“Email Marketing: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson”

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Here’s a quick checklist of elements that make for engaging, effective, and influential emails:

1. Conflict, outrage. We seem to take a constant delight in seeing or participating in a fight. The more real it is, the more engaging it is. The more status the fight participants have, the more engaging it is.

2. Surprising connections between unrelated things, or surprising distinctions in things that seemed simple and unified.

3. Metaphors, analogies, and “transubstantiation.”

4. Angst. All good copy is rooted in angst. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “The sky is either falling or is about to fall.”

5. Imitation and parody.

6. An engaging character. As Matt Furey didn’t but should have said, “For the email marketer, nothing transcends character.” The email of personality, rather than the email of “value.” Email is not about sharing valuable information. It’s about writing about normal things in a valuable and interesting way. It’s about accuracy of human observation and precision of the observation.

7. All right, enough of this. Let me come clean:

Everything I’ve just told you actually comes from a video titled “Visual Comedy: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson.”

Atkinson you might best know as the clumsy priest from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I watched Atkinson’s Visual Comedy guide a few days ago, expecting to be entertained. And I was that. But I found the video surprisingly full of deep analysis of what actually makes for visual comedy. It was like a prehistoric episode of the Every Frame a Painting series, if you’ve ever seen that.

And not only was this video insightful.

I realized that much, or maybe all, of what makes for good visual comedy can be ported very easily to email marketing.

For example, point #1 above is really about slapstick. As the Visual Comedy video says, “We seem to take a constant delight in seeing people hurt and humiliated. The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more dignified the victim, the funnier it is.”

And that Matt Furey non-quote in point #6?

​​It actually comes from Charlie Chaplin. “For the comedian, nothing transcends character.”

If you like, I’ve linked the entire Rowan Atkinson video below. You can watch it and try to figure out which techniques of visual comedy I mapped to each of my email marketing points above.

Of course, there’s more in this video than just what I’ve written above. The list of connections between visual comedy and email marketing is long and distinguished, and doesn’t just stop at 6″.

As just one example:

Maybe the most valuable part of this video is the detailed discussion of what exactly makes for an engaging character in visual comedy. I found almost all of this applied to email marketing directly, without the need for even the smallest bit of translation. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s a lesson I should apply myself.

So to wrap up:

​If you’re a goofy and thoughtless person who enjoys laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel…

​Or if you’re a deep and serious thinker who is interested in uncovering the hidden structure of things most people take for granted…

​Then I believe you will get value out of this video. Or maybe you’ll just get some pointed human observation. You can find it below. Before you click to watch it, you might want to sign up for my daily email newsletter, and get more insightful things like the essay you’ve just read.

I spent 120+ hours to uncover this marketing secret for you

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Do you remember the TV show Lost?

It was a big cultural phenomenon some 15-20 years ago. A planeful of people crash on a mysterious island. They have to fend for themselves while uncovering the island’s many bizarre secrets.

I watched Lost a few years after it came out. I did it because my girlfriend at the time insisted. She insisted because everybody else insisted.

So we got into bed one night and we watched the pilot episode.

Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

“Do we really need to keep watching this?” I asked my girlfriend.

“Yes! Everybody says it’s sooo good.”

So we watched another episode. More of the same.

And a third episode. ​

​​Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

But bit by bit, I was getting sucked in.

​​I was starting to like or dislike the various characters. I formed theories about the island’s bizarre secrets and the show’s unresolved cliffhangers. I looked forward to settling into bed each night for yet another episode.

And that’s how I ended up wasting about a hundred hours of my life, watching the remaining 120+ episodes of Lost. Even though my initial experience summed up what each of those episodes were all about:

Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

I recently talked about Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind. Here’s one curious thing from that book that got to me:

“It is generally the most disinterested spectator who is the hardest to fool. Those who watch less end up seeing more.”

Brown was talking about doing magic. Apparently, a drunk at the bar who is not paying attention to the magician on stage will spot the sleight much more easily than an attentive audience member who is focused on the magician and who is determined to catch the trick.

That’s because, as Brown says, magic is about “entering into a relationship with a person whereby you can lead him, economically and deftly, to experience an event as magical.”

As in magic, so in marketing.

Except you might already be a little sick of being told that marketing is all about the relationship.

And the fact is, what I’m telling you about is both more and less than a relationship. You can see some of the stuff I mean in my Lost history above. Social proof and pressure… a sufficiently tight curiosity gap… an attractive or inviting selling context.

Or, in a few simple but powerful words:

“One prime objective of all advertising is to heighten expectations.”

And with that, I’d like to promote a book to you. And it’s NOT Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind.

Instead, it’s one of the top five marketing books I would recommend to anyone…

It’s part of A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos’s mandatory reading for copywriters who want to make it into the top 10% in just a year…

And it’s where I got the quote above about that prime objective. I spotted that quote on, I believe, my third re-reading of this book.

Of course, there’s a lot more in this book besides this one quote.

Like horses. And beer. And ketchup. If you’d like to read more:

https://bejakovic.com/lost

“So cringe”: Content creators get rich without anyone knowing who they are

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I sat down just a few minutes ago, my hotdog + espresso soup at the ready, and I watched 8 minutes of:

* A hot girl putting a live fish down her sweatpants

​* A man walking up the side of a 30-foot light pole

​* A motorcyclist’s head falling off

​* Pigtails being cut by office scissors and meat cleavers

​* Cheating wives and husbands caught in the act and running for cover

​* A leech up somebody’s nose

The backstory is all these videos were produced by Network Media, a video content mill that’s gotten 200 billion views on Facebook and Snapchat over the past two years.

200.

Billion.

Let me repeat that number so that it perhaps has a chance to sink into your brain. If each of those video views were a hotdog, that means that you and everybody else on the planet would have eaten 25 Network Media hotdogs each over the past two years.

Network Media was started by Rick Lax, who looks a little like a young Mickey Rourke.

Lax ​​has a law degree.

But Lax’s primary passion was never law. It was always magic.

Lax wasn’t popular as a kid. To make things worse, he never could quite make it at the highest levels of the magic business.

He was apparently hurt to be excluded even from this community of misfits.

So Lax went outside the magic establishment, and started posting videos on Facebook, iterating, optimizing, and cranking out content. At first, his videos showed magic tricks. Later, they showed random stuff Lax figured out to be popular.

It got so Lax’s Facebook videos were easily getting 100 million views each.

Lax started to monetize his videos with Facebook’s “paid creator” ad share as soon as that became available. Immediately, he started making six figures a month.

What’s more, Lax realized the demand for his bizarre videos, which applied his insights from magic, was endless. So he brought on more people, often broke actors and singers, who were making minimum wage before Lax found them.

Lax turned many of his anonymous content creators into millionaires. By late 2021, Lax’s Network Media was pulling in $5 million a month across all its different videos.

I’d like to tell you more of Lax’s story, but I’ve just finished my hotdog + espresso soup and my time is up. So I’ll make you an offer instead.

Check out article below. It’s where I learned about Rick Lax and his $5M/month viral video business. The article contains lots of titillating facts, plus some useful techniques.

In fact, if you read the article below, you can find out why almost all of Lax’s video feature something surreal, such as tampons in the fridge or a dirty hairbrush as part of a cooking video.

​​Maybe that will even explain why I’m eating hotdogs in espresso sauce as I write this email.

So my offers is, read the article below, find out the technical term for this “tampons in the fridge” technique, sign up to my email newsletter, and then write me an email to tell me the name of this technique.

In return, I will share with you something else interesting, valuable, and related. It’s something that I might share with my entire list down the line, but that I will share with you first, and for certain, if you only take me up on my offer.

In case you want to do that, here’s the link to get started:

https://bejakovic.com/lax

An inspiring Aaron Winter recommendation

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If you are a bit of a word nerd, then I have something that might fascinate you:

The words free and friend are closely related, and both derive from an ancient root meaning love.

Maybe the path from love to friend seems straightforward.

But free? What’s love got to do with it?

Well, here’s the surprising explanation:

Apparently, the original meaning of free was “not a slave”. A free person was able engage in social relationships such as friendship and marriage. On the other hand, slavery was a condition in which all social bonds were cut off, and the only relation was being owned by the master.

Perhaps that sounds abstract. An example might help:

If a Roman legionnaire was captured in war, made into a slave, and then escaped and made it back home, he would have to go through laborious rituals to recreate his entire social network, including remarrying his wife. That’s because becoming a slave was equivalent to “social death” and the severing of all social ties.

That thing with the Roman wife and the free/friend etymology are two curious factoids I got from the book The Dawn of Everything.

This book takes a bunch of new anthropology and archeology research that has come out over the past few decades, and it turns upside-down what you might think of as well-established human history.

I’m telling you about all this because yesterday, I promised to tell you the most valuable thing I have gotten (so far) from the Dig.This.Zoom training.

Well, the recommendation to read The Dawn of Everything is it.

Partly, that’s because The Dawn of Everything is full of interesting tidbits like the free/friend etymology above.

But really, I found this book valuable because of how inspiring it is. Because through detailed argument and seemingly endless research, it makes the following point:

Human beings choose and shape the societies live in. There’s nothing inevitable about the way the world is, or about the way it’s going to develop.

Aaron Winter, the copywriter who is putting on the Dig.This.Zoom training, recommended this book to suggest that something similar holds on a smaller scale as well.

Aaron’s point was that you can choose and shape how you work, and with who you work. There’s nothing inevitable and you are not bound by industry norms, not if you don’t want to be.

Again, I found this inspiring. I always enjoy being reminded that we all have agency, and that we can choose and shape how our lives turn out, even though it might not be obvious in any given moment.

I’m not sure I’ve done enough to either motivate you or convince you with this email.

But perhaps you resonate on some level with the idea that today’s society is not the only possible one, and that very real paths exist to something better.

Or perhaps you are greedy for lots of interesting facts and arguments that will make you a more interesting person to your friends, acquaintances, or newsletter readers.

In either of these cases, you might get some value, or perhaps a lot, out of The Dawn of Everything. Here’s the link if you want to check it out:

https://bejakovic.com/dawn

About that Dig.This.Zoom course

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Today is Tuesday, which means it’s time for the next Dig.This.Zoom call.

I’ve written about this course a few weeks ago.

​​I paid $1,200 to listen to mysterious, reclusive, but highly successful copywriter Aaron Winter talk over 12 consecutive Tuesdays. Well, I paid to listen to Aaron and also to participate in the “nebulous community benefits” promised.

But the fact is, I’m finding myself falling behind with this course. I’m even dreading tonight’s call a little.

One reason is the time difference. Where I am, it will be 10:30pm by the time tonight’s call starts. That’s a time of day when I’m really only suited for a warm glass of milk and a bedtime story, if there would be anyone out there kind enough to read me one.

The other reason is that, from what I’ve seen of these calls so far, they are very loosely structured, very jokey (and I’m quite humorless, at least at 10:30pm), and each week’s content seems to mainly be one or two big metaphors.

I’m telling you all this because several people have written to ask me what I think about the Dig calls, and whether the course is worth getting now that the price has been slashed to $600 — if you don’t get the calls live and if you don’t get to participate in those “nebulous community benefits.”

I can tell you this:

Aaron is apparently setting up an affiliate program, so all the folks who signed up initially can promote these new $600 recordings.

I thought about it for about 2 secs. And then I decided I won’t be selling these Dig calls as an affiliate.

After all, if I am struggling to get value out of this thing myself, how can I congruently sell it to you? And you know what they say about daily email newsletters. It only takes one sip of spoiled milk to turn you off the stuff for years.

Perhaps at this point, you are getting ready to take a big sigh of relief. Perhaps you were debating whether to invest your $600 in the Dig tapes. And here I am telling you not to buy the stuff.

Except I’m not telling you anything of the sort. Because here was my response to everyone who contacted me asking whether to buy or not:

1. Apparently a big part of this is a recruiting play for the Dig agency and the people associated with Dig. So if you are looking for a full-time gig, it might be worthwhile just for that opportunity, even if you don’t get those “nebulous community benefits” — whatever they will turn out to be.

2. There are worthwhile ideas and insights in the course, but it’s as much what you bring to it as what’s in the actual content. If you are smart and ambitious, you can probably get a lot of value out of this training. But then again, if you are smart and ambitious, you can probably get a lot of value out of most anything.

So I am not endorsing the Dig tapes. And I am not issuing a fatwa against it either. You will have to make up your own mind. If you are curious, here’s where you can get the full details:

https://dig-lolz.myshopify.com/

And if you decide not to buy the Dig tapes, or even if you do, you might want to read my email tomorrow.

​​I will tell you the most valuable thing I have personally gotten from this Dig.This.Zoom course so far. All for free. If you want to read that, you can sign up for my email newsletter here.

The IOU theory of copywriting

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I read once (in a book) that credit, aka debt, came way before money. In other words, an IOU — a little slip of clay tablet commemorating the three sheep you gave to me — is a more powerful economic idea than gold coins.

I also read once (in an email) that copywriter Gary Halbert said the most powerful human motivating force is not self-interest… but curiosity.

Is there a connection between these two powerful facts?

Clearly. Because I personally think of curiosity as an IOU.

You give a couple of IOUs to your reader right in your headline. “I promise to pay you some valuable information,” each IOU says, “just give me a bit of time.”

As long as you’re in the reader’s debt, as long as he’s holding one of your IOUs, he sticks around. He wants to get paid.

The good thing is that you can give your reader a new IOU before paying off an old one. That way you can keep him around. But be careful.

If you start handing out too many IOUs… if the debt you’re incurring is too outrageous… if the repayment period is too long… then your reader is likely to get frustrated.

“This guy is never gonna pay up,” he will say. “This is just worthless paper.” He will throw away all your IOUs into the river, and along with them, your sale.

In other words, don’t overdo your debt of curiosity. But do do it.

And if you want some technical pointers on how to do curiosity in your sales copy, why, I’ve got just the thing.

It’s hidden right there inside Commandment III of my book on A-list copywriter commandments.

In case you haven’t checked this book out yet, but are a bit curious, here’s the link:

https://www.bejakovic.com/10commandments

Two marketing legends try and fail to pronounce my name

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A few days ago, reader Sam wrote in to tell me a curious fact:

On a recent episode of the Chris Haddad podcast, Chris and IM guru Matt Bacak spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to pronounce my name.

Matt: “B-E-J-A-K-O-V…”

Chris: “Buh-Jack-Oh-Vick? I think that’s how you pronounce it?”

[No, it’s not. But I can’t blame anybody for not knowing for what to do with this salad of letters.]

The context is that Chris, the very successful marketer and copywriter I wrote about yesterday, asked Matt, a legend in the direct response field, which copywriting books Matt recommends to people.

Matt had two recommendations.

The first was Evaldo Albuquerque’s 16-Word Sales Letter.

The second was Johh Buh-Jack-Oh-Vick’s 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

I was chuffed to hear that Matt and Chris were discussing my book.

But it wasn’t a complete surprise.

About a year ago, Matt had written me an email telling me how he recommends my book to people inside his mentoring program. At the time, I was a little too denso to do anything with Matt’s endorsement.

So if you really need a marketing and copywriting lesson in today’s email, then my message to you is:

​​Don’t be like me.

In other words, ​when doing marketing for yourself, treat yourself as you would a client, including being aggressive about collecting and using testimonials.

If you are a freelance copywriter or marketer of any stripe, I can almost guarantee that’s the most valuable thing will hear today.

​​But perhaps you don’t believe me.

Perhaps you want more copywriting and marketing advice, so you can compare which one is the most surprising, new, and useful for you.

​​If so, I have ten more copywriting and marketing commandments to share. Inside of a little book publicly endorsed by Matt Bacak. You can find the entire collection here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Getting comfortable copybragging on Facebook

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Speaking on a podcast a while back, marketer and copywriter (though not freelance!) Chris Haddad had the following harsh truth to share:

“If I was a freelance copywriter, I would be posting on Facebook about copy all the time. And I would be posting all of my testimonials and all of my successes. Because that’s the gig. And if you can’t do it, you need to go out and do something else.”

Chris was saying how back in the day, what made him successful as a freelance copywriter is he was willing to go out and shout, “Hey I’m Chris Haddad and I’m fucking great.” But that kind of bragging causes a discomfort in his seat these days. It’s also one of the reasons Chris didn’t offer any copywriting training for the longest time.

What if you’re the same?

What if you have a fear of the spotlight, and you cannot imagine bragging about yourself on Facebook?

​​And what if, unlike Chris, you haven’t yet reached the levels of success that allow you to say, you know what, I’ll do something else instead?

Well, I think you’ve got several options. Such as creating your own product in a non-marketing niche… or writing a daily email newsletter in the hope of establishing your credibility without bragging… or taking a page out of Sasha Fierce’s book.

Yes, Sasha Fierce.

Maybe that rings a bell. Maybe no? It’s the alter ego that Beyonce created for herself in her early days. Here’s Beyonce:

“Usually when I hear the chords, when I put on my stilettos, like the moment right before when you’re nervous… then Sasha Fierce appears, and my posture and the way I speak and everything is different.”

Psychologists agree. By conducting experiments on children and the weak-willed, they have shown how inventing an alter-ego for yourself (or at least asking yourself, “What would Chris Haddad do?”) works wonders in changing your perspective, your resolve, and your behavior. ​​Search online for the “Batman Effect” if you want to know more about this.

But for now, maybe it’s time to start inventing a braggartly Facebook alterego for your copywriting business. It might not be what you like to hear. But as Chris says, that’s the gig.

Are you expecting me to finish this email by bragging myself?

No, I will save that for tomorrow’s email. I do have something to brag about, and it even involves Chris Haddad in a way. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow. Sign up to my email newsletter if you’d like to read that when it comes out.

​​​​For today, if you’d like to hear all of Chris’s tough love insights into what it takes to be a successful freelance copywriter, then brace yourself, and then take a listen here:​

#1 copy critique I give inside the Inner Ring

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Yesterday, I held the fourth call of the Copy Riddles Inner Ring.

The Inner Ring is a little coaching group. I created it as an upsell to Copy Riddles.

In the Inner Ring, I critique people’s bullets.

The problem is, the bullets of the Inner Ring folks are getting too good. With each new week, there’s less and less biting and merciless criticism I can give.

If you think I’m trying to presell you on the Inner Ring, then stop thinking. I won’t run this offer again.

I made that decision a few days ago, for my own reasons. I might talk more about those down the line.

For today, I want to share a share a little diamond with you. It’s small but very valuable. I found it thanks to the Inner Ring. And it’s this:

There’s just one bit of feedback I keep giving people, week after week.

Even as their bullets become more intriguing… as their mechanisms become sexier… as their warnings become scarier… there’s one thing I keep repeating.

And that’s to make their copy 100% clear.

That’s my advice to you too.

Make your copy easy to read. Make it easy to understand. Take out fluff that clutters your message. Clean up stains that allow doubts to creep into your reader’s mind.

How do you do that? How do you make your message 100% clear?

There are many ways to fleece that feline. Today, I want to point you to just one. It’s an automatic, push-button tool that gets a lot of cat fur off quickly.

For example:

I started out this email with a first draft. That draft was at a 6th-grade reading level.

Thanks to this tool, I whittled it down to an 5th grade level. Then to a 3rd-grade level. And then, with a lot of work, to a 2nd-grade level.

You are still reading this email. Maybe you even found it persuasive. If you did, clarity is the reason why.

So if you aren’t using this tool yet, consider doing so. It’s valuable and it’s free.

And if you this tool, consider using it more. All the way to its full, second-grade potential. Here’s where to find it:

https://hemingwayapp.com/

The “knitted eyebrows” copywriting technique

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If you ever wished you had the nerve to engage in more risk-seeking behaviors such as unprotected sex or high-stakes roulette, here’s some good news:

Scientists have found a quick, cheap, and easy way to help you out.

According to a study published by researchers at the University of Ohio a couple years ago, all it takes is acetaminophen — ie. Tylenol, Panadol, etc.

The scientists found that a 1,000-mg dose of acetaminophen increased risk-seeking behaviors in a batch of 545 college students.

​​In other words, acetaminophen not only reduces physical pain such as headaches… but it seems to also reduce psychic pain, at least the psychic pain coming from fear and uncertainty.

So the next time you find yourself nervously turning away from a suspect sexual partner… or refusing to bet it all on red at the Casino in Monte Carlo… just pop a couple Tylenol, and you will be good to go.

You might think I’m being foolish or trivial. And perhaps you’re right.

​​But there is a point I’m trying to get to, if only my fingers would follow my brain.

I’ve read somewhere, and the Tylenol study above supports it, that we humans have grafted modern brain processes onto old physical hardware.

For example, when we have the intellectual or emotional experience of, say, trusting somebody… this is connected to physical sensation of warmth in our bodies.

​​The link goes both ways — trust inspires warmth, and warmth inspires trust. (Again, some scientists have run experiments to prove this.)

Similarly, other human emotions such as fear, disgust, anger, and joy, can and do trigger — and are triggered by — physical cues.

“Ugh why is this relevant to me,” I hear you saying, as your eyes roll to the back of your head.

Well, if you’re in the business of writing some frightening or infuriating or energizing sales copy, your first move might be to reach for adjectives. Like “frightening.” Or “infuriating.” Or “energizing.”

​​But that’s for kids.

What grownup copywriters do is pay attention to their own bodies.

Dry swallowing… gritted teeth… a fully expanded chest.

​​These are just some of the hundreds of physical cues you can include in your copy, and play your readers’ emotions like a keyboard.

​​Or if you want them to focus and read on, just talk to them about their eyebrows knitting together. And on that note, if you’d like to focus and read more essays like the one you’ve just read, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.