Hot opportunity inside

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Today’s email will:

1. Amuse you
2. Tell you something personal and possibly shocking about me
3. Give you a valuable marketing idea you can use right now
4. Outrage you and give you a chance to feel superior
5. Share some saucy gossip about people you might know, at least online
6. Clue you in to a hot opportunity
7. Remind you of something valuable that you probably know but aren’t doing
8. Allow you to feel like you are making progress simply by reading
9. Give you a chance to think differently
10. Provide you with an experience of insight

Confession: Today I had absolutely no clue what to write. So I went back to a big list of good marketing ideas I’ve been collecting for years, and I found the following:

“Shortcut: Write out all the benefits you can think of before seeing the product. Then keep the ones that the product can satisfy.”

That’s from Milt Pierce, who according to according to A-list copywriter Bob Bly, was “the greatest copywriter you never heard of.”

Bob says that Milt was also one of the greatest copywriting teachers of the 20th century, which might be why I’ve heard versions of the above idea from a bunch of other A-list copywriters, including Parris Lampropoulos, Ted Nicholas, and John Carlton.

So for today’s email, I took Milt’s idea, came up with 10 possible benefits, and kept the four I could possibly deliver on.

But you might be wondering how I’ve delivered on #6, “Clue you in to a hot opportunity.”

The fact is, I heard Milt share the above advice in a special program, the “Gene Schwartz Graduate Course on Marketing.” This “Graduate Course” was more like a seminar of top copywriters and marketers, including Parris, Jay Abraham, and Ken McCarthy, going back and forth on the topic of Gene Schwartz and the marketing and copywriting lessons they squeezed out of the man.

The “Gene Schwartz Graduate Course” used to sell for hundreds of dollars. Then for many years, you couldn’t even get it at any price. But today, it’s yours free — well, “free” as in you gotta buy something, for $12.69, but then you get the Gene Schwartz course as a free bonus.

So what do you gotta buy?

If you check my list above, you won’t find “Charm you with a sales pitch” among today’s benefits. So for that, and for the full info on this hot opportunity, take a look below:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

An “awful” way to guilt-trip customers into staying subscribed

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A few days ago, I sent out an email trying to sell you the idea that much of the sale happens after the transaction is over. And I asked, how can you keep a customer selling himself on your offer, even after he’s bought it?

I got lots of interesting responses. One business owner, who asked to remain unnamed, wrote in with the following:

We plant a tree for each subscriber every month.

Each week we remind the subscriber of how many trees they’ve planted via their subscription.

The idea being that their subscription is making an ongoing difference by employing locals in areas affected by deforestation.

If they unsubscribe now there will be consequences for others.

This actually sounds kinda awful…

I don’t know about awful… I just thought it was wonderfully guilt-trippy. It also happens to be the exact flip-side of one way I’ve used to inspire people to buy, which is to say that their self-interested drive for success will have beneficial wider consequences.

That idea, about beneficial wider consequences, is one of 7 ways to inspire that I wrote up in an email long ago.

This was in the early days of my newsletter, when I stupidly and shamelessly whole-hogged how-to advice in my emails. The only thing I can say in my defense is that with this particular inspiration email, I at least camouflaged the how-to in with some infotainment (I matched up each how-to-motivate strategy with a pop song).

Anyways, I bring all this up for two reasons:

1. I realized that each of my 7 ways to motivate people to buy can be flipped to motivate people to stay sold. I just gave you one example above of how that works. But with the smallest bit of thought, all the other 6 ways can be flipped in such a way as well.

2. If I were a little smarter, like Ben Settle for example, I would take my “7 ways to inspire” email off my site, flesh it out a bit, and sell it for $97 as part of a paid newsletter.

It turns out I’m not very smart. But maybe I will get smarter one day, maybe one day soon.

As it is, you can still read that inspiration email for free, on my site, at the link below. And who knows. Maybe you can even take one of those ideas, use it to inspire some customers to take action today, and benefit them while also making money for yourself. Or flip that idea, and keep those wayward sheep from making a big mistake and straying from your flock.

In any case, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/99-problems-and-folsom-prison-blues-how-to-write-copy-that-inspires/

A pagan priest’s trick for persuading without being seen

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Lately I’ve gotten a little overwhelmed listening to marketing and copywriting courses, which is something I do during the off-moments of my day. So for a change, I found a course on YouTube about the early Middle Ages. I’ve been playing that when I make my salad or hard-boil my eggs or whatever else it is I am doing for lunch.

Today, I listened to a lecture about early Medieval Britain. And the lecturer read out a passage about a pagan priest, who supposedly argued to his king that the kingdom should convert to Christianity.

Now, if you are doubtful that a pagan priest would argue himself out of a job, I share your doubts.

​​Nonetheless, I thought the priest’s supposed argument was moving and even beautiful:

“The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.”

A sparrow, flying swiftly through a bright and warm banquet hall, as a metaphor for life.

​​How the hell do you come up with something like that? Do you just have to be a poet?

I thought about this for a moment.

I’m sure being a poet helps.

But I realized something rather obvious. This image, of the bright and warm banquet hall, and maybe even a sparrow flitting through it, was something a king of Northumbria would know very well. It would be a daily experience — well, if not daily, at least nightly, on the weekends.

So the point I want to share with you is to make your metaphors something your prospect will know well, and will resonate with.

That’s not my idea. It comes from the book Metaphorically Selling by Anne Miller.

You might think this idea is so basic that it hardly needs mentioning.

But Miller gives the example of a business woman, speaking to an audience of other business women, who peppered her talk with metaphors taken from baseball and football. Unsurprisingly, the talk bombed.

Miller’s advice is to “snapshot” your prospect.

To observe. To do research. To find out his or her life and background. Even things that aren’t related to the problem you are offering to solve.

And then to use that, and not just to inform your sales arguments. But also to shape the metaphors you come up with, so you can subtly persuade your prospect, without him even noticing it. Kind of like a soft bed, which makes it both pleasant to fall asleep, and impossible to tell when it actually happened.

If you found that persuasive, you might like my email newsletter. Or you might not. If you want to try it out, you can sign up here.

Factual vs. emotional

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As I so often do, this morning I sat down at my writing desk, took a sip of my coffee, lit my pipe, put on my eyepatch, and started re-reading, for the 114th time, David Ogilvy’s self-promotional ad, How to Create Advertising That Sells.

As you probably know, Ogilvy’s ad is a collection of 38 bits of wisdom that Ogilvy learned by creating “over $1,480,000 worth of advertising.” Number 23 on the list is this:

23. Factual vs. emotional. Factual commercials tend to be more effective than emotional commercials.

However, Ogilvy & Mather has made some emotional commercials which have been successful in the marketplace. Among these are our campaigns for Maxwell House Coffee and Hershey’s Milk Chocolate.

I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like Mr. Ogilvy is saying, “Certainly, emotional ads have been known to work… but it takes a true expert, someone like me, to pull it off. Otherwise, best stick to facts, facts, facts, or your advertising will pass like a ship in the night.”

That goes against a lot of copywriting advice you hear today.

Today, the main advice for copywriters is to agitate, scare, excite, outrage. Pile on the power words. Don’t tell people facts. They don’t care. But stir their emotions and they will buy.

So what gives? Was Ogilvy just writing at a different time? Or do different rules apply you promote Hershey’s Milk Chocolate in Life Magazine than when you promote, say, ProstaStream supplements on Clickbank?

Well, I can tell you a little personal story.

The single piece of copy that has paid me the most money to date, per word written, was a 317-word email I wrote a couple years ago, in 2020. It was full of facts, to support the idea that using hand sanitizer won’t get your hands as clean as washing your hands with soap and water. We were selling “paper soap” — little dental-floss sized dispensers of one-time soap flakes. And thanks to that fact-filled email, we sold, literally, a ton of paper soap.

“Yeah,” I hear you say, “but that was a unique moment. There was a lot of fear around corona, and everybody was in the mindset to keep their hands clean or die. You were just tapping into that.”

You’re right. And in a way, that’s the point.

Facts alone are like pebbles by the side of the road.

They’re not very impressive. Not very threatening. Not very useful.

But take some of those facts, and put them inside your prospect’s shoe. Suddenly, you have him squirming, and twisting, and looking to get rid of that discomfort and pain. And not only that. You have him taking that discomfort and pain with him — unlike power words and emotions, which are like a cloud of smoke that disappears in a few moments.

The bigger point is that, ideally, all aspects of your copy, or anything else you write, should do double or triple duty. Facts are no different.

Sure, facts provide concreteness and believability. But choose the right facts, and you will stir emotions also. After all, who really cares that, at 60 miles an hour, the loudest thing in this Rolls Royce is the electric clock? There must be something else going on there.

And now here’s a fact:

Every day, over 1,050 people are signed up to get emails with little bits of marketing wisdom like what you just read. If you’d like to join them, click here and fill out the form.

A gazumping email that might give you a conniption

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What exactly does gazump mean? Or tippex? Or quango?

I have no idea. I’ve never heard these words before. And for the sake of this email, I decided not to obey my curiosity and not to look them up.

Odds are, you also don’t know what these words mean, unless you are from the UK.

If you are from the UK, you you almost certainly know them. That’s according to a data analysis I just looked at, about differences in word familiarity between the UK and US.

80% of people from the UK knew gazump, tippex, and quango. But only 10% of Americans did. (My guess is that the rest of the world, maybe excluding Australians, are equally clueless.)

What about the other direction?

Well, less than 20% of UK people, and at least 75% of Americans, knew such all-American words as ziti, manicotti, and albuterol. The word conniption also had a big spread.

But wait, there’s more.

Because I got one more interesting data set for you. This one is about differences between men and women.

Fewer than 20% of men, and more than 50% of women, knew the following words:

* peplum
* boucle
* rouche

(True enough, I don’t know what any of these words mean. And I’m afraid to look them up.)

There’s nothing comparably interesting in the other direction, because words known by fewer than 20% of women, such as femtosecond and thermistor, are also known by fewer than half of men.

But there is something very interesting at the highest end of the men-women data set.

There is a certain provocative word, which is known by 88% of men… but only 54% of women.

That word is shemale.

Draw your own conclusions.

I really mean that. Because while I thought this word data was interesting, I couldn’t come up with any smart marketing point to draw out of it.

So today, I will just risk it and guess that maybe you’re like me, and maybe you find words interesting.

And since I found this stuff fun, maybe you will too.

Thinking about it now, that might be a marketing point in itself.

In any case, if you like strange or disgusting words that women know and men don’t, and vice versa, you might like my email newsletter. Or you might not. If you want to give it a try, click here and fill out the form.

Copy Zone thesis #89

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If there were a church near me, I’d go and nail an announcement to the door that says:

I’m nearing the end of Copy Zone, my guide to the business side of copywriting. Managing clients… getting them if you don’t got ’em… upleveling to as high as you want to go, that kind of thing.

Copy Zone consists of 114 points, rules, or maybe theses, to keep going with the religious theme I have set up my offers.

I’ve finished all but a handful of these 114 theses. And for those that remain, I have notes and clear plans for what I want to say.

But here’s the puzzling and conflicting thing to my troubled mind:

I started working on Copy Zone over 3 months ago. This final result, soon to be finished, will be 85% what I initially wrote up for myself in a batch of notetaking in the first couple weeks, when I started working on this.

And yet it’s taken me over three months, and will take a bit more time, to actually get to the end.

That’s not because the actual writing has been so hard or has taken so long.

Instead, it’s because I had doubts about the overall structure… the presentation I was making… the emphasis I wanted readers to rememeber and walk away with.

So I ended up rearranging, making tweaks, changing the structure multiple times… while keeping much of the content the same.

Will it be worth it?

​​And even if the current version really turns out to be a 100, wouldn’t it have been better to put out something that was an 85, but to do so three months ago?

Who knows. It’s a fair question. and maybe It’s a lesson I will draw for myself in the future.

For now, I just want to share a different point with you:

Don’t get desperate if your copy, or anything else that you’re writing, sucks.

Don’t go all Nikolai Gogol on your half-finished sales letter and set it on fire, or delete it on your hard drive.

It might be tempting. I know I’ve felt the urge. But the fact is, even if what you’ve written looks awful right now, 85% of it can be salvaged.

So take a bit of time — or worst case, take three months — and rewrite what you’ve got. There are sure to be good ideas in there. Your entire package just needs to be sharpened, polished, molded or otherwise physically transformed. But the substance is there.

A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos once talked about how he writes a sales letter. After the first draft’s done, Parris said, he always thinks he’s lost it. People will find out he’s a fraud.

Then he rewrites the bullets he’s written. They’re still bad. But Parris squints a bit, tilts his head, and thinks to himself, maybe, maybe I can get away with this?

Third and fourth rewrite, the bullets are starting to look pretty damn good.

And the next thing you know, Parris has got himself a new control sales letter, which ends up paying him hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in royalties.

Ok, on to business:

Do you want to get notified when Copy Zone is out? You can keep waiting for that announcement on the church door. Or just sign up to my email newsletter.

What’s the best font for making sales?

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A couple days ago, I saw a little study titled, “Best Font for Online Reading.”

Spoiler: there’s no clear answer.

One font, Garamond, allowed the fastest reading speed on average.

But that’s just on average. Not every person read fastest with Garamond. Another font, Franklin Gothic, proved to be the fastest font for the most people, though the average reading speed was lower than Garamond.

So is it time to change your sales page font to Garamond? Or Franklin Gothic?

Or maybe even to Open Sans — the font that came in last in terms of reading speed?

There is an argument to be made for having people be able to read your copy faster. If they get through your copy more quickly and easily, they get your sales message more easily, and they make it to the order button faster. And money loves speed, right?

On the other hand, there’s an equal argument to be made for having people read slower. The more time and effort somebody invests with you, the more likely they are to trust you (one of those mental shortcuts we all engage in), and the more likely they are to justify that investment and trust by buying in the end.

So like I said, no clear answer.

But this did bring to mind a story Brian Kurtz likes to tell about a time he hired Gary Bencivenga.

As you probably know, Brian was the VP at direct response publisher Boardroom. And in that role, he hired some of the most famous and most brilliant copywriters of all time, Gary among them.

Anyways, Brian’s story is about two sales packages, one fast, one slow, both written by Gary Bencivenga, both promoting the same product.

To me personally, this story has proven to be the most fundamental and important lesson when it comes to copywriting or running a direct response business.

Brian’s little story won’t tell you what kind of font to use, or what kind of copy to write, fast or slow. But maybe it will make that choice a lot clearer in your mind.

In case you want to read Brian’s valuable sales and copy study, you can find it at the link below. But before you go read that, perhaps you might like to sign up for my slow but trustworthy email newsletter. In any case, here’s Brian’s article:

https://www.briankurtz.net/how-you-sell-is-how-they-will-respond/

Tricks to make sales stick

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Last week, I wrote an email about misdirection, and asked for examples. A bunch of people wrote in with good pop culture illustrations.

I also got to work, reading up on the theory of misdirection. Step one was Derren Brown’s book Tricks of Mind.

You might know Brown. He is a stage mentalist and TV illusionist. He’s done a TED talk where he reads the minds of people in the audience, and he’s got shows on Channel 4 in the UK where he demonstrates and debunks the acts of psychics, faith healers, etc.

After a rough start to Brown’s book, about Brown’s conversion from gullible Christian to enlightened atheist, the book picks up and talks psychological principles, just like I was looking for.

Today, I want to share one very cool such principle with you. It’s not about misdirection. Instead, it’s the idea that a lot of the “magic” of a magic trick happens after the trick is over.

Brown describes different techniques to do this.

For example, you can repeat a trick multiple times, so tiny (and different) details from different runs bleed together after the fact, gaslighting the viewer.

Or you can give subtle verbal suggestions. For example, you can instruct an audience member to shuffle a deck of cards “again” — when it’s really the first time, and when multiple shuffles make the magic trick more impressive.

The point, as Brown claims, is that people both love magic because they like being astonished and surprised… but they also resist it, because they don’t like being fooled.

And that’s why, once the trick is over, viewers keep going over the act in their heads.

​​And if the magician does his job right, then viewers will exaggerate cool things that happened… forget details that could make them seem gullible or dumb… and invent new memories that support the idea that this was really an incredible and unexplainable act of possibly real magic.

All of which, if you ask me, applies to sales also.

Making a sale is an emotional manipulation.

And much of the sale is made after the credit card details have been exchanged and the transaction is over.

Sure, a part of that is having a solid product and good customer service.

But, like Brown says, it’s only one part, and might be a minor part.

A bigger part might be the rationalizations, selective forgetting, and false memories that pop up in your former prospect’s, now customer’s mind, after the sale is over.

I believe, like in a magic show, that there are different tricks you can use to make this happen in your customer’s head, even once he’s on his own, late at night, driving home from your sales stage show, with your digital information product sitting in his virtual lap.

What tricks exactly?

Well, I’ve got a few ideas.

But I’d like to hear yours also. Specifically:

How can you write copy, or organize your marketing, to get people to keep selling themselves on your offer after the sale is over?

Get on my email newsletter, then write in and let me know your ideas. No judgment — anything that comes to your mind is valid, and I want to hear it. In exchange, I will tell you a few ideas I’ve had on this question myself.

Grumble and grow rich

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I recently decided to stop working with a big new client.

I felt the project wasn’t making any progress. I wasn’t enjoying the work. And perhaps most of all, I didn’t really need the job, because I have other options.

Still, I took some time after it all ended to make a list of good things that came from this experience.

One was that I got turned on to a cool new gadget (the reMarkable tablet).

Another was hearing some good stories about how to build an 8-figure business within a few years.

And a third were some new book recommendations, including Mark Ford’s Automatic Wealth.

As you might know, Mark is a multimillionaire entrepreneur and marketer. He’s one of the guys who helped build up Agora into a billion-dollar company. And he’s a prolific author, best known in copywriting circles for the book Great Leads, and best known in non-copywriting circles for his book Ready, Fire, Aim.

From what I can tell, Automatic Wealth was Mark’s first book. It’s about — maybe you guessed it — wealth. What you need to do to get it. What you don’t need to do. And on that last topic, here’s a quote from Mark’s book:

“But if getting rich and successful were simply a matter of replacing negative thoughts and feelings with positive ones, why are some of the richest, most successful people that I know miserable, grouchy, and gloomy? Not all the time. And not in all circumstances. But as a general rule it seems to me that most of the people out there making the big bucks are more driven than dreamy, more testy than tranquil, and more hard-pushing than easy-going.”

You don’t have to be miserable to grow rich. But based on what Mark’s saying, if you are miserable, it’s not an impediment.

The thing is, as I’ve written before, I really don’t care much about getting rich. I make enough money as is, and my appetites are limited.

That’s not to say I’m not ambitious in my own way, about other things (a topic for another email).

And that’s why I wanted to share this quote with you. Because it applies equally well to achieving anything in life. To achieving moderate success. To just getting started, on any project, or any change you’d like to make.

You don’t have to be miserable, obsessed, or filled with negative thoughts to succeed at what you care about.

​​But if you are negative, a grouch, or even filled with doubts, it’s not an impediment. Not unless your job is to be a greeter at Disneyland or a radio DJ or a head shop owner.

​​Or who knows. Maybe you can succeed even in those careers, if you just get going. And if you just have the will to keep putting the one foot in front of the other, however grumblingly.

So much for inspiration. For practical marketing and copywriting ideas, get on my email newsletter.

Anatomy of a penis pill business success

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In early March of this year, I was listening to some Dan Kennedy seminar when Dan casually mentioned a penis pill company, out of Scottsdale, Arizona, that Gary Halbert used to write for, and that got busted by the Feds in the early 2000s.

I did some research.

​​I couldn’t find evidence connecting GH.

​​But I did find an NBC News article that said there was a company, called C.P. Direct, out of Scottsdale, Arizona, that sold “more than $74 million worth of pills that it claimed would enlarge penises or breasts, make the consumer taller or hairier — even sharpen his or her golf game.”

C.P. Direct got busted in 2002.

But they didn’t get busted for bogus claims, ineffective product, or lack of proof or evidence.

Instead, they got because of forced autoship and not giving people refunds.

The NBC News article concluded that “C.P. Direct would likely still be selling its pills today if it hadn’t illegally charged customers’ credit cards without reauthorization.”

Well, maybe.

Or maybe not.

Maybe if C.P. Direct had run a more legit business, at least in terms of not actually stealing from people, then there wouldn’t have been much of a business at all.

Maybe they would have had such high refunds and low reorders that even Gary Halbert’s magic front-end copy couldn’t save them.

And vice versa.

Just because Gary Halbert, if he did write the front-end copy for C.P. Direct, did create $74 million worth of sales of herbal supplements — “guaranteed to induce gross physical alterations of the human body” — well, that doesn’t mean that the copy was any good.

​​Maybe Gary’s copy was a total flop, but the fact that C.P. Direct could milk hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars from every naive customer, against the customer’s will, made the business profitable nonetheless.

My point being, there’s a lot of number porn out there, people who (truthfully) claim their copy has sold millions of this and trillions of that.

Or you can see ads that keep running in Newsmax or on Taboola, month after month.

But the fact is, the advertising you might be copying and studying from might not be great advertising after all. Even if it’s got hard numbers to back it up.

​​Well, at least it’s not great, unless you are also willing to copy the rest of the business, shady and illegal practices included.

And now the big question?

Are you happy with your size? Breasts or penis? If you’d like to increase and improve what you have, completely naturally, then join thousands of other satisfied readers and sign up for my email newsletter.