I was doing “massive action” all wrong

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.

Use the Force to avoid copy that’s too long

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy that’s pretty much the one we live in, I was wasting time doing “research” (ie. not writing when I should have been). But at least I discovered the following curious fact:

George Lucas’s early drafts for the Star Wars script talked about “the Force of Others.”

These early drafts gave detailed explanations of what the Force of Others was, how it tied into a “Kyber crystal,” and how there was a “Bogan” side and an “Ashla” side of it.

Following his better instincts, Lucas stripped out all the explaining in the final draft. He got rid of the crystal and the Bogan nonsense, and dropped “the Others” and simply called it “the Force.” Star Wars went on to become a pretty, pretty big hit.

There’s a copywriting lesson here. But first, here’s another illustration:

Back in 1982, Darryl Hall was writing the prototype of a song called Maneater. He was stumbling on the last line of the chorus. “Oh here she comes… She’s a maneater and a …”

Hall can’t remember the original final line, because his girlfriend told him to “drop that shit at the end.” So he did. Maneater went to the top of the charts ​and stayed there longer than any other Hall & Oates song. Hall said that cutting down the last line made all the difference.

Conventional direct response wisdom says that longer copy outperforms shorter copy. It’s been proven over and over in many tests.

Copywriter Victor Schwab, who wrote How to Write a Good Advertisement, definitely supported the use of longer copy. But Schwab also wrote the following:

“Some ads don’t need much factual under-pinning… The copy about some products can soar successfully — without ‘coming a cropper.’ An abundance of factual material merely inhibits its flight. If too explicit about the “why” and “hows,” such copy pulls the reader’s imagination up short.” ​​

I can’t give you a recipe for when you should take out the “whys” and “hows” of your copy. I think it’s a matter of having a good feel for your market and your product, and knowing what they need to hear — and what not — in order to make the sale.

In other words, trust your intuition. Or use the Force. The Bogan Force. Of Others. And stop yourself if you say too much.

I should have stopped there. But I have one final thing to say. I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to get my emails, much like what you just read, you can sign up here.

Ben Settle’s secret three-act content strategy revealed

A few days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line:

“Ben Settle emergency emails in support of Copy Riddles?”

That email officially had the highest open rate of all my emails over the past 10 days. I don’t know if that was because of the subject line. But for my own reasons, I will run with it and pander to your apparent tastes, by telling you a three-act Ben Settle story:

Back in 2016, Ben released a tiny Kindle book titled, Persuasion Secrets of the World’s Most Charismatic & Influential Villains.

The villains book turned into a sleeper hit.

As I write this, the book has 286 Amazon reviews and an Amazon ranking of 42,849. From what I know of Amazon publishing, that means the book continues to sell 4-5 copies every day, six years after its publication.

I reckon the villains book didn’t make Ben a tremendous pile of cash, not directly, not compared to other parts of his business.

But it almost certainly got him a large and constant new source of highly qualified leads. And it certainly gave him positioning and exposure in the direct response industry.

For a while, everyone associated Ben with the villains concept. It truly made him unique. And this probably led many more highly qualified leads trudging towards his hut, banging on his door, and demanding to be sold something.

So what did Ben do next? Perhaps you know act two. In 2018, he released Persuasion Villains, volume II.

Act three came in 2019. That’s when Ben released Persuasion Villains, volume III.

Which brings us to the present day and a tweet I came across a few days ago.

The tweet was written by one Matt Koval, who was apparently a big face at YouTube for over 10 years. Koval was the one whipping those early and confused YouTubers into the all-consuming media machine that YouTube has become.

Anways, Koval was tweeting in response to some YouTube influencer’s new video, and he wrote:

“One of the earliest pieces of content strategy advice we used to give at @YouTube was to try and turn your viral hit into a whole series – and it’s great to see @RyanTrahan do just that. It’s a TON of work, but no doubt a huge boost to his channel.”

But really, what is Koval’s “series” idea more than the standard DR practice of testing out different sales appeals in your ads? And then doubling down on the winners, for as long as they continue to pay for themselves?

As far as I know, Ben isn’t releasing any more villains books. This probably means he has milked this franchise to the point where putting out a new villains book isn’t worth the opportunity cost.

But maybe you’ve had a hit idea that you haven’t milked dry yet. Whether in your YouTube videos, Kindle books, or email subject lines. So rather than trying to be creative and have an all-new hit, turn your proven hit into a series.

In other news:

As I write this, I only have one Kindle book out there, my 10 Commandments book.

The 10 Commandments book hasn’t been as much of a success as Ben’s original villains book. But it has sold a lot of copies, and it continues to make sales. More importantly, it continues to drive highly qualified prospects to my email list.

And who knows? Maybe I will take my own advice.

Maybe I will lumber up the mountain, get a few more stone tablets of copywriting commandments, and write a second installment in this series.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read volume I, here’s where you can get your very own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The heavy cost of heavy emailing

From last Wednesday to last Sunday, I sent out 11 emails to promote the most recent run of my Copy Riddles program. Five of those promo emails came on just the last day.

Here’s some sobering feedback I got about that from copywriter Dave Montore, who signed up for both Copy Riddles and the Inner Ring coaching:

Thanks for the warm welcome, and thanks for sending more emails than usual for this one.

I’d have missed sign up due to the holiday weekend if I hadn’t noticed three emails from you in one day yesterday.

Good lesson for anyone who thinks they’re “bothering” their list.

Dave replies to my emails fairly often. He’s actually bought some of my other offers in the past. And yet, like he writes above, he might have missed this most recent offer had I emailed less, particularly the last day.

“Yeah,” you might say, “but at what cost did you buy this one great case study? How did the rest of your list tolerate all that heavy emailing? I bet many of them were piii—”

Well, before you go there, let me admit those five emails I sent out the last day did get a total of 5 unsubscribes. That’s about 0.4% of my list. Over the entire 11-email promo campaign, I had a total of 10 unsubscribes. That’s actually less than my long-term average.

And in spite of kicking off this campaign with a tongue-in-cheek email, inviting the wrong kind of readers to send me their hate mail and mp3s of their trollish grunting, I got fewer than one such response.

​​That’s to say, nobody, not one person, wrote in to tell me how I’m selling too hard or how I’m sending too many emails or how I should check out Andre Chaperon or the Hubspot website for ideas about how to really do email right.

On the other hand, I did get dozens of fun, smart, or respectful replies from people who enjoyed my emails, or had questions about the offer, or who actually took me up on my offer and wrote me with a certain amount of pride to tell me so.

Still you might say, nothing new here. Email done right makes sales. The worst that happens is that people who aren’t a good fit end up unsubscribing.

Yes, there is nothing new here. You got me there.

The only reason I am telling you this is because, ever since I’ve started offering my Email Marketing Audit back in May, the first conclusion I’ve made with all the clients who took me up on the Audit has been:

Email more.

Many business owners email once a week. They make some sales with that one email. And then they start to think, gee, how can I do better? Are there some subject line tricks or some deliverability hacks for improving the results from this one email?

My argument is always:

If you are making some sales with one email a week, try sending two. You might not double the money you make. But I’m pretty sure you will make more than you make now, and I’m 100% sure will make more long-term than if you focus on tiny tweaks to that one email.

So that’s free advice.

Of course, there is more to email marketing, done right, than simply creating heavy email showers.

But that kind of advice and guidance and advice is something I charge for.

So if you are a business owner, and you have an email list, and you want me to do an Email Marketing Audit of your email funnels and copy, you can get started here:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

How to create blacker-than-black urgency without a deadline

This morning, I closed down the Copy Riddles cart and ended the promotion for this run. It’s now time for all the people who signed up to see how I deliver on the promises I’ve made.

Like I wrote in my last promo email for Copy Riddles, 76.7% of those people — well, 76.7% of my total sales — all rolled in the last day. I had more coming in after I wrote that email, so the final number for last-day sales was even higher.

That’s because, like I wrote in that email, deadlines are black magic. In the words of Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap:

“It’s so black. Like how much more black could this be? And the answer is… none. None more black.”

Well, for Nigel’s benefit and maybe yours, I want to tell you that there is a form of persuasion wizardry that might be blacker than black. Let me quickly get my cloak and peak hat on, and tell you what I have in mind.

Over the past few days, while preparing to write my second Most Valuable Postcard, I started reading Rich Schefren’s 12 Month Marketing Blueprint.

I’m a big fan of Rich and just about everything I’ve seen him do. But I have to say the name of this particular offer is misleading. It’s hardly a blueprint. Really, it’s a fully built, furnished condo with pictures of Rich’s family inside.

In other words, what you get inside the “Blueprint” is 310 pages of actual emails, slides, sales letters, and free reports that Rich created back in 2006 and 2007 and sent out to his list and to his JV partners.

If you wanna reverse engineer a blueprint out of this, that’s gonna be on you. You have to do it yourself.

​​But it might be a worthwhile exercise. Because here’s the result of all these hundreds of pages of marketing, from the front page of the Blueprint:

Over 830,000 downloads
Over 1,895 one-way links
$960,000 in the first 2 hours and 15 minutes
From unkown – to known – to well known. From 20 clients to 2,070 clients. From 2 employees to 12.
How I Got Attention and Leveraged it to 7.4 Million a Year company.

I won’t spell out the many smart strategies that Rich uses in this 310-page collection of marketing. (A few of the most interesting ones are going to people who are subscribed to receive my Most Valuable Postcard later this month.)

What I will reveal to you is that blacker-than-black wizardry I mentioned above.

Here it is, right at the top of Rich’s sales page for his consulting offer — the offer that sold out in 2 hours and 15 minutes, and generated close to a million dollars:

“Warning: 32,543 want to know more about my coaching. 4,507 are on a waiting list to get early access (to this page) and 4,284 marketers registered for a teleseminar to get the details of this program. In addition, my joint venture partners will be sending out roughly 1,300,000 emails directing their subscribers to this offer. Consequently, there are only 1000 of 1000 seats available. Many of them are being taken as you read this. Scroll down to secure your spot!”

So there you go. that’s how you create blacker-than-black magic, without a deadline. Right there, in that salad of numbers.

What?

​​You want a blueprint?

A salad is not enough?
​​
Pff… fine.

​​Here’s the actual formula, phrased the way Rich likes to phrase it:

Social proof + Scarcity = Urgency

And now, on to unrelated promotional materials:

If you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard offer, I have an update for you.

I initially only opened this offer to 20 people, when I first made it available, back in May. All 20 of those 20 are still subscribed to get the postcard.

Later this month, I will reopen my Most Valuable Postcard for the first time, to 20 new subscribers. I’ll limit it again because I’m making some changes to the offer and I want to control how that will go.

My joint venture partners will be sending out roughly 0,000,000 emails directing their subscribers to this offer.

But this email is going out to over 1,300 people who read my daily emails.

And almost 140 of these readers have already expressed interest in signing up for the Most Valuable Postcard. They have joined the waiting list, so they can be the first to get notified and the first to have a chance to sign up when I reopen the Most Valuable Postcard.

In case you’re interested in blacker-than-black persuasion magic, and you’d like to have the best chance to sign up to my Most Valuable Postcard when it reopens, you’ll have to be on my email list first. Here’s where to sign up.

A push-button storytelling trick for a stronger second draft

Let me try to charm you with a pretty exciting story I witnessed a few days ago:

I was sitting on a stool at a seafood restaurant at the main Barcelona market, waiting for my order of oysters and fried squid. Suddenly, I saw it. A lobster, on a bed of ice, on top of a seafood display shelf in front of me. But the little guy was still alive!

The lobster started walking backwards, off the plate, onto the glass counter. The nearest restaurant patrons moved away. One tried to grab the lobster from behind. But the lobster turned around, and the brave patron backed off. For a moment, it looked like a panic might start.

But then the owner of the restaurant, a middle-aged woman with a pixie cut and a big smile on her face, came, confidently picked up the lobster, and put him back on the plate of ice, pushing the poor bastard down to keep him from walking off again. The end.

Pretty charming story, right? Pretty… pretty… charming.

But can we inject some electricity into this pretty charming story? Can we force it to come alive, like Frankenstein’s monster? Well, let’s push the button and see:

I was balancing on a stool at a seafood restaurant at the main Barcelona market, counting down the seconds for my order of oysters and fried squid. Suddenly, my eyes locked in on it. A lobster, on a bed of ice, on top of a seafood display shelf in front of me. But the little guy still twitched with life!

The lobster scrambled backwards, off the plate, onto the glass counter. The nearest restaurant patrons fell out of their seats. One tried to coral the lobster from behind. But then the lobster spun around, and the brave patron backed off, arms up. For a moment, it felt like the place might erupt in a panic.

But then the owner of the restaurant, a middle-aged woman with a pixie cut and a big smile on her face, swept in, confidently grabbed the lobster, and plopped him back on the plate of ice, crunching the poor bastard down to keep him from escaping again. The end.

Better, no? I mean, maybe a little ham-handed, maybe a little freshman-writing-class-y, but the idea is sound. And the idea is this, from a quick story once whispered by Hollywood screenwriter Larry Ferguson:

“There was a girl who came to me with her first screenplay. It was a good first shot. I gave her some advice. I told her, ‘I want you to go home and take a yellow Marks-A-Lot and highlight every verb in this 120-page screenplay, and then I want you to read them out loud and ask yourself, Can I find a stronger verb.'”

So there you go. If your current draft is a good first shot, highlight your verbs. Sweat and struggle a bit until you hit upon stronger verbs. And you might discover you’ve created something sexy, something truly alive.

But you know what?

Stronger verbs, and stronger words in general, are just one good way to edit your copy to make it more biting and bothersome.

There are at least six other editing techniques, which I’ve seen A-list copywriters using regularly, either consciously or unconsciously. A few of these techniques are much more subtle, and maybe even more effective, than just reaching for stronger words.

If you’d like to own all of these techniques, you can find them in Round 20 of Copy Riddles. Round 20 is all about taking that pretty, pretty good copy you’ve written and turning it into something that wounds people with intrigue and curiosity, even if they can’t quite pinpoint why.

And Round 20 isn’t just a bunch of boring how-to. Instead, just like the rest of Copy Riddles, it forces you to practice each technique yourself, and compare your results to the results that A-list copywriters got.

After all, the only thing better than a demonstration you can see… is a demonstration you can try out — I mean, play with, fondle, and feel — yourself.

Enrollment for Copy Riddles closes later tonight, at 12 midnight PST. That’s less than 12 hours away. To sign up while there’s still time:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

How living next to train tracks can transform your copywriting skills

A few days ago, I came across a trending science article with the headline:

“These cancer cells wake up when people sleep”

From what my zero-biology-classes-in-college brain could understand, researchers have made an important new discovery.

Cancer cells in one part of the body are most likely to spread to other parts of the body — a dangerous process called metastasis — while we sleep.

In other words, sleep — usually a good thing – suddenly becomes threatening and dangerous if you have cancer.

I guess this is big news in the science community and might lead to new ways to stop cancer from metastasizing.

But I’m not part of the science community. I’m part of the direct response copywriting community.

And so I mused that, were I in the business of selling important new health information, like Boardroom used to do, I might sell this breakthrough research with a provocative headline:

“How living next to train tracks can stop cancer”

The reason I thought this immediately was because the above science story reminded me of what I think is the greatest bullet of all time:

“How a pickpocket can cure your back pain”

That bullet was written by A-list copywriter David Deutsch in control package for Boardroom, back in the 2000s. David’s brilliant bullet has a clever underlying structure, which I modeled for my would-be headline/bullet above.

Perhaps you can parse exactly what I did with my bullet above. Or perhaps you know the story behind David’s bullet and therefore don’t need to parse what I did.

But if not, you can find the background of David’s bullet, including a breakdown of his clever technique, in Round 10A of my Copy Riddles program.

But let me put it this way:

Living next to train tracks can transform your copywriting skills.

Because enrollment for Copy Riddles closes later today, at 12 midnight PST.

If you haven’t signed up yet, and if you’re sleeping fitfully when the deadline hits, you will miss the enrollment window, and you will have to wait who-knows-how-long to enroll and find out the secret (and more importantly, the copywriting lesson) behind David’s bullet.

So trains rumbling outside your window might actually be a good thing in this case.

On the other hand, if you got no rumbling trains to count on, then you can always sign up now, while you’re still awake and while your mind is fresh and on it. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

How I’m manipulating you again by telling you the truth

Came a curious question yesterday, in response to my email with the subject line, “How I manipulated you, and how I might do it again.” Reader Jan wrote:

Hi John,

I’ve been reading your emails for a while now and I really enjoy them.

I’d love to know what’s your stance on actively mentioning downsides and what a certain offer is NOT/whom it’s NOT for in order to disqualify the wrong buyers.

This email sounds like you’re not really a fan of it, which surprises me a bit. Maybe I misunderstood something about it.

I would appreciate it a lot if you could clarify that.

At first I found myself flummoxed.

After all, this question came in response to an email in which I actively gave a potential buyer reasons why my Copy Riddles program might not be right for him.

But then my slow, tortoise-like brain struggled forward a few inches. And I remembered the “disqualification” I gave to the potential buyer in yesterday’s email.

I said that Copy Riddles is not for anyone who’s not willing to “poke, prod, jolt, shock, creep out, and unsettle people.” Because my claim is that copywriting is about:

1) Stripping out details that don’t help your case (ie. not telling the whole truth), and

2) Using reliable ways to get people more amped up than they would be normally.

So is this in flagrant conflict with the practice of actively mentioning downsides or disqualifying the wrong buyers?

Maybe. Or maybe it’s more subtle than that.

Now, I hate to do what I’m about to do to you.

But get ready for a bit of hard teaching, because I don’t know how else to deal with this question right now.

During my Most Valuable Email presentation last week, I talked about what I call frontloading. I used a Ben Settle email to illustrate:

And it contains the exact same methods I used to land high-paying clients who could have easily afforded to hire better and more seasoned writers. But, using my sneaky ways, they not only hired me… they hired only me (often multiple times, plus referring me to their friends), without doing the usual client-copywriter dance around price, without jumping through hoops to sell myself, and without even showing them my portfolio, in most cases.

I used this info during good and bad economic times.

In fact, I got more high paying clients during the bad times (2008-2010) than the good times.

I cannot guarantee you will have the same results.

And the methodology doesn’t work overnight.

But, that’s how it worked out in my case, and this book shows you what I did.

Frontloading is when you make a powerful, extreme promise. Then you qualify your promise. But the big, extreme, initial promise still keeps ringing in your prospect’s head.

Ben is a past master at this, as you can see in the snippet above.

Sure, he actively mentions some downsides to make his offers sound legit. But he does it after he’s thourougly amped up his readers with an irresistible promise, which might sound too good to be true — were it not for those downsides.

And by the way:

I’m not in any way criticizing Ben. All I’m saying is, he’s a serious student of direct response copywriting… and he knows what works.

And what works is what I tried to explain, perhaps clumsily, in my email yesterday:

1. Controlling your reader’s attention, and

2. Arousing his emotions in an almost unnatural way

Of course, you can do this to rope in people who are a bad fit for your offers. That’s dumb if you ask me.

You can also do it to turn good prospects into buyers. That’s smart, and it’s what Ben does every day.

And now:

I have an amazing offer for you… a new way to own A-list copywriting skills more quickly than you would ever believe.

Some of the smartest and most successful marketers of all time, Ben Settle among them, have endorsed the approach that this offer is built on.

But the thing is, my offer does cost money.

And it’s gonna require work. Every weekday. For 8 weeks straight.

And it might even make your head hurt a bit once or twice.

But if none of those downsides turn you off, you might be a good prospect for my offer. It’s called Copy Riddles. To take me up on it:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

The one piece of influential writing which molded me above all others

The one piece of influential writing which molded me above all others – above all the Ben Settle emails, all the Dan Kennedy books, all the Dan Lok Facebook ads — is an old issue of the Gary Halbert newsletter, titled:

The Difference Between Winners and Losers.

I read this issue in the first few weeks after I discovered copywriting, years before I actually became a freelance copywriter.

And I’ll make a dramatic claim:

I don’t know if I would have ever started as a copywriter without this Winners/Losers issue. Without the basic idea I got from it.

One thing I know for sure is that whenever I come back to the core idea from this Winners/Losers issue, big things, transformative things, often happen.

Maybe I’ve made you curious. So here’s the gist, in Gary’s own words:

Non-alcoholics can never truly understand alcoholism. Straight people can never understand what it is to be gay. Gays can’t hope to thoroughly comprehend what it is to be straight. And…

Spectators Can Never Understand
What It Is To Be A Player!

In that newsletter, Gary gave a quick, cheap, and easy exercise that anyone could do to 1000x their chances of becoming rich. It just involved putting out a classified ad and fielding all the calls that would come in.

​​Just follow the simple instructions, and ultimate success is 1000x more likely.

“But most of you are not going to follow these simple instructions,” Gary said. “I know that already from past experience.”

“I won’t be like those people,” I told Gary, who was already dead. “I will do what you tell me, and I will become a success!”

Of course, as you can probably guess, I never did follow Gary’s instructions and I never did put out the classified ad. But the idea, along with a bit of shame, stuck with me.

And that’s how I achieved what I have achieved. Because on occasion, I remember Gary’s Difference Between Winners and Losers.

And rather than saying, “Yeah that’s good advice” or “Pff I’ve heard that before,” I shut up for a minute and actually follow the step-by-step instructions that some smart and successful person has laid out for me.

Because like Gary said, knowing something intellectually is not good enough. You have to do it, apply it, experience it yourself to have a chance of becoming a player.

Perhaps keep that in mind, as I switch to an almost entirely unrelated topic:

My Copy Riddles program is now open for enrollment, until this Sunday at 12 midnight PST.

“Pff I know all about that,” I hear you say. “You haven’t stopped talking about your Copy Riddles program for a century and a half.”

Well, maybe this is the moment when you finally hear me. For two reasons:

First, because Copy Riddles was actually born when I finally followed another bit of Gary’s step-by-step advice. This was advice I had known intellectually for years, but that I had never put into practice. And when I finally did put it into practice, big, transformative things happened.

And second:

B​ecause Copy Riddles is built around the idea that you gotta experience things yourself.

Spectators can never understand what it is to be a player… and copy readers can never understand what it is to be a copywriter.

​​That’s why I built and organized Copy Riddles as a series of practical exercises, simple but powerful, that you do every day to implant copywriting skills into your head — and to actually get the experience of creating effective copy.

But maybe that’s all a little vague for you.

Fortunately, I have written up a quite extensive and exclusive report, with all the details of how Copy Riddles works. In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

The most powerful appeal for making the sale, according to the great Robert Collier

I did my best to be snarky last night. I announced that Copy Riddles is now open again, and I invited criticism and trollish responses to the many promotional emails I would be sending.

What I got instead was a bunch of messages like the following, from reader and past Copy Riddles alum Nathan Eshman:

Love this course John!!! I literally use what I learned in it every day.

Is it still open for those who’ve done it in the past to join in again?

If so, can you put me on the receiving list please?

Sigh. This is not the thoughtless trolling or nasty criticism I was expecting. But you gotta work with what you got.

The background is this:

Nathan first signed up for Copy Riddles last year. He’s now taking advantage of the fact that if you join Copy Riddles once, you get lifetime membership. In other words, you can rejoin Copy Riddles for any future run for free.

This offer is open to anybody who has gone through Copy Riddles before. If that’s you, and you’d like to join for this run, just hit reply, let me know, and I will add you.

And if that’s not you, and you haven’t been through Copy Riddles yet, then I can tell you a valuable direct response lesson I first learned from the great Robert Collier, author of the Robert Collier Letter Book and that New Thought mishmash, the Secret of the Ages.

In analyzing a bunch of sales letters he had sent out, Collier found out that the most powerful appeal for making the sale is to say, “The price is going up.”

That’s also a reason to sign up for Copy Riddles now, rather than later.

Because each time I have run Copy Riddles, I’ve increased the price significantly.

It’s very possible I will do so again the next time I run this program.

But if you join now, then like Nathan, you don’t have to worry about any future higher price. You get into future runs for free, free, free.

Of course, I don’t want you to make up your mind about joining Copy Riddles based only on price.

Read the sales letter. See if this training makes sense for you. Decide if you will do what it takes to get value from it.

And if you conclude that the answer is yes, then do the simple math of comparing less with more, and use that to guide you. Here’s where to get started:

https://bejakovic.com/cr