Captain Midnight: The perfect direct response prospect

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On the evening of April 26 1986, millions of homes on the eastern half of the US were tuning in to the spy drama The Falcon and the Snowman.

​​It was being broadcast on HBO. But not for long.

Soon after midnight on the 27th, the picture flickered and changed. The SMPTE color bars appeared along with a message:

GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]

This weird interruption only lasted 4 1/2 minutes, but it had big consequences.

The next day, network news picked up the story.

​​People around the country got to jabbering about the unfairness of HBO’s prices.

​​HBO was furious, and they put pressure on the FCC to catch Captain Midnight, whoever he was.

​​Several months and an investigative manhunt later, that’s just what happened.

In July of that year, Captain Midnight was arrested and exposed as a 25-year-old electrical engineer named John MacDougall.

​​MacDougall lived in Ocala, Florida. He had a part-time job there at the Central Florida Teleport satellite uplink station.

Turns out, MacDougall also had a satellite dish installation business.

His business was doing well, until changes in HBO’s pricing turned people away from the idea of getting a satellite dish installed.

MacDougall’s business tanked. He was personally offended by HBO and financially hurt.

And so, while monitoring the satellite uplink of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, he made an impulsive decision.

He pulled up the character generator and typed up the above message. Once Pee-wee’s Big Adventure finished, he pointed the giant 30-foot dish straight at the Galaxy 1 satellite. And he jammed Transponder 23, which carried the eastern feed of HBO.

MacDougall’s message appeared on millions of TVs across the country, and Captain Midnight was born.

I thought this story was interesting. Almost as interesting as Richard Armstrong’s How to Talk Anybody into Anything.

That’s the little book Richard wrote about 44 points he learned by studying con artists. Point 3 is about how con artists choose their marks.

I won’t tell you what RIchard’s point 3 is here. You can find that at the link below.

What I will tell you is that, when you’re writing direct response copy, you might feel your prospects are gullible nincompoops.

But they are not. At least if they are good prospects. In order to sell big with direct marketing, you want to sell to people like Captain Midnight.

How do we know? Well, that’s what Richard Armstrong says, and he’s what you might call an A-list copywriter.

Richard’s How to Talk Anybody into Anything could probably sell for hundreds of dollars. Once upon a time, it was only available behind a paywall, as a bonus for RIchard’s novel the Don Con.

But right now, you can download a copy of RIchard’s 44-point con man guide, for free, without any obligations. In case you are interested, here’s where to go:

​​​​https://www.thedoncon.com/

The future of continuity offers for publishing businesses

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I have this friend who makes a lot of money but leads a very isolated and dull life. As a result, he spends much of his money on ridiculous, overpriced purchases.

For example, a while ago, he bought a $2,000 Japanese smart toilet. He had it shipped from Japan and installed in his house in Baltimore.

This morning, I thought of my friend and his foot-massaging, storybook-reading, life-coaching toilet. I imagined him going to his master bathroom… using his smart toilet for its core functionality… and attempting to flush. But instead of hearing the satisfying rush of water, a soothing female voice would say:

“Thank you for using SmartAsshin! Your subscription to the Flusshi® function has now expired. To renew your Flusshi® subscription, please visit smartasshin.com.”

That might sound ridiculous. But it’s not entirely out of the realm of the possible.

A couple days ago, I read that BMW has been trying out subscriptions for things like heated car seats.

The idea is that each new BMW comes fully equipped with all the extras. But in order to activate any of the extras, you have to pay. Monthly.

As the folks at BMW argue it, this system actually makes a lot of sense.

It allows people to try out functionality before committing.

It allows buyers to upgrade their car as they can afford to do it.

Plus it makes the resale value of the car greater. The functionality of the car no longer depends on the choices of the initial buyer.

Of course, BMW buyers don’t see it that way. They are furious, and there is a lot of backlash. I guess see it as a variation of my scenario above, with the Japanese smart toilet.

And now to get deadly serious.

Smart marketers, in particular smart direct marketers, have long known:

Continuity offers are where it’s at.

Of course, BMW story shows it ain’t so simple. Put a part of your usual service behind a paywall, and you can face indifference, or perhaps backlash.

It will be interesting to see what happens with BMW and their heated seats by the month.

Meanwhile, if you have a business… and your offer is not inherently a subscription like a streaming service or a newsletter… then it’s past time to start thinking how to integrate subscriptions into your offers.

And if you are looking for ideas for how to do it, without triggering a backlash, then check out the article below.

It comes from Simon Owens, somebody I’ve written about before. Owens publishes a Substack newsletter, covering media and publishing businesses.

In the article below, he talks about three subscription models he has seen. None of them involves hiding more of your content behind a paywall.

Of course, you don’t have to check out Owens’s article.

You can also just stay put.

In time, I will probably take Owens’s ideas… pad them out with a few other good things I find… and repackage them into a product, which I will offer to you later. Perhaps inside some kind of continuity offer.

But in case you don’t want to wait for that, you can do some of that work yourself right now. Here’s the link:

https://simonowens.substack.com/p/thinking-outside-the-box-with-paid

Email tweaks that typically triple sales

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My recent batch of book recommendation emails stimulated more responses than I usually get. One person who wrote in was Camille Clare, who, along with her husband Dustin, founded shelter.stream.

​​Shelter is a kind of high-class Netflix. It’s a streaming service, which only features architecture and design films and series.

Last month, with the goal of increasing subscriptions for Shelter, Camille took me up on my Email Marketing Audit. And not only that.

As soon as we finished the consult last month, I could see Camille actually put my recommendations to work. (I’m signed up to her list.)

So when she replied to one of my emails a few days ago, I asked Camille how her own tweaked emails are doing. Here’s what she wrote:

“Emails are going great! Just so you know, since your feedback, we have tripled our sales via email. So that’s pretty awesome and thank you :)”

Tripled sales… within a few weeks… thanks to some small-to-modest changes in email strategy.
​​
That’s too good of a testimonial not to share right away, without the usual infotaining jiggery-pokery. Because for the moment, I am in a rare position:

I only started offering the Email Marketing Audit last month. And since Camille is the first consulting client to get back to me with her results, I can honestly say that “tripling sales is a typical result following my consult.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean my Email Marketing Audit will also triple your sales within a month, like it did for Camille.

But if, like Camille, you have a great offer… if you have a source of high-quality leads… and if you’re doing email marketing already… then my Email Marketing Audit could be worth much more to you than my consulting fee.

Of course, that’s assuming you actually implement what I suggest.

But in case you’re ready, eager, and determined to make more sales via email, you can start the process here:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

How to get really rich in sales and marketing

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One afternoon a few years ago, I was sitting by the beach in Barcelona, eating my empanada and trying to mind my own business, when I saw an Indian guy selling beach blankets.

He was talking to a group of women who were interested but not yet decided on buying.

He sweet talked them a little bit.

He answered some questions.

He applied a bit of pressure at the right moments.

Eventually, he convinced them to buy.

He was about to close the sale when the women decided that they wanted another pattern of beach blanket after all.

The guy hung his head.

“No problem,” he seemed to say. And he jogged across the beach for a few hundred yards to get the other pattern from his stash.

He jogged back, handed over the correct blanket, and finally closed the sale.

While I was watching this, all I could think is how much work and skill it had taken for this guy to close this one sale, which probably netted him a profit of a dollar or two.

And it’s just about the same level of work and skill that it would take for a $100 or $1,000 or maybe even $10,000 sale.

Point being, it’s not really what you do that matters so much as who you do it for.

You can have the same skills. Do the same work. Maybe even make the same offer. But find a hungrier market, a richer market, a more invested market, and you will make more money, while having an easier time doing it.

At least that’s my inspirational message for you for today.

This message ties into my 11th Commandment of A-list Copywriters.

11th Commandment? Maybe you thought there were only 10?

Nope. There is an 11th apocryphal A-list commandment, discovered only in 2018, on an audio cassette buried in a clay vessel at the bottom of a flooded cave in western Ethiopia.

If you’d like to find out what that apocryphal 11th commandment is, then make sure you take me up on the offer at the end of my 10 Commandments book.

And if you haven’t got a copy of that book yet, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

About my semi-confessional love note to the wrong girl (and my lifelong history of sending such notes to the wrong people)

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When I was in 10th grade, I had a light-to-moderate crush on this girl in my English class, Sarah K.

One day, while we were in class, I wrote Sarah some kind of a note. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote. It was not a full-on confession of love. More like a semi-confession, veiled in some kind of inside joke.

The class was seated in an L-shaped arrangement of desks. Sarah’s desk was in front of and perpendicular to mine.

I folded up the note.

I waited for the opportune moment.
​​
And I tossed the note from where I sat to Sarah’s desk.

But Sarah didn’t notice. She was busy writing something. In fact, everyone was busy writing something. Well, except me.

“Psst, Sarah!” I tried to get her attention.

But in my characteristically careless way, I forgot that Sarah K. shared the desk with Sara L.

Sara L. looked up from her writing. She saw my hopeful-then-terrified face. And then she spotted the note on the desk.

Sara L. picked up the note. Unfolded it. Tried to parse the meaning of whatever I had written for Sarah K.

Sara L. then frowned, shook her head a little, and gave me a disapproving look. It said, “You are SO weird.” She crumpled up the note and threw it over her shoulder.

Well, that was a long time ago. It doesn’t sting much any more.

​​But really, how little things change.

Yesterday, you may have been surprised to get an email from me with the subject line “Death of a postcard.”

I meant to send that email just to the 20 people who are the first subscribers to my Most Valuable Postcard.

But instead, I ended up sending the email to my entire list. Years of daily ritual clicking is a hard habit to break.

I realized my mistake only a few moments after I sent out the email.

I literally groaned. Because here’s something you might or might not know about me:

In spite of the frequent typos, missing articles, and ungrammatical sentences in my emails (a consequence of how I write, a topic for another time), I actually hate making mistakes.

The memory of even a tiny mistake can keep me up at night, or startle me awake in the morning.

And sending out a semi-confessional note to a mass of people who were not supposed to get it — well, that’s a less tiny mistake than just a typo.

Like I said, I groaned.

And then, in the very next moment, I took a deep breath.

I reached into my mental library. I pulled out my copy of Daniel Throssell’s Email Copywriting Compendium. ​​And I flipped the mental pages until I got to rule #101.

“Aha,” I said, “here we go. Here’s the fix for this mess.”

I won’t tell you what Daniel’s rule #101 is. If you’ve bought the Email Copywriting Compendium already, you can reach for it now in your mental bookshelf, or at least pull it up on your computer, and look up rule #101 yourself.

And if you haven’t bought the Email Copywriting Compendium yet, well…

Daniel certainly doesn’t need my help in selling it. And since so many people on my list are also on Daniel’s list, I’m not sure what help I can give.

Still, I have been in a giving mood lately. And I have been sharing resources that I personally find valuable. So I will link to Daniel’s Compendium below.

If you write daily emails, I encourage you to get it and read it. Maybe even twice. That’s how many times I’ve read it so far, and I might read it again.

And in case you’re wondering:

This is not an affiliate link. It’s also not part of any kind of JV, cross-promo, list-swap deal with Daniel.

I’m just linking to Daniel’s Compendium because a) you might get value out of it and b) in gratitude over that rule #101. Plus a few other of Daniel’s rules, which I’ve peppered into this email.

​​Maybe you can spot these rules in action. If not, here’s where to go:

https://persuasivepage.com/compendium/

People will pay to see someone shut your mouth

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Back when I was sexually illiterate — and by that I mean, back when it took me a minimum of two months of “hanging out” to maybe take a girl to bed — well, back then, I knew a guy named James.

James and I spent enough time together that I began to notice an uncomfortable thing he always did.

In any group of people, assuming there were any girls around, James always made some offhand sexual comment. Perhaps a fragment of a bizarre story that happened to him between the sheets. Or how he didn’t have a lot of time to cheat on his girlfriend before she came back from vacation. Or just about some impressive breasts that were passing by.

Like I said, I always found these comments uncomfortable. Tacky. Unnecessary. Why would James say these things?

Well, I now know. But this isn’t a pickup newsletter. Instead, it’s a marketing newsletter, so let’s talk marketing.

Specifically, personal branding.

Yesterday, I watched an eye-opening video on YouTube. It’s called Villains in Wrestling: The Art of Making People Hate You.

The video is great. Fun. Full of detail and story.

And it tells you the exact steps these TV entertainers take to become hated. And course, why they do it. In the words of Gorgeous George, the first TV wrestling heel and somebody who influenced Muhammad Ali, James Brown, and Bob Dylan:

“People will pay to see someone shut your mouth. So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”

Gorgeous George was a star on par with the biggest entertainers of his era, including Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. He was paid obscene amounts of money, and he single-handedly made television into the entertainment medium it is today.

And that’s the connection to my story with James above. James had a pretty girlfriend, and from what I saw, plenty of quick success with random other girls on the side.

Fact is, there are proven ways to take girls to bed quickly, which have nothing to do with making more money or having six-pack abs.

Likewise, there are proven ways to grow a personal brand people will pay for, which have nothing to do with giving away more value or being helpful and friendly.

Maybe these ways make you uncomfortable. Maybe you’re all about expanding your comfort zone… but not if it means being hated or being tacky.

Your choice. But the knowledge is out there. And, speaking personally, that YouTube video on wrestling villains is worth a watch.

One last point:

I write a daily email newsletter. But it’s exclusive and therefore it’s not for you. For everybody else, the link to sign up is here.

How I increased my explosion rate +infinity% with the “Censorship Catalyst”

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Over the past two days, I got on my white lab coat, protective goggles, and elbow-high rubber gloves and ran a little experiment.

I wanted to see which mix of persuasive elements could create the most explosive reaction.

Except, I really have no scientific training. And so my experiment was poorly designed and very possibly dangerous. It went like this:

I sent out two emails with a link promoting the same book on Amazon.

But the link was not an affiliate link, so sales were not tracked.

To make things worse, the emails went out on two consecutive days, to my entire list, instead of at the same time, to different segments of my list.

​​Maybe the first day’s emails would eat up all the easy sales. Or maybe the second day’s emails would seem to sell all the people who were won over by the first email, but just didn’t buy immediately.

But let’s ignore all that for just a sec. And let me tell you my dramatic results.

Again, while I don’t have actual sales numbers for these emails, I do have personal replies people sent me. Among the replies to the first email, only one referenced the book I was promoting:

“I definitely didn’t buy it and I’m not excited to read it at all”

In case you missed it, the key words seem to be, “I definitely didn’t buy it.” For whatever reason, there seemed to be zero explosive reaction to my first email.

“What could be missing?” I asked myself as I paced up and down my lab late into the night.

Fortunately, just as I was about to give up and admit defeat, my lab mouse, Gulliver, who is allowed to run free around the lab after 9pm, knocked a book off the lab’s three-foot “Persuasive Classics” bookshelf.

The book fell off the shelf, hit me on the head, and landed right at my feet. I picked it up. It was opened to just the following passage:

“This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people — authors of daily email newsletters for example — the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize their censorship.”

I stared at the page for a few moments. “Too bad,” I said. “I had hoped I would at least get a good idea when this book hit me on the head. But I got nothing. Maybe next time.”

Suddenly I heard Gulliver squeaking up on the shelf. He was gesticulating wildly and trying to tell me something in his mouse-like way.

A light bulb went off in my head. I knew what was missing!

I ran to my work desk, and furiously wrote up a second email, featuring the missing catalyst – the fact that the book I was promoting was restricted from the Amazon affiliate program.

Result?

A +infinity% increase in explosive power! ​​That is to say, I got three (3) people writing in to tell me they bought the book.

​​Look, I know three is not a lot. But who knows how many bought the book and didn’t write in to tell me so? Probably millions. In any case 3/0 is still technically infinity, and infinity sounds way better than saying I made three sales.

But maybe you dismiss these findings, or the validity of my experiment.

If so, that’s your loss.

Because there are other hungry marketers on my list who will take this info and use it to create sales explosions.

Many of them probably have that same classic of persuasion sitting up on their bookshelves. And they can just open it up to chapter 7 to find out the specific conditions in which the above persuasive catalyst works best, and which extra catalysts make it even more powerful.

And others hungry marketers on my list, who don’t have this book yet, will be sure to click below and get a copy of their own.

As for you you? Well, if you don’t click on the link below, then write in and let me know what you decide to do.

https://bejakovic.com/censorship

Excluded by Amazon: The book that’s too powerful to promote

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Yesterday, as I finished up my email promoting Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind, I rubbed my hands together and started a reverie:

I imagined myself sitting in the shade, under a tiny palm tree, by a tiny beach, sipping a very tiny beer, and eating a very, very tiny steak.

After all, I was planning to put in an Amazon affiliate link at the end of yesterday’s email.

Depending on how many people actually took me up on my recommendation to get Brown’s quality, value-packed book, I might make $0.14 in affiliate commissions… or maybe $0.22… or who knows, if I was really persuasive… even $0.47!

That won’t buy a proper vacation even in a reverie, but a tiny vacation? Sure.

But then this tiny reverie was rudely popped. As I clicked to get the affiliate link, Amazon told me off:

“This product is one of the Amazon Associates Program Excluded Products. We do not support direct linking to this product. Please direct customers to another product or the category for this product instead.”

Excluded? Another Product? After I’d written the email???

I decided to invest a few minutes into threatening and cursing my laptop. That produced no result. So I looked around, made sure nobody had seen me, and pulled myself together.

I dug into why some products are excluded from the Amazon affiliate program. It turns out there are only three reasons why:

1. It’s alcohol

2. It’s an external promotional page linked to by an Amazon property

3. The third-party seller requested that the product be excluded

Brown’s book, by being a book, and by being on Amazon and not an external page, must fall into the third category.

In other words, like I wrote yesterday, maybe the information in this book really is too powerful.

Maybe Brown himself wants to keep it hush-hush. Maybe he only wants a select few, those who are cool enough, smart enough, mature enough, to read this book.

Maybe he wants to keep this book from appearing on a bunch of SEO-optimized top 10 lists and Medium filler articles and “most underrated” email newsletters.

So let’s see if that added information makes the book more attractive to you.

Whether you click the link below or don’t, I’m eating boiled chicken breast either way. I mean, I’m not getting paid anything by Amazon if you buy this book, and even if I were, it wouldn’t buy me steak tonight.

Before you go, if you want to hear more from me about excluded, possibly too powerful, insider information, then sign up for my email newsletter. And now, here’s the link to Brown’s book:

https://bejakovic.com/tricks

The destructive power of analogy

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Today I’d like to start by sharing an inspirational quote:

“If you feel you’re under-motivated, consider this: the word ‘motivation’ is used only by people who say they don’t have it. People who are ‘motivated’ rarely use such a term to describe themselves. They just get on with the task at hand. ‘Lack of motivation’ is an excuse: it’s giving a name to not just getting the job done.”

I read that in Derren Brown’s book, Tricks of the Mind. Brown seems like somebody I might have become in another life, had I only craved attention instead of shying away from it. And so when I read Brown’s quote, I nodded along and said, “Hmm that’s interesting. Maybe that’s even profound. Hey maybe there’s hope for me!”

Well, it wasn’t really me saying that. It was the little angel who usually sits upon my right shoulder.

“Psst, you there,” said the little devil who usually sits upon my left shoulder. “You wanna go smoke some cigars and drink some hooch? Or do you wanna hear why that D. Brown quote is bunk?”

“Err no,” I said. “This quote is inspiring. Please don’t ruin it for me. I’d like to believe it. Plus it makes sense. After all, if motivated people don’t know the feeling of being motivated, clearly it’s not a real thing.”

“Well let me ask you this,” said the little devil. “Do you know any 9-year-old kids?”

“No.”

“Well pretend like you do. Or just think back to when you were 9. Do you ever remember waking up in the morning after a blessed 10 hours of deep sleep… jumping out of bed… and with a stretch and a big smile on your face, saying, ‘Boy I feel so healthy today!'”

“Oh no…”

“Yeah, that’s right. Kids don’t talk like that, at least not the vast majority, the ones who have been perfectly healthy their whole life. But does that mean that there is no such thing as health? That you can’t be in good health or in bad health? Or by extension, that there’s no such thing as motivation and lack of m—”

“Get thee behind me Satan!” I yelled. But my mood was already spoiled and the quote above was ruined for me.

Maybe I managed to ruin it for you as well. If so, it was all for a good cause. I just wanted to illustrate the destructive power of analogy.

Fact is, Brown might really be right. There might not be any such thing as motivation.

But the fact he tried to prove it in a specific way (“motivated people never use the word”) was easy to spoil with my analogy to kids and health. And maybe, just maybe, your brain made the same leap after that which my brain did.

“Well, health is real… and if health and motivation are alike in this one way… then motivation must be real.”

​​But that’s not proven anywhere.

Anyways, now I’m getting into ugly logic which is really not what persuasion or this email are about.

I just want to point out that, if you want to persuade somebody of something, or if you want to dissuade somebody of something, then the most subtle and often the most persuasive thing you can do is to take two pushpins and a piece of string.

​​Stick one pushpin into an apple. Stick the other into an orange. Tie the string between the pushpins. Make it tight.

And then hold up your creation to the world and say, “Draw your own conclusions! But to me, these two look fundamentally the same! Just look at the string that connects them!”

Anyways, D. Brown does not talk much about analogies in his Tricks of the Mind. That’s his only omission. Because this book really has everything you need to persuade and influence — and from somebody who is both a serious student and a serious practitioner of all this voodoo.

In fact, the last time I mentioned this book in one of my emails, a successful but low-key marketer wrote in to tell me:

John!

Maybe you didn’t get the memo! You can’t tell people about Derren Brown’s “Tricks of the Mind”.

It’s against the rules.

As a friend of mine said, “That’s too much in one book. Don’t give the chimps tools.”

LOL

Well, maybe my mysterious reader is right. So don’t buy a copy of Derren Brown’s book. But if you do want occasional chimp-safe tools from that book, or from other valuable persuasion and influence sources, then you might like my daily newsletter.

I was doing “massive action” all wrong

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I just spent an hour sending out about a dozen emails to random people on random topics.

Some of them were personal.

Some were to connect those who might get value out of knowing each other.

Some had to do with my own little publishing business, of which you are reading the marketing right now.

The total time to send all those emails was under an hour. The total work, in terms of effort and brainpower, was nothing.

I don’t know what’s gonna come out of all those emails.

But I bet that out of those 12 emails, at least one big and positive thing will emerge that’s not anywhere near to the surface today. Perhaps it will be some totally new and fantastical beast, with bat wings, a cat tail, and maybe a donkey head… ready to entertain me, or make me some money, or maybe open up doors I don’t even know exist right now.

All this brought to mind something I overheard once during the Q&A part of a Dan Kennedy seminar. Somebody in the audience mentioned the “principle of massive action.”

I’ve known about “massive action” for a long while.

In fact, at different times in my life, I’ve been a devotee to the idea. But I always took it to mean something in a kind of Grant Cardonish sense – work harder than you’re working now, 10x harder, and quit complaining.

But this person in Dan Kennedy’s audience gave a different meaning to massive action. One that seems to exist within the Dan Kennedy galaxy.

Yes, “massive action” still involves taking action, and maybe even doing work.

But the key thing, according to what I read from Dan Kennedy, is to take action in a bunch of different dimensions.

Think up 12 different ways to solve a problem. And get going on all of them, all at once.

“Err Bejako,” I hear you say, “are you telling me to grind 12 times harder? How is this an improvement over Grant Cardone’s 10x fluff?”

Nope. Grinding is not required.

Of course, some of those 12 possible solutions might be hard to move forward.

But some may be easy.

Some may require you to do real work. Many won’t.

Some might require sitting and thinking, or writing and editing. Others might just require a quick email to someone you know.

You never know which one approach will end up being the one to solve your problem. And if my experience is any guide, it usually won’t be the most difficult and time-consuming one, the one that requires Grant Cardonish grinding. Plus, there’s seems to be some multiplicative magic when you take different approaches to solve a problem, beyond simple addition.

Anyways, I’m not sure if this helps you in any way.

But if you want more ideas like this, ideas I’ve pilfered from people like Dan Kennedy, applied, and benefited from, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.