right to say no. And mean it.

Camp was a negotiator in billion-dollar deals.

In other words, this isn’t just about cutting your unsubscribes. It’s also about making more sales and making more deals. And most importantly, it’s about continuing a valuable relationship into the future.

I’ve repeatedly promoted my Most Valuable Email course in these emails.

Perhaps you’ve decided this course is not for you. Perhaps you’re just not interested in it. That’s fine.

Otherwise, if you’d like more information about Most Valuable Email, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Value is not how-to

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Yesterday’s email, about a strange scientific experiment on kittens, provoked some response.

​​One reader said I should have included a trigger warning. (“Deeply disturbing content. Cruel. CRUEL.”)

Another reader said we “look at Nazi scientists and cringe as we click our tongues” but we allow our own scientists all sorts of license.

A third reader wrote to say he loved the line, “The scientists are wearing white lab coats. The kitten is not.” He thought the line was priceless.

I highlight these responses because they focus on exactly the two things that got me about the strange kitten experiment.

​​The research was bizarre and cruel. At the same time, the image of two laboratory scientists in white lab coats, working hard to startle a kitten into blinking, was ridiculous and made me smile.

There was a point to my email yesterday. If you read the email, do you remember the point?

If you don’t remember, no problem. The point was not the value of the email.

In general, value in an email is not the how-to. Value in an email is the emotional spike it creates.

I could tell you how to create emotional spikes in your emails, but really, what would be the value in that?

Instead, I’ll just tell you that you can create emotional spikes even without talking about cruelty to kittens, without creating outrage, and without trying to be funny. In fact I’ve created a course all about the how-to of “intellectual” emotional spikes. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Kitten doesn’t blink, scientists not surprised

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Imagine the following:

Two scientists and a kitten. The scientists are wearing white lab coats. The kitten is not.

One of the scientists holds the kitten tight.

The other scientist asks, “You ready?”

The first scientist nods.

Scientist two takes a big swing and rushes his large man-hand towards the kitten’s face. He stops right before hitting the kitten.

The kitten doesn’t even blink.

The scientist stares hard at the kitten, then picks up a clipboard, and notes down the results. “Just as we thought,” he says.

The annals of science are filled with strange experiments designed to answer strange questions. Perhaps none is more strange than an experiment performed in 1963, by two cognitive scientists at MIT.

The experimenters took a bunch of newborn kittens. Put them in pairs. Kept them in total darkness. Only occasionally exposed them to light, under very specific conditions.

When it was time for the light, the scientists put a box around the kittens’ heads. This was so the beasts couldn’t see their paws.

One kitten, kitten A, then got to walk around freely.

The other kitten, kitten P, couldn’t control where it was walking. But thanks to a clever mechanism designed by these MIT scientists, kitten P was moved around the floor in a little basket in exactly the same way as kitten A was moving.

Result?

After 21 sessions of this bizarre treatment, all A kittens learned to control their paws properly, and to judge depth properly.

All P kittens on the other hand — well, you can guess. Bring a P kitten to the edge of a table, and the poor thing didn’t know to stretch its little kitten paws out. Take a swing at a little P kitten’s face, and it didn’t even know to blink.

The P kittens were Passive. The A kittens were Active.

The P kittens ended up Pathetic. The A kittens ended up Athletic.

There may be something in there that applies to humans also.

Read, study, observe what others are doing — you may learn something. Or you may not.

Practice, do, apply it yourself — and you are guaranteed to develop.

The choice is yours.

​​For specific opportunities to apply, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

We’re in the fiction business

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I was surprised—

Yesterday I polled readers as to what books they are reading right now.

The responses came flooding in. Lots of business books. Lots of marketing books. Lots of self-help books.

What surprised me is that out of the several dozen responses I got, fewer than five came from people who said they are reading fiction.

A few days ago, I mentioned how I’ve watched lots of Dan Kennedy seminars about marketing and copywriting, and how Dan will often poll the room about who reads fiction.

​​A few hands go up, most stay down.

“You gotta read fiction,” says Dan. “Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non-fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business.”

So read fiction. Even better, write fiction. Dan did it – a mystery novel. John Carlton did it, too — sci-fi. I guess even Gary Halbert did it, maybe romance.

You don’t have to write a novel or even a short story. An email can be it.

​​I’ve done it before in this newsletter. Sometimes I was serious about it. Lots of times it was a parody. In every case, it was valuable.

​​To read the adventures of Bond Jebakovic, secret agent, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/once-upon-a-time/

Reader asks me how to read faster and retain the information

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I’ve been busy the last few days. Whenever I’m busy, I default to writing these emails in the easiest possible way. In my case, that’s emails about interesting or valuable ideas I’ve read somewhere.

Today, I have a bit more time, so I can indulge in writing an email that doesn’t come so easy to me, the Q&A email. A reader wrote in with a question last night, following my email yesterday:

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This was very insightful, you somehow always send an email related to something I’m trying to improve at the moment, thank you.

In the context of Reading, what strategy would YOU recommend to read faster and retain the information?

Will be trying the mentioned focus on the subtlety and easy to miss. details.

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My 100% serious answer:

If you want to read faster and retain the information, my best recommendation is to read slow.

​​It’s what I do. It helps that I read very slowly by nature, almost at a 5-year-old’s pace. But these days, I even encourage myself in it.

Reading slowly is how I always have lots of interesting ideas that I read somewhere that I can throw into an email if I’m rushed for time. Actually, it’s reading slowly, and taking lots of hand-written notes — of things that surprised me, made me smile, or reminded me of something else I had been reading.

Like the following, said once by a man often called the world’s greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga. Gary was talking about how he researches a book that he will then write a sales package for:

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You almost have to read a sentence, and think about it. Read another sentence. “Is there any possible drop of juice I could squeeze from this orange to turn it into marketing enticement in some way?” Don’t let a single paragraph go by without pausing. You don’t want to just race through it. Give it a lot of time, and think about each thing you’re looking at.

===
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Gary said that during his farewell seminar, which cost $5k to attend back in 2006, and the same large amount if you wanted to get the recordings.

Gary could charge that much money for a seminar because of his status — the results he had gotten, the endorsements from top people in the industry.

But there was another reason Gary could charge that much for his knowledge and experience. And that’s scarcity.

Gary never attended conferences. He never got up on stage to give talks. He almost never gave interviews.

In fact, I know of only two interviews Gary ever gave. One of those is with Ken McCarthy, and you have to join Ken’s System Club to get it. The other was a 6-part interview with A-list copywriter Clayton Makepeace, which was available for free on Clayton’s website until Clayton died and the website shut down.

If you take a bit of time and trouble, you can go on the Internet Archive and dig up all 6 parts of this interview. Or you can take me up on my offer today.

Because I’ve gone on the Internet Archive previously, and downloaded all 6 parts for my own files. If you’d like me to share them with you, write in, tell me which book or books you’re reading right now, and I’ll reply with the Gary B/Clayton MP interview.

A tip for deeper concentration and faster learning

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I’ve watched maybe a dozen presentations or seminars by marketing great Dan Kennedy. Dan will often poll the room.

“How many of you read fiction?”

People raise their hands and stare at Dan. “You’d be better off looking around the room at what other people are doing,” Dan will often say.

I took Dan’s lesson to heart.

At the copywriting conference I attended a couple weeks ago, I made a point to look around the room repeatedly, throughout each presenter’s talk. How was the audience reacting? I learned some valuable things. Plus it helped me stay focused.

Other times, when speakers were speaking, I took notes. But not of the “how to” information the speakers were sharing. Instead, I took notes of the claims they were making, the language they were using.

“I’m not looking for clients… I’m looking for success stories.”

There were some hot seats during the conference as well. Trevor “Toe Cracker” Crook picked a copywriter at random out of the audience.

This copywriter didn’t really have a clear problem to solve, but there she was in the hot seat. For the next 15 minutes, seven high-powered, highly paid success coaches went around in circles, trying to identify and then solve a problem that didn’t really exist.

During this time, much of the audience slumped to sleep. I managed to stay awake, and not just because of the three coffees I’d had in the previous two hours. I was taking notes again, of the language the hot seat sitter was herself using:

“I guess I just want confirmation. I want somebody to tell me, ‘Your work is great. You should get paid more. You should work less.'”

That could go directly into a sales letter. And besides, it helped me stay focused, awake, interested in the actual experience of sitting in a chair and listening for hours.

This is something I learned once in a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, by a guy named Tim Gallwey.

I long had prejudices against this book, because I assumed it was all about mindset. “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, you deserve to win tennis matches!”

But that’s not what this book is about at all. I was so pleasantly surprised as I read it. It’s full of practical tips, like the following:

“The most effective way to deepen concentration is to focus on something subtle, not easily perceived.”

The usual tennis coaching advice, if you’ve ever tried playing the stupid sport, is to “watch the ball.”

Most people manage to stick to that behavior for a few seconds, then their eyes wander. That’s why it takes people months or even years before they can reliably hit a tennis ball over the net and into the court.

Gallwey didn’t tell his students to watch the ball. He told them to keep their eye on the spin of the seams on the tennis ball. That’s how he managed to teach people to play serviceable tennis in 30 minutes or less.

And that’s what I was trying to do at that conference also. I wasn’t paying attention. I was focusing on specific, subtle, easy-to-miss things. The reactions of the audience. Repeated words or phrases by the speaker. Sales letter fodder from the hot seat sitter, rather than overt problems.

If you’re looking for deeper concentration, or help with learning anything, maybe this tip can help you also.

And if you want more learning and performance tips, Gallwey’s book has ’em.

Like I said, I was so pleasantly surprised by this book. If you haven’t read it yet, my experience is that it’s worth a read. And it’s worth keeping an eye out for every time Gallway uses the word “rhythm.” Get your copy here:

https://bejakovic.com/inner-game

Why the bathroom is a great place to negotiate

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I walked to the beach this morning. People were out jogging. Others were going into the sea. Some were playing with their dogs. And there I was, listening to a course by negotiation coach Jim Camp, and taking notes on my phone.

“One of the things I like to do is negotiate in the bathroom,” Camp says. “It’s a great place to negotiate.”

To me that sounded like the usual contrary and shocking Camp material. But this one is surprisingly straightforward.

“When are people most exposed?” Camp asks. “I’m not talking about their physical parts. I’m talking about, when are they most relaxed, in their mind? When do they open their mind? When are they most exposed? ‘Well, the fight’s off. Now I’m free to go to the restroom.’ As they go to the restroom, you ask them a question. They’ll answer. They smile, and they answer the question. It’s a great time to do research.”

That’s a good tip for when you negotiate. Or for when you do magic.

Because this is the same exact idea described in a book I read not long ago, by a guy named Gary Kurtz, about the use of misdirection in stage magic.

Kurtz has a name for this bathroom phenomenon. He calls it the off-beat. The off-beat is the relaxation, the lull in attention that happens when the audience thinks the magic trick is over. That’s when the actual sleight-of-hand is done.

I’m thinking of writing a new book. I don’t have a title yet. Maybe I will call it, “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Cult Leaders, Copywriters, Door-To-Door Salesmen, NLP Trainers, Storytellers, Professional Negotiators, and Stage Magicians.”

The topic would be core ideas I’ve picked up from a bunch of far-flung fields, which are actually all the same field – one that’s all about controlling attention, heightening emotions, guiding people to an outcome.

I’m only thinking about this book right now. But if you have any input you’d like to give me — stories you think I can include, other fields I didn’t think of, specific techniques you have in mind — hit reply and let me know.

​​I don’t have anything to promise you in return, except my gratitude, and an acknowledgement in the book if I ever do put it out. Thanks in advance.

I’m good at writing stories, hate writing personal stories, and found a new way to look at it

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I spent a good amount of time just now, thinking up and then discarding 10 alternate angles to start this email about personal stories. The fact it took me so long and I still got nothing proves the point I’m trying to get at:

It’s easy to write stories. It’s hard to write personal stories. At least write ’em well.

But what does that mean?

I’ve written thousands of stories, in the context of this newsletter, in sales emails for clients, in Facebook ads, advertorials, sales letters.

Many of those stories were written well, in the sense that people read them, and were then hypnotized — they became open to suggestion and influence.

Most of those thousands of stories involved my clients, or were retold horror stories I’d found online, and one was about Benito Mussolini, and what happened to his corpse after he died.

But out of those thousands of stories, some were also personal stories, featuring me. Some of those personal stories I managed to write well. Some not. I never knew why.

Because of this, I always felt an extra level of confusion, resistance, and doubt whenever I have to tell a personal story. “Is this a good story? Should I include this bit? Is it relevant? Is it interesting? Am I just including it for the sake of ego? Is it irrelevant to the story but somehow important on another level?”

Today I was reading an old issue of the New Yorker. I came across an article, written by Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, about the challenges of ghost writing a memoir for Prince Harry.

“No thank you,” I said immediately, and was ready to turn the page.

But I have this rule that whenever an article seems utterly repulsive to me, I force myself to read it. And good thing I did. I came across the following passage.

The ghostwriter was fighting with Prince Harry over a detail in a story. The prince wanted the detail included. The ghostwriter didn’t. The prince insisted, because this detail showed an important bit of his character. To which the ghostwriter said, “So what?” And he explained:

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Strange as it may seem, memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people, and at this point in the story those people don’t need to know anything more than that your captors said a cruel thing about your mom.

===

I found way of looking at personal stories insightful. I mean, this is what I’ve always done instinctively when writing stories about other people. But it’s something I could never put my finger on when writing stories about myself.

And I’m only telling you I found this insightful because maybe you too have found it frustrating to write personal stories in the past, and maybe you will find this new way of looking at personal stories insightful also.

There were other valuable things that prince Harry’s ghostwriter said, which might be useful to you, whether you’re trying to bring to life your own personal stories, or whether you too work as a ghostwriter. In case you are curious:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/15/j-r-moehringer-ghostwriter-prince-harry-memoir-spare

Guy rebuffs my attempt at cross-promotion

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A report from the trenches:

I’m working on growing my health email newsletter, which I launched a few months ago.

One part of what I’m doing is reaching out to other newsletters to offer to cross-promote. I’ve been contacting newsletters of a similar size to mine, who share some common elements with mine:

– sent out weekly
– news-related
– “proven” — make an emphasis on providing references or sources
– is made up of actual paragraphs of text that people read, rather than just a collection of links

I’ve had a few people take me up on my cross-promotion offer. But one guy, whose weekly newsletter is for people who want to “stay on top of the current issues and that like to read more than just bulletpoints,” was not interested in my offer. He wrote me to say:

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I don’t think this partnership would work out, basically because I’ve done it before and the clicks were very, very low. Also, I don’t think there’s a great overlap in the content of our two newsletters.

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As Dan Kennedy might say about that first reason, if we all stopped doing something if the first time was a fail, the human race would soon die out. There’d be no more babies born.

But what about that other reason? About content overlap?

It’s very sensible to only sell competitive duck herding products to competitive duck herding enthusiasts.

But most offers are not that one-dimensional.

The “world’s greatest list broker,” Michael Fishman, was once tasked with finding new lists to promote an investment newsletter.

Michael suggested a list of buyers of a product called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. The publisher of the investment newsletter said, “We’ve tried golf lists before, they don’t work for us.”

Michael said, “No problem. It’s not a golf list. Think about who would buy a book called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. I don’t care if it’s Big Money Pro Flower Secrets. Anybody who would respond to that language is somebody whose door we want to knock on.”

Point being, if you have something that’s not as narrow in appeal as duck herding, there are many dimensions along which you can expand your market, beyond the obvious topic or content or promise of what you’re selling. ​

​ By the way, Michael Fishman is somebody worth listening to. I’ve read and watched and listened to everything I could find online by the guy. I make a habit of occasionally searching the Internet to see if anything new has cropped up.

If you want a place to start, here’s a great interview that Michael Fishman did with Michael Senoff of Hard to Find Seminars:

https://www.hardtofindseminars.com/Michael_Fishman_Interview.htm

Is this the most immoral email ever written?

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Or is it the most sensible, the most practical, the most revolutionary thing you will read today?

To find out, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Is your business or career a source of annoyance or frustration instead of a source of pleasure and fulfillment?

2. Have you become tense and irritable because of the incessant, nagging demands made upon you by others?

3. Do you remember my email from last week, the one where I had a little story from Drayton Bird, about how he and Gene Schwartz independently wrote the exact same ad headline, word-for-word?

Well I tracked that ad down. By the tone of it, I guess it’s the Gene Schwartz version.

This ad sells a book — “the most immoral book ever written?” — which was initially published in 1937, then went through a lot of reprints, then went out of print, and was finally resurrected in the 1960s by Gene for his mail-order book-selling empire. Gene is still supposed to be the guy who has sold the most books by mail in history.

I invite you to check out the full ad on the page below. If, after 10 days, you do not believe that Gene Schwartz’s masterful cold reads can dramatically transform your marketing, you may return the ad and owe nothing. Otherwise I will bill you for $0.00 plus postage. Click the link below and then read the page that opens up:

https://bejakovic.com/most-immoral