Day 2 at a copywriting conference starts in bed

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Last night, I slept through the night. I don’t remember the last time I slept through the night.

But yesterday I was exhausted. It was day 1 of a copywriting and marketing conference I’m attending.

It’s been a strange experience. The talks are interesting. The people are nice and smart and many are very successful.

But yesterday afternoon, when it was time for the second coffee break — the fourth networking opportunity of the day to that point — I had to leave and just go out for a walk and get away. So much listening and talking in such a short space.

All in all, I counted 12 hours of strenuous ear or mouth work yesterday. That’s why I managed to sleep through the night.

In another half hour, it will be time to start the second day.

I still have to shower. I have to get dressed. And I have to rouse whatever socializing energy is left in me for the morning coffee. It’s not the coffee that will require an effort but the inevitable socializing.

Since there isn’t much time, let me quickly tell you the best thing I heard during yesterday’s talks.

Well, really the best thing was listening to Drayton Bird, who is 87, but who was so full of energy and charm and stories — “…and then Gene Schwartz asked me to show him my headline. He showed me his. They were identical…”

Those kinds of stories were really the highlight.

But the best takeaway I heard came from business owner Barry Randall. Barry is apparently renowned for getting things done. So much so that A-list copywriter John Carlton has apparently invented a “Barry Quotient,” which I guess is defined as the fraction of good ideas you implement over the good ideas you hear about.

How does Barry maintain a super high Barry Quotient? One thing he said, which stuck with me, is:

“Simple ALWAYS gets done”

Maybe you shrug. Maybe you say that’s obvious and nothing new. It sounded profound to me. But maybe that’s because I heard it live. And maybe that’s really the advantage of a live event over an email or paper newsletter, even if they share the exact same ideas or strategies.

In any case, this simple email must end here. But if you want to read more simple advice, read my 10 Commandments book.

​​I’ve worked hard to make the simple advice in that book sound profound and impactful, even though it’s just a book, and not a live person talking to you.

Will any of the 10 pieces of advice in this book sound profound or impactful to you? Only one way to find out:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Curious quirk at a copywriting conference

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“So what do you do?” she asked me.

“Nothing much,” I said.

The cheerful English woman laughed. “But seriously, what do you do?”

I shrugged. “I write. Like everybody else here.”

Her eyes got wide. “But I don’t write anything!”

Last night, I spent a bizarre two hours, standing around with a glass of sparkling water and a plate of little croissants in my hands, talking to anybody who passed within arms reach of me.

I would start a conversation by saying, “Hello, I’m John.” And then I would try to keep that conversation going as long as I could without saying anything about copywriting, marketing, or sales funnels.

Inevitably though, everybody I talked to revealed they are a copywriter within a minute or two.

“I write for a supplement company.” “Oh I work for the Motley Fool.” “I’m in the prepper niche.”

It’s not surprising the restaurant was filled with copywriters. After all, it’s a copywriting and direct marketing conference I am attending.

When I asked people why they are here, many of them said it’s because A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos is giving a talk. Indeed, there was Parris, working the room and chatting with everyone. He had on a colorful shirt. “It’s a Robert Graham,” Parris said. “I put his kids through college.”

At some point, I realized there were two tablefuls of people that had not gotten up during the whole night. I hadn’t talked to anybody from either table. So I went over to one, and asked if I could join.

“Sure,” said the cheerful English woman.

We talked for a while about her Staffordshire bull terriers (9 of ’em!) and about the best years of her life (moving around in a camper van).

And then she asked me what I do. I tried to dodge the question. But eventually, I had to reveal that I too write. She said she doesn’t.

That was my first clue to a curious fact, which became revealed as the night went on.

For some reason, all the copywriters were standing around the bar and buffet. All the business owners were seated at the two tables, and they weren’t budging.

Maybe the copywriters are hungry, and the business owners are not?

Or maybe it was just a quirk of last night?

In any case, if you ever do attend a copywriting conference, and you’re a hungry copywriter looking for work — not my current situation, thank God — then keep this possible quirk in mind. And gravitate to the tables where nobody seems willing to budge.

It’s 8:07am as I write this. In another 10 minutes, the conference is supposed to start. I will be there exactly on time, because I’m hoping for coffee.

Which means it’s time for me to go. ​​

Meanwhile, if you want to read something that I learned from the great Parris Lampropoulos — perhaps the best thing I’ve learned from him — you can find that in Commandment II of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. The book is hiding on Amazon, unwilling to budge from its spot. But if you’re willing to go to it:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

I finally got my first 1-star review

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A few days ago, Amazon started showing Goodreads average ratings for books, right next to average Amazon ratings.

I know this because I have a book on Amazon, called 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. And every so often, I check how the book is doing.

The Amazon rating for my 10 Commandments book has held steady at an average 4.6 rating, based on 51 reviews. But thanks to the new change, I just found out my Goodreads rating is lower, just 4.45, based on 22 ratings.

I went to see what’s up.

It turns out I’ve gotten my first-ever 1-star review on Goodreads.

The review is written in Serbian, which once upon a time was the same language as my native Croatian. In other words, it’s a language I know quite well.

So here’s what that 1-star review says, as translated by BejakoGPT into English:

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This book is more like a big ad for copywriters that the author chose as examples. It’s full of outdated tricks and the author openly praises several truly miserable writing tactics — for example, Sugarman’s tossing out a hook to readers about how a female client in a miniskirt came to see him, and he, poor guy, is married and is uncomfortable. And as for what happened next, you’ll find out if you keep reading. Seriously?

Besides this, the author is impressed how Gene Schwartz made a pile of money in the 1950s and bought a penthouse while writing ads for only 3 hours a day. Knock knock, 2022 is calling and it wants to know, are you for real?

Beyond that I won’t comment on the uncreative direct response tricks which were cheesy even in the 50s, I cringe at those texts. (“Did you catch that? We started out talking about clever ways doctors keep from getting the common cold. Now we’re talking about preventing cancer and Alzheimer’s. […] That’s a giant claim. Very likely, it would sound like hype if it came right in the headline. That’s why it takes an A-list copywriter like Parris to hold off on making this claim. He waits long enough that he can be sure his reader will believe him.” WHAT THE ACTUAL…)

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“Seriously? Are you for real? WHAT THE ACTUAL…” To me those sound like the arguments of a 14-year-old, indignant about her 10pm curfew.

No sense in bickering with a teenager.

Fortunately, several adults have also read my book. Some of them have even written reviews. Right below the 1-star review by the 14-year-old, I got a 5-star review by an adult:

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A great book for experienced copywriters who are looking for a quick refresher on the different styles with many examples from copywriting legends.

I’m subscribed to Bejakovic’s emails – and while I’ll admit I rarely check my inbox, I did happen to come across this one advertising this book, and I’m glad I did.

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And right below that one, I got a 4-star review, also by an adult:

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Short and very pertinent. Loaded with the names of hugely successful giants of the copywriting world and the titles of their successful books. I read the book on Kindle and highlighted many great bits of advice and the names of the great writers sharing advice. If you write ad copy for a living or hope to do so, buy this book.

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Knock knock.

2023 is calling.

It wants to know, do you have a copy of my 10 Commandments book yet?

If you don’t, you can get one, and all the cheesy and outdated tricks inside it, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Why I would write daily emails even if they made zero money

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I just sent some feedback to one of my one-on-one coaching students about his email copy.

The core of his email is good. But parts of it are flowery, too clever, confusing.

​​So I told him to make the email simpler and clearer, more direct and less clever. And I rewrote parts of his copy to show him exactly what I mean.

I then sat down to write my own email.

​​I also have a tendency to get clever and confusing. The advice I gave my coaching student applies to me also. So I’m writing this email right now with this exact goal in mind, to make my copy simple and clear.

One of the big benefit of coaching others is to see consistent problems and mistakes across multiple people. This forces you to figure out what the underlying problem is, and what the fix might be. Odds are, these insights will apply to you as well, at least if you also do what you coach others to do.

The bigger picture is the benefit of teaching.

H​​elping others learn makes you better also.

I have changed and become much, much better at persuasion, marketing, and copywriting via writing daily emails about those topics for close to five years.

​​I’ve been forced to seek out interesting and valuable new ideas. I’ve been forced to understand them better, to connect them to other ideas. I remember all these ideas much better, and I sometimes I even remember to use them, by writing about them over and over and trying to present them clearly.

All that’s to say:

There’s great value in teaching what you’ve learned, way beyond the money you make and beyond any positive feedback you might get.

​​A daily email newsletter just happens to be an easy and natural format to do it in.

If you’re interested in learning more about persuasion, marketing, and copywriting, you can sign up to my daily newsletter here. I occasionally sell my courses and coaching through my newsletter. But I would write it even if I never sold anything.

I thought “fake news” was stupid but this is not

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A few weeks ago, I was reading an article about Ozempic, the diabetes drug that celebs are using to lose weight quick and easy. The article appeared in the New Yorker, which is not ashamed of its left-leaning proclivities.

One of the points in the article is that the main harm from obesity is negative perception both by doctors and obese people. In other words, it’s not the fat that’s the real problem.

​​To make its point, the article used the following statistics sleight-of-hand, which put a smile on my face:

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A recent study examined subjects’ B.M.I.s in relation to their blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and insulin resistance. Nearly a third of people with a “normal” B.M.I. had unhealthy metabolic metrics, and nearly half of those who were technically overweight were metabolically healthy. About a quarter of those who were classified as obese were healthy, too.

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A few years ago, there was a lot of fuss over fake news. I always thought that fuss was stupid. Predictably, it has passed now.

I’m not advising anyone to write fake news or to make up stuff.

But you can and in fact you must spin. You must twist facts and figures, cherry pick quotes and stories, and direct and misdirect your readers’ attention at every step.

Not only to make your point, like in that “metabolically unhealthy” quote above.

But also to give people what they want. I mean, I read the New Yorker because I find the articles interesting and horizon-expanding. But I also read it because I enjoy agreeing with the writers’ points of view, and I enjoy even more disagreeing with their point of view.

I hope I’ve managed to get you to disagree with at least some of the points I’ve made in this email.

But if I’ve just managed to make you agree, I’ll have to settle for that today. Tomorrow, I’ll work to do better.

That’s the beauty of writing a daily email. You have a chance to constantly get better at influencing your audience, and to make your case anew, and to get people to agree or disagree with you. If you want to keep agreeing or disagreeing with me, starting tomorrow, you can sign up to my daily email newsletter here.

If you consider yourself a paid traffic expert

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If you consider yourself to be something of a paid traffic expert, or you want to be seen as such, I’ve got a lead gen/business idea for you.

​​I’m giving away this idea. You’re free to use it. In fact, I hope you do.

Here goes:

1. Start a newsletter. Call it “Classified Growth” or something sexy like that.

2. Go around, finding other newsletters that sell classified ads. There are hundreds or thousands of such newsletters, but they are not organized, and they often do not make it known they sell ads. You might have to email them and ask or suggest it.

By the way, I’m not talking about big featured ads like you can find inside Morning Brew, which have a big photo and hundreds of words of copy, and which are really intended for rich brand advertisers. Databases of newsletters offering those kinds of ads already exist.

​​I’m talking about small, classified-like ads, 100 words max, no picture, which can be integrated into the content of a newsletter, which are likely to cost a few hundred to maybe a thousand or so dollars, and which are perfect for advertising to get dedicated newsletter readers. As far as I know, there’s no source to tell you where to find those.

3. Each week, send out a new issue of your newsletter. Publish the latest classified ad opportunities you’ve found, and link to a page where you keep a running list of all the previous classified ad opportunities you’ve found.

4. Add in a little intro paragraph to each issue with your own voice so people know who you are. Casually mention any status-building things that happened to you or to your newsletter over the past week.

5. To grow your newsletter, do a good job implementing 1-4 above for four weeks, then email me and I will promote your newsletter to my list for free. I’ll also give you the contacts of 10 other people with sizable email lists who are likely to promote your new newsletter for free.

6. After you start getting people onto your newsletter, to monetize, sell your own consulting services or products or community, or sell ads, or sell affiliate offers.

The cons of this:

You’re likely to attract people who are at the early stage of newsletter growth. This means they are unproven and uncommitted — they might fail or quit.

​​And if they do succeed, they are likely to outgrow your newsletter and focus on other newsletter growth strategies that are easier to scale. That’s why I say this makes sense if you want to offer services or products around paid traffic and can use this as a lead-gen method.

The pros:

There is clearly demand. I would subscribe and read this newsletter each week, and others would too.

​​There are literally thousands of people with newsletters hoping to grow, and hundreds more joining every day. And since we’re talking about paid traffic, you’re likely to attract a serious segment of that audience, who might even have some money to spend.

So that’s my business idea for you. Again, I hope you run with it, because I would love to see it happen.

I’m currently working on growing two newsletters — the one you’re reading, and a second one that’s still in a bit of stealth mode, about a health topic.

In the past, to grow various newsletters I’ve had or have, I’ve run Facebook ads, solo ads, Twitter ads, paid “recommendations” like they have on Substack, banner ads, and classified ads in other newsletters.

The classified ads in other newsletters win in terms of quality of traffic.

The problem is, classified ads take time and are not scalable, but a resource like the one I describe above could help.

​​At the same time, it could help you build your own list, quickly, with highly qualified and valuable leads, that you could then monetize into submission.

Speaking of which, if you do launch the above newsletter, you’re likely to have more success selling your services or products if you drive your readers to a second, daily email newsletter like the one I write each day.

If you’d like to see how I do that each day, so you can model what I’m doing to make money, you can sign up to my newsletter here.​

Clicks of the dial

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Another day, another Airbnb.

​​Today I am in Warsaw, Poland because it was one of the few places in central Europe that won’t be raining for the next five days. And five days is how much time I have until I go to Gdansk for my first-ever live event to do with marketing and copywriting.

This morning, I woke up, carefully stepped down the circular staircase from the second floor of the apartment to the ground floor, located the inevitable Nespresso machine, popped in a capsule, and made myself a coffee.

And you see where this is going, don’t you?

If you have anything to do with marketing, you should. It’s a basic topic, so basic that I in fact wrote about it in the first month of this newsletter, back in September 2018.

The same marketing model is shared by Nespresso, by King Gillette’s safety razors-and-blades empire, and by info publishers like Agora and Ben Settle. They all promise you almost-irresistible sign-up premiums in order to get you paying for a continuity offer.

You almost certainly know this. Many people have talked about the same. It’s obvious. I won’t belabor the point.

Yesterday, I promised to tell the bigger point behind such models — models which might seem obvious, when somebody else points them out to you.

There’s a document floating around the Internet, legendary marketer Gary Halbert’s “Clicks of the Dial.”

It’s a collection of Gary’s “Most Treasured ‘First-Choice’ Marketing Tactics.”

I read this document once. I even shared a link to it in this newsletter last year.

But I never really got much out of Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” list. I doubt the hundreds or thousands of my readers who downloaded Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” got much out of it either.

That’s because there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, reading, nodding your head, and saying “hmm good idea”… and, on the other hand, observing, thinking a bit, and writing down your own conclusions.

So my point to you today is to open a new text file on your hard drive. Title it “Clicks of the Dial.” Break it up into three columns to start.

Name one column “traffic.” Name the second “conversion.” Name the third “consumption.”

And then, each time you go for a coffee, or a bagel, or a haircut, observe an obvious business or marketing practice you’re exposed to. Odds are, it’s been proven in hundreds or thousands of different situations. “Chunk up” that practice to make a model out of it. And write it down in your list in the appropriate column.

Gary Halbert’s entire “Clicks of the Dial” list was something like 20 items.

In other words, it won’t take you long to fill up your own “Clicks of the Dial” document to full.

​​Very soon, you can have a list of core business and marketing strategies, that you can cycle through, and solve pretty much any marketing problem by clicking the dial.

​​And since you put this list together yourself, based on your own experiences, it will actually mean something to you. Eventually, you might even appear to others to be a marketing jeenius like Gary himself.

As for me, it’s time to go get a brownie. I have a long list of food recommendations for what to eat in Warsaw, but only a limited amount of time and stomach space to do so.

Meanwhile, if you have no more interest in reading anything from me, because you’ve determined to learn all of marketing and copywriting by observation and thinking, there is nothing more I can tell you, except farewell and good luck. On the other hand, if you do want to hear from me every day, with more ideas and occasional inspiration, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Free chocolate traffic and distribution model

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Yesterday morning, my friend Sam and I were sitting at a cafe terrace that hangs over the waters of Lake Lucerne. We were getting a coffee while waiting for a boat to take us down the lake, to the bottom of a big mountain, which we would attempt to scale.

Of course, this being Switzerland, we each got a little chocolate next to our coffees. Well, I got a chocolate, but for some unfair reason, Sam got two.

Our three little chocolates were all the same size. Later, at much higher altitude, we would find out they were also the same flavor. But each of the three chocolates had a slightly different design on the wrapper.

One was light blue and had a picture of a locomotive. That chocolate was advertising a “guest house and games paradise.”

The second chocolate was white with an elegant font. That was advertising a rentable space to hold events.

The third chocolate was also white but a bit more flashy in its font. That was advertising a “shopping restaurant.”

Since my mind has been entirely warped by thinking and writing about marketing every day, I noticed this and I thought about the underlying model. It’s this:

1. Take an expense for other businesses (for cafes, little chocolates next to each coffee)

2. Provide that thing for free both in terms of cost and effort and risk (the chocolate tasted good, and the design was classy)

3. Use the thing for traffic/distribution/advertising for your a product or service of your own choosing (“gasthof und spielparadies” on the wrapper)

You might say this is nothing special or unusual. But you can get creative.

For example, many people used to pay a few dollars a day to read the Wall Street Journal (1). Then some guys made a free email newsletter with the most important news of the past 24 hours (2). In between the news segments they also put in ads (3). The result was Morning Brew, which sold a controlling stake for $75 million a couple years ago.

Back in the Barcelona supermarket I go to, you can get free bubble gum (1 and 2) at the store, along with various other small items, if you download an app that tracks you and serves you ads for other products (3).

Then there’s the offer I made a couple months ago, to help businesses add in a “horror advertorial” into their cold traffic funnel for free (2) — a service I would normally charge a lot of money for (1) — if they would also insert an email into their welcome sequence to promote my new newsletter (3).

And finally, there’s an idea I’m planning for the future, to offer syndicated content (1) to businesses for free (2), as a means of advertising that same new newsletter I’m working on (3).

In other words, this simple little chocolate idea has broad applicability when you start to think about it.

But there’s a bigger point, too.

The bigger point is— well, I will talk about that tomorrow. No sense in jamming two good ideas into one email.

I’m approaching the Zurich airport as I write this. It’s time to leave this rainy but beautiful country. The train I’m on will be six minutes late in arriving, and the conductor just came alive on the PA to announce that shocking delay and to apologize in German, Italian, and English.

If you want to read my email tomorrow when it comes out, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Email coaching for sale

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When doctors go on strike, patient deaths either stay the same or go down. Such was the conclusion of a 2008 literature review by four professors of public health at Emory University.

The scientists looked at the results of five doctors’ strikes from 1976 to 2003.

​​They found that in the absence of doctors, deaths never went up, but often went down.

You can interpret that how you will. I know how I will interpret it, and it’s to tell you that when copywriters go on strike, sales either stay the same or go up.

Well, of course not every time. But in many situations, getting tricky with your messaging, optimizing for the sophistication of your market, or being clever and indirect actually harms rather than helps your sales.

One of the most successful of all copywriters, Gary Bencivenga, summed it up as the “duck for sale principle.” Gary wrote:

“If you are trying to sell a duck, don’t beat about the bush with a headline such as, ‘Announcing a special opportunity to buy a white-feathered flying object.’ You’ll get much better results with, ‘DUCK FOR SALE.'”

If you would like my guidance and help writing emails, which don’t need to be complicated or take a lot of time to get you results, I will soon have email copywriting coaching for sale. The only way to join it is to be on my email list first. You can sign up for that here.

Reader hopes I can understand why he unsubscribed

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My email yesterday got a high number of unsubscribes. The normal is 1 or 2 but yesterday’s email got 5. One unsubscriber wrote:

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I do LOOOVEEE the emails and I just want them to keep coming ALWAYS. But the thing is I’ve subscribed to A LOT of lists already and I’m consuming a lot of content than I should. In fact, I’m at the point where I’m inches away from getting the infamous “information overload”. So most of the time I just skip some emails to let my brain rest. Unfortunately, very very unfortunately, I have to let your email list go (FOR NOW). But I need to get those emails in the future so kindly don’t put me on your blacklist. It’s temporary. Hope you can understand.

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Here’s a free and valuable email marketing tip:

Don’t apologize. Don’t explain yourself. Don’t hedge or flip-flop.

Email is a wonderful medium because you can control any neediness you might feel.

​​You can be however you are in real life. You can even write like that. But then you can take a moment to distance yourself from what you’ve written to cut out any unasked-for apologies, waffling, or attempts to lessen the insult that your message wasn’t going to cause anyhow.

As for the guy above, he has been placed on a blacklist. Not out of any malice. Active Campaign does it automatically whenever somebody unsubscribes.

I used to occasionally go in and purge that blacklist so unsubscribed readers could get back on my list if they so choose.

​​I don’t bother any more. I do get on occasion somebody writing to me to say they signed up but are not getting my emails, in which case I will add them by hand.

Famed negotiation coach Jim Camp used to say negotiation is a series of decisions. You can’t tell people anything. The only thing you can do is help them see and decide for themselves.

My email yesterday got a high number of unsubscribes. I’m sending a new email today because you only ever get people off your list when you a send a new email. You also only ever get people reading and opting in and PayPaling you money when you send a new email.

Negotiation is a series of decisions. You can only send people emails to help them make those decisions for themselves. ​​If that’s something you can see for yourself, you might decide to start applying it. You certainly don’t need my help to do it. But in case you want it, you can sign up for my email list here.