Archive - Page 121 of 262

My highlights and lowlights of the past twelve months

December 31, 2022 by John Bejakovic

2022 has been a year of changes and upheavals for me.

I’ve lived in three countries this year, and moved around 8 apartments.

Back in February, I hit my lowest point in possibly the last two decades, or maybe longer. And yet, 2022 as a whole has been an unequivocal improvement over 2021.

I worked with more zeal this year than ever before in my life. But the most satisfaction I’ve gotten this year is by repeatedly asking myself, “What if I never achieve anything more, what if I never succeed in changing my life in any substantive way?”

Back in January, I jokingly self-diagnosed myself as having a “temporal lobe personality,” after reading the book Phantoms in the Brain.

A few days after that, I discovered I can manifest a stolen license plate simply by the use of imagination.

I’ve settled more or less permanently in Barcelona. I went back to school to study Spanish. I’ve even furnished my beautiful new apartment with some forks and spoons so I don’t have to eat canned sardines with my fingers.

Maybe you’re wondering what I’m on about. The fact is, I’ve written emails over the past 12 months about most of this stuff.

I’ve lived a strange, irregular, and changeable life over the past 12 months, and really, for much longer than that. This daily email practice has been one of the few constants. And a positive one.

Almost exactly a year ago, pickup coach Tom Torero committed suicide. Tom used to say that picking up girls is therapy. Not because you get a momentary boost of validation when sleeping with a new girl. But rather because getting to that point forces you to face all kinds of things you have going on inside of yourself, and address them.

I feel the same about writing a daily email newsletter. It’s a kind of therapy journal, though I’ve worked to make it interesting and valuable for you as well.

So since you are reading, let me say thanks. Let’s see where I am in a year from now, and where you might be, and what I can show you in the meantime to make it worth your while. In the words of David Bowie, which are really the watchword for this entire project:

“The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”

In case you want to read my emails regularly, maybe even for the whole of the next year, here’s how to get on my daily email list.

The secret to better pizza, better emails

December 30, 2022 by John Bejakovic

Back in 2020, I reported on a saucy story involving Jack Trout.

Trout is one half of the team that wrote Positioning, which I still think is one of the best and most interesting books on marketing.

Once upon a time, Trout was in meeting with John Schnatter, the “papa” in Papa John’s Pizza.

Schnatter’s chain already had 1,000 locations around the country. But I guess he wanted more, and so he was talking to Trout.

Schnatter explained how Papa John’s makes pizza. “… and then we put the tomato sauce, which we get from Dino Cortopassi…”

“Hold up,” said Trout. “I know Dino. He doesn’t sell to chains. He only sells to small mom-and-pop shops. His stuff is fresh-packed and there’s not enough for chains. You’re telling you get your sauce from Dino?”

Schnatter nodded. A call to Dino himself confirmed it.

And so was born Papa John’s positioning:

“Better ingredients, better pizza.”

Is Papa John’s Pizza truly better? I can’t say. I’ve never had it. But the company grew five-fold in the years following the positioning change, and is worth some $3 billion today.

So let’s see how many billion I can make with the following positioning statement:

Better ingredients, better emails.

My claim is that, as for pizza, so for long-term marketing.

More interesting stories and more valuable ideas make for better emails. Independent of the copywriting pyrotechnics you invest in. Independent of the rest of your public persona, which builds you up into a legend worth listening to.

Maybe the fact that you are reading my email now, or have been reading my emails for a while, is proof of that.

But you gotta pay the piper somewhere.

Better ingredients for your emails are not free — free as in just sitting there in your head, right now, ready to be used.

The good news is, better ingredient are not hard to come by, and are not expensive.

They have been collected and sorted, organized and prepared for you, in low-cost receptacles known as books.

If you read the right books, you’re likely to find lots of interesting stories and lots of valuable ideas.

I had more to say on this topic. But I reserved that for people who are signed up to my email newsletter. If you are able to read, including books, then you might like to join my email newsletter as well. Click here to do so.

Marcus Aurelius, not Marcus Mansonius

December 29, 2022 by John Bejakovic

Came the following question after I revealed my 2022 reading list yesterday:

What did you think of Roadside Picnic?

I’ll answer, but only because the underlying idea is so valuable, or at least has been so to me.

Roadside Picnic a scifi novel written by two Soviet guys in 1971. I read it because it was the inspiration for the movie Stalker, which is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Both Stalker and the original Roadside Picnic talk about The Zone, a mysterious place that obeys its own dangerous and strange rules, and that grants you your ultimate wish if you can make it to the heart of the place.

Earlier this year, I planned to create a guide to the business side of copywriting called Copy Zone, using The Zone as an organizing conceit.

I knew all I needed about The Zone from the movie, but I decided to read the book because— well, because that’s the super valuable core idea:

If you find somebody whose writing or film or stand up comedy you like and respect, then follow any allusions they make or references they use.

If they talk about a book or science paper or inspirational talk that was influential to them, look it up and read it, watch it, listen to it while you wait for your waffles to toast.

More generally, go to the original source, or as close to it as you can stand.

You can call this basic principle, Marcus Aurelius, not Marcus Mansonius.

Mark Manson became a big star a few years ago when he wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

He then had to write an article, Why I Am Not a Stoic, in response to many people who accused him of simply taking ideas from stoic philosophers and regurgitating them as a light summer read, complete with a curse word in the title.

Mark Manson’s fun and easy and accessible book is good for Manson. But it’s not good for you, or it’s not good enough for you. At least the way I look at it.

I am personally not interested in stoicism. But if I were, I would go and read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and not The Subtle Art of Using “Fuck” in Your Title.

The way I see it, there’s value in sources that are old, difficult, or unpopular. You can even call it easy value.

Rather than having to come up with a shocking hot take on the exact same news that millions or billions of other people are discussing right this afternoon, you can get a new perspective, by digging into something that was written a few decades, a few centuries, or even a few millennia in the past.

Maybe you don’t agree with me. That’s fine.

But maybe you suspect I’m on to something. In that case, you might want to get on my email list. Partly to read the articles I write, and partly to keep an eye out for references and allusions I use, so you can look up these original sources yourself, and get a valuable new perspective that few other people around you have.

In case you’re interested, click here to sign up.

My miserable 2022 reading list

December 28, 2022 by John Bejakovic

Back in January 2021, I wrote about an ugly observation that James Altucher once made:

You have maybe 1000 books left in you to read, for the rest of your life. The math checks out.

After facing this ugly realization, I started keeping track of the books I’ve read, and how many per year I’ve read.

Turns out my math is even worse because I am such a slow reader. Over the past 12 months, I managed to finish just 18 books:

1. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea

2. Michael Masterson & John Forde’s Great Leads (re-read)

3. V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain

4. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic

5. William Shakespeare’s King Lear

6. Claude Levi-Strauss’s Myth and Meaning

7. Eric Hoffer’s True Believer

8. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

9. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, vol. 1

10. Claude Hopkins’s My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (re-read)

11. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

12. Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles

13. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

14. Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind

15. Joe Vitale’s There’s a Customer Born Every Minute

16. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything

17. John Cleese’s Creativity

18. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (re-read)

And that’s it. 12 months, hundreds of hours of daily reading, and yet, a miserable 18 books — and one of those was John Cleese’s Creativity, which weighs all of 90 pages.

At this sorry pace, I will have to live for another 56 years if I hope to reach Altuchers’ 1000 books.

Still, I better stop complaining, and I better keep my nose down and peeled to the inside of a book. I mean, what else is there?

There’s been a lot of agonizing lately whether AI is consuming the world. And it really might be.

It’s genuinely not clear to me whether anything you or I can write will be more interesting to people than what AI will produce, whether today or in a year’s time.

But one thing is clear to me:

And that’s your best shot at security.

If there is any way to prosper and profit, now and in the future, I figure it’s to think and to take action, to find or come up with new ideas, and to put those ideas into practice.

And the best way I know to prime that process is to read interesting books, to take notes of valuable things I come across, and to connect those to projects I’m working on.

Which brings me to my offer. It’s simply to sign up to my email list. I often share interesting ideas I come across in books with my newsletter readers.

Who knows, one of my emails might expose you to a new and insightful book you’d never have heard of otherwise, which might end up changing your life, or at the least, the success of your business.

In case you’d like to get my emails daily, click here, and fill out the form that appears.

Magic words

December 27, 2022 by John Bejakovic

A few days ago, I read a fascinating story by Yassine Meskhout, a public defender in some unnamed U.S. state.

Being a public defender is a dull job, says Meskhout. Mostly, you are defending people who are clearly guilty, and there’s nothing you can do.

Meskhout story was of one such defendant. This guy was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He was caught driving drunk, and not for the first time. He was then released on bail. As part of his probation, he had to wear a tracking ankle bracelet.

And then, the following hapened. From Meskhout’s article:

“The ankle bracelet company sends me an update a few days later. My client had visited their office, informed them that he intended to flee the country because he was scared of jail, then underscored his statement with a flourish by taking out a knife and cutting off the ankle bracelet in front of them.”

The bracelet guy had panicked. He immediately changed his mind about leaving the country. But it didn’t matter.

After this dramatic breaking of his probation conditions, it was highly likely this guy would get sent back to jail. And that’s not the worst part.

If he went back to jail, he would then be deported and never let back into the U.S. even though the rest of his family — his mother, wife, and children — were all there.

During the probation hearing, Meskhout made his best appeal. It didn’t work.

The judge decided the drunk driver would be sent back to jail. Case closed.

The defendant sat there without understanding. His mother started bawling in the background.

Meskhout stood up from his desk, his brain whirring. And right before the hourglass emptied down to the last grain, he blurted out these 11 magic words:

“Is there anything else the court would like to review to reconsider?”

The judge looked up from her glasses. She paused for moment. She flipped through the case file for a second. And she said:

“All right. Mr. Meskhout, I’ll go ahead and give him an opportunity. Since you have asked.”

In other words:

The defendant would not have to spend 180 days in jail. He would not be deported.

In an instant, his life went from being perfectly dark to being perfectly clear. The mother started bawling again, but this time from happiness.

Now put aside the question of the craziness of how the justice system operates, or who it decides to free and who to put through the meat mincer.

Instead, simply focus on the impact those 11 magic words had.

11 words, put together in the right way at the right moment, which absolutely changed the course of somebody’s life, in spite of overwhelming odds to the contrary.

That’s something to remember when you yourself are making offers or crafting appeals.

But let me take my own advice.

I’ve been promoting my Copy Riddles program for the past 7 days. After today, I won’t be promoting it for a while.

In case you haven’t bought Copy Riddles yet, let me ask you:

Is there anything else you would like to review to reconsider?

Like I say on the sales page, if you have any questions or doubts whether Copy Riddles is right for you, then write me and ask.

I don’t have a money-back guarantee. What I do have is a pretty stellar record of satisfied customers who have bought this program. I’d like to keep it that way.

So if you are on the fence, then write me and ask. I will answer your questions honestly, because I would rather not have you buy than buy and be disappointed.

And if you need a bit more of a push, I can tell you that round 14 of Copy Riddles is all about magic words.

Sprinkle these words into your appeals and offers to instantly boost response, without doing anything else.

You might know some of these words. But a few are sure to be a surprise. Perhaps a valuable surprise. In case you’d like to review this one more time:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

The old future of new newsletters

December 26, 2022 by John Bejakovic

I’m a regular reader of Simon Owen’s Tech and Media Newsletter — it’s an insightful rag. For example:

A few weeks ago, Owens wrote a piece about the future of new media startups, and what those will look like.

He made five predictions. One of those was “niche editorial products.”

Here’s a relevant bit from Owens’s article, where he is writing about Axios, a conglomerate of email newsletters (free and paid) that sold for a thumping $525 million back in August:

What most impressed me about the company was how it simultaneously managed to be a general interest news site while also funneling its audience into niche verticals, making it much easier for it to deliver highly targeted advertising and industry-specific subscription products.

In other words, Axios offers general and free newsletters on the front-end… and specific and expensive newsletters on the back end.

When you put it like that, this ain’t nothing new:

1. Write something like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Give it away for free or sell it for $0.46 on Kindle.

2. And then, to the people who bought the book, sell something like the Dale Carnegie Institute’s High Impact Presentations corporate training, which consists of two in-person sessions, and costs $2,195.

So Owens’s prediction might not be new, but it’s still a good reminder for each new generation and each new technology.

And it’s something I’m thinking about, especially in the context of email newsletters. If you have a highly niched offer, it might be something for you to think about also.

Meanwhile, let me remind you that this basic idea is not just about offers. The same idea actually applies to copywriting, marketing, and effective communication of all types.

In fact, everything I’ve just told you is related to “chunking up”, which is the first big and new copywriting insight I had by looking at the bullets of A-list copywriters.

The way I describe it inside my Copy Riddles program, “chunking up” allows you to expand your market 3x, 5x, or more.

Which goes to show:

Once you learn the essence of effective communication — once you learn to make interesting and attractive appeals — you can then apply that from a single sales bullet all the way up to the core structure of a $525-million business like Axios.

Perhaps you’re curious to learn more. Perhaps you want specific examples from print ads, video sales letters, and paperback books.

Perhaps you even want to practice chunking up yourself, so next time you try to get your message or offer across, it comes naturally.

You can do all that, and more, if you buy Copy Riddles, which I am currently selling. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Chameleon positioning

December 25, 2022 by John Bejakovic

If you are ever looking for political influence in a new country, or maybe just a new copywriting client, then the following might be valuable:

A few months ago, I wrote about Alkibiades, an Athenian politician and general who was the ancient world’s Donald Trump.

Alkibiades once cut off his own dog’s tail. The people of Athens were shocked and outraged at the cruelty. “Good,” said Alkibiades. “At least they aren’t talking about the really bad stuff I’ve done.”

Alkibiades switched allegiances several times. First he served Athens. Then Sparta. Then the Persian empire. Then back to Athens.

He did this 1) because he always became hated wherever he stayed for a while and 2) because he had an uncanny ability to become loved wherever he decided to move.

How?

How did Alkbiades, who was hated, envied, and despised wherever he stayed, become quickly loved wherever he moved?

Simple. He turned chameleon.

When Alkibiades moved from luxurious Athens to spartan Sparta, he dropped his personal chef, threw away his perfumes, and packed up his fancy clothes.

Instead, he started bathing in cold water, gnawing on dry Spartan bread, and forcing down the infamous Spartan black broth.

Pretty soon, the Spartans, who had initially been suspicious of Alkibiades and his allegiances, started to wonder that this man could ever have lived in decadent Athens, because he was so clearly a true Spartan at heart.

So there you go. Like I promised. The key to political influence in a new country — or to new client work, if that’s the kind of thing you’re after.

Perhaps you see exactly how to apply the story of Alkibiades to getting new client work. Perhaps you don’t.

In that case, you can look inside my Copywriting Portfolio Secrets, where I lay out and expand on this idea of chameleon positioning, and apply it to the hunt for new clients.

Chameleon positioning is how I won some of my longest-running, most profitable copywriting jobs — and I didn’t even have to become hated anywhere along the way.

But you might hate me for this:

Pretty soon, I will pull both of the free bonuses I currently offer with Copy Riddles, put a bow around them, and turn them into paid products.

For now though, you can still get both bonuses — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and Storytelling For Sales — for free.

You can get them for free if you get Copy Riddles, which, in case you are not overflowing with client work, is something you might want anyhow. As Vasilis Apostolou, formerly a senior copywriter at Agora, wrote after going through Copy Riddles:

I wish I had John’s bullet course when I was starting out. It would have saved me tons of frustration… and shaved months off my learning curve.

To save yourself some frustration, shave months off your learning curve, and find out how to win yourself new client work:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

It’s the thought that counts

December 27, 2022December 24, 2022 by John Bejakovic

I’ve been living in Barcelona for the past six months, and it’s been more or less normal until a few weeks ago.

That’s when Christmas prep started, and things got bizarre.

I’ll tell you just one bizarre thing, and that’s the appearance of the poop log.

The poop log – aka caga tió — is literally that:

An actual wooden log, propped up on two wooden sticks for arms, with painted-on googly white eyes and a big smile, wearing a traditional red hat, covered with a little blanket for warmth — and for privacy.

Yes, for privacy. Read on.

The poop log goes in homes. It’s a Catalan tradition, the equivalent of the Christmas stocking that goes above the mantel in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic traditions.

Every night, kids are supposed to “feed” the poop log with sweets and dried fruit to fatten it up.

Then, on Christmas Eve, kids hit the poop log with a stick — gently and lovingly — and sing it a threatening little song, which apparently translates to:

“Shit, log, shit nougats, hazelnuts and mató cheese, if you don’t shit well, I’ll hit you with a stick, shit, log!”

No, I poop you not, this is all for real.

The beating and singing complete, the poop log relieves itself, and children lift up the bulging red blanket in the back to find the usual mess — candies, small toys, and other things I prefer not to write about.

Catalans laugh and wave their arms to try to explain away the poop log. But really, there is no explaining.

There’s just the fact that, when it comes to most things humans do, it’s really the thought that counts.

I mean, without being too vulgar about it, here they’ve managed to take a log, and one that shits, and turn it into a kind of cute and heartwarming winter tradition that brings the family together.

If they can sell that, imagine what you can do.

And with that thought, let me wish you a merry Christmas.

And now let me lift up the bulging blanket in the back.

Because if you thought you could get to the tail end of this email, and avoid the usual mess — well, Christmas is no time to stop selling. But it’s the thought behind the selling that counts.

So in case you want your nougats, hazelnuts and copy riddles, dig in here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

I’ve written about this before, but you probably missed it

December 23, 2022 by John Bejakovic

This morning, I talked to a business owner who is interested in joining my email coaching program. Interested… but also wary.

“I was talking to my husband,” she told me. “And I realized, John writes good emails. But who is he? I don’t really know anything about him.”

About that:

I’ve been writing this email newsletter for four years. I’ve shared plenty of personal stories.

I’ve also shared plenty of specifics from my copywriting career — lessons learned, successes earned, endorsements spurned, like the one I wrote about yesterday.

And yet, people still don’t know almost anything about me. Because the problem is this:

I shared all those stories and successes and endorsements once, or twice, or maybe frice.

That ain’t enough.

So here’s my message to you. It’s a message I’ve shared before, multiple times. But you probably missed it, even if you’ve been reading my emails for a while.

You have to repeat yourself over and over and over. And if you want people to “know” you, you have to create a legend – a simplified cartoon version of your life, and you have to hammer that home, week in and week out.

“I was a blessed child born into a billionaire family… but a tragic and violent attack left me an orphan… and then one day, I fell into a cave full of bats.”

You tell that story. And then next week, you tell it all over again.

“I was made an orphan after my parents were brutally gunned down… I was lost, and all the billions I had inherited meant nothing… until one day, when I fell into a cave full of bats.”

You might wonder why I don’t take the opportunity here to talk about my own background, instead of that fantasy with the cave and the bats.

That’s because these emails are not primarily about selling, or even about building authority where you look at me as a leader in my little niche.

You might wonder what these emails are primarily about in that case. I’ve actually written about that in the past, and multiple times, but you probably missed that too.

No matter. I will probably write about it again one day.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there are certain messages that I cannot allow to slip through the cracks of your awareness.

For example, last week, while I was promoting that coaching program for which I’m interviewing prospects now, I got the following fat-fingered reply from a reader:

What annout copyriddles John? Still selling?

Of course I’m still selling. In fact, I spent a good amount of time just a couple months ago, writing and sending a sequence of two dozen emails to sell Copy Riddles.

And yet people forget, and quickly.

So if you’d like to join Copy Riddles, let me repeat you can do that at the page below. And let me repeat the following, even though I’ve said it before—

Everything I’ve just told you is actually part of a fundamental copywriting technique. It’s a technique covered in Copy Riddles Round 4, with riddles based on bullets by Clayton Makepeace, Gary Halbert, and Parris Lampropoulos.

For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/cr