I broke the email chain yesterday

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This morning, reader Jesús Silva Marcano wrote to say:

Hey John!

Today when I saw that I didn’t have an email from you….

And after waiting a few hours…

I must admit a part of me was a little saddened.

Besides Ben Settle’s emails, yours are the ones I usually look forward to.

They never disappoint.

I hope all is well.

It’s true. I didn’t send out email last night.

I broke a chain going back to July 2020, when I skipped a few days because I was on vacation at the seaside, drinking quite actively, and generally celebrating and feeling high from having made a ton of money the previous few months, my first really big copywriting months.

But nothing exciting like that happened yesterday.

I had an email scheduled. I checked my inbox before I went to bed. But the email still hadn’t arrived.

I checked ActiveCampaign. It said my email was “Pending Review.”

I tried to stop the campaign so I could recreate it and send it again. It wouldn’t allow me. I tried again. No soap.

I contacted ActiveCampaign to ask what’s up.

No response.

I went to bed, figuring it would solve itself.

It didn’t.

This morning, my email from yesterday is still “Pending Review.” I can’t imagine why, because I wasn’t writing about any controversial or flaggable topics. (I do have an email about a certain kind of “gross body enhancement” coming up, but last night’s email waddn’t it.)

Oh well. The world doesn’t end if I don’t send out an email.

​​But it does spin a little faster. So it’s a shame I don’t have something to sell you right now.

In my experience, people today are starved for something — anything — real.

And when your readers witness you making a mistake, in real time, or getting involved in conflict, in real time, or failing to deliver on a public promise like a daily email, that’s more powerful and engaging than even the most personal stories you share.

And if I had, say, a training on writing faster, that would be perfect. I could end this email right here by saying something like:

“But you know what? Let’s talk copywriting. According to my extremely neat timekeeping, 72% of so-called “writing” really goes to editing. And things often don’t get delivered on time, or ever, because they are “Pending Review” by that finnicky, editing part of your brain. So if you don’t want to be at the whim and mercy of your own inner editing demon, if you want to meet all deadlines, if you wanna get projects done more quickly and make more money, then join me for the Faster Writing (and Editing) Workshop here blah blah…”

Well, maybe a little less ham-handed than that, but you get the idea.

If only I had the faster writing offer for sale right now, then the fact that ActiveCampaign is behaving like a lazy consular office processing my visa application… rather than as a for-profit business that has been taking my money for the better part of a decade… well, that would’ve all worked in my favor.

So keep this in mind if you have your own email list. Anything really real in your life, particularly that readers can experience and verify for themselves, makes for the pinnacle of engagement.

As for me, I got nothing. No gain from this ​event. ​Except to tell you that indeed I am ok, in case you were worried. And now that I’ve told you the background of all this, to maybe make a slightly stronger bond with you, so you get excited about getting my next email tomorrow, and decide to sign up for my email newsletter.

John Bejakovic writes only for the Letter

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I’ve got a quirky history lesson for you today. But before you run and hide, let me say this lesson is as valuable and as relevant as an NFT investing tip. Here goes:

The first full-page advertisement in the U.S. appeared in The New York Herald, on June 7, 1856. It repeated the same phrase nearly a thousand times, all the way down the page:

“Fanny Fern writes only for the Ledger”

The ad was taken out by the extravagant Robert Bonner, the owner of the Herald’s rival newspaper, The New York Ledger.

​​Bonner had hired a then-popular writer, Fanny Fern, to write a story for his newspaper at an astronomical $100 per column. And now he was advertising the fact, over and over, in a single ad, in his rival’s newspaper.

Result?

The circulation of The Ledger doubled, to nearly 50k.

Bonner didn’t repeat this exact ad in the future, but he kept his eccentric advertising practices to promote his newspaper. Sometimes he repeated a phrase in an ad over and over, sometimes he ran a full-page ad that was almost entirely empty.

His newspaper circulation grew and grew. Bonner died a millionaire, back when a million bucks could buy you a skyscraper or three.

So what’s the point?

Well, I won’t try to massage this little story into a stiff lesson for you. Rather, I’d like give you a meta-point:

A clear example or two, or fifty, are often more valuable than a bunch of rules.

And if you truly are interested in persuasion, influence, copywriting, and the like, then there’s an entire history of real-world experiments out there, just waiting for you to discover and rediscover.

Maybe you can reduce these experiments to theoretical rules. Or maybe, more profitably and usefully, you can just use them for new ideas you can imitate, sometimes verbatim, in your own marketing and influence efforts today.

Speaking of which:

My headline above says, “John Bejakovic writes only for the Letter.”

The Letter. Yes. That’s the name for my daily email newsletter. The John Bejakovic Letter. In case you want to join the growing circulation of this little rag, I still have a few copies available, and you can sign up to get one, on the regular, for free.

The gruesome adventures of Mussolini’s corpse

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On today’s date, April 28 1945, the leader of fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini, was executed by Italian partisans in a small town next to Lake Como. But it turned out death was only the beginning of the adventures of Mussolini’s corpse.

The next day, the corpse was taken to Milan. It was dropped off in a square recently renamed to honor 15 partisans killed by Mussolini’s forces.

There, on the ground, Mussolini’s corpse was kicked and spat upon by passersby.

The corpse was then hanged by its heels from an Esso gas station.

Hanging upside down, the corpse was stoned by an angry crowd. One woman fired five bullets into the corpse, one for each of her five sons who had been killed by Mussolini’s soldiers.

Mussolini’s body was eventually taken down, and buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery north of the city.

The end?

Oh no.

Next year, on Easter Sunday 1946, Mussolini rose from the grave, or rather, his corpse was dug up by three fascist sympathizers.

The decaying mass that was left of Mussolini was then kept in a trunk for over 10 months, and smuggled around from place to place.

​​Eventually, the Mussolini trunk made its way to a Franciscan monastery near the town of Pavia. There, the corpse was recaptured by Italian authorities.

The end?

You wish.

The new Italian government couldn’t decide what to do with Mussolini’s remains.

In fact, the government kept agonizing over this question for over ten (10) years.

I couldn’t find out exactly where Mussolini’s corpse was kept all this time. But the conclusion was that, after intense political deal-making, Mussolini was finally reburied, in 1957, in a crypt, with marble fasces on the side, in a cemetery in his home town.

The end, finally.

​​A gruesome story, right? And so… illogical.

I mean, the guy was dead. The war was over. Fascism had ended. Why all the fuss over what would happen to the rotting flesh of the man who had once ruled Italy and caused death and destruction?

Well, because that’s how our brains work. What I mean is…

It’s impossible for our brains to take in all of a complex historical process, even if it’s happening around us.

And while it’s not impossible, it’s certainly hard and unpleasant to keep an abstract concept like “fascism” in our minds for very long.

But a specific person… with a name… a title… and all the ready-made emotional reactions that we humans get in response to other people… well, that’s very easy and natural to keep in mind.

But forget all this stuff I just said. And just remember Benito Mussolini and his traveling corpse.

Because whether you want to promote an idea, or bury one, you will find it much easier to promote a person, or to execute one. Figuratively of course. And then to figuratively kick and spit on the corpse, and let it hang by its heels for all the world to curse.

By the way, do you hate Benito Mussolini? Or love Bill Burr?

Then you might like my email newsletter. You can try it out here.

Dude… you gotta read this email

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This morning I was idling on the Internet when I saw a clip of an MMA fight between all-time great Fedor Emelianenko and all-time loudmouth Chael Sonnen.

In the clip, Sonnen managed to get Emelianenko on the ground. Sonnen then did some fancy/silly move to get himself in trouble, with Emelianenko on top, raining punches down on Sonnen’s head.

But what really had me transfixed was looking at the ad on Sonnen’s shorts. It read:

DUDE WIPES

Dude wipes? It turns out to be a real thing. Disposable wet wipes for men, in masculine black packaging.

My first impression was that calling your intimate hygiene product “wipes” is already emasculating, and defeats all the manly branding.

But apparently I’m wrong. DUDE Wipes is a successful business. As proof:

They have many offers on their site beyond just wipes (DUDE bidet)…

They have endorsement deals with pro sports figures (pro golfer: “On the golf course and off it, I’m taking it to the hole with DUDE Wipes”)…

And on Amazon, various bundles of DUDE wipes have tens of thousands of reviews, almost all five-star, though with some caveats (“The wife is always reluctant to have them in the guest bath when we have company because of the, as she puts it, sophomoric name and black package”).

This brought to mind my long-simmering idea to create a business by taking a consumable product and applying it to an affinity or identity group.

The usual order in much of direct response is to take a niche and then figure out, what could we sell to them? What could we create and sell at a high-enough markup and with repeating revenue for long enough to make it worthwhile?

This system clearly works.

But the other way works also, and maybe even better. As Claude Hopkins put it, “It is a well-known fact that the greatest profits are made on great volume and small profit.”

So the idea is to take a consumable product which is a known seller to a mass audience, and brand it for a specific affinity or identity group.

I’ve already seen this done with coffee for Reformed Christians. That brand was called Reformed Roasters, and within two months of being launched, it was making $40k/month.

So why not a line of fine cheeses for militant atheists?

Or air fresheners for QAnon nuts?

Or dog food for dogs of heavy metal heads?

Maybe you say any of these ideas is arbitrary, and much more likely to fail than to work.

I’m sure you’re right. To make this work, you will need good marketing to get your Sunni Soda off the ground.

But if you have capital to invest, I happen to know a good marketer. And if you’re looking for a partner to help you create the next Pepsodent or Palmolive soap — for dudes — then sign up for my email list and then we can talk.

Never start a relationship with a commission-only arrangement

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A few days ago, I shared a Jeff Paul sales letter that tells the story of how Jeff dug himself into a deep hole, with $100k worth of debt, living in his sister-in-law’s basement, without a job, humiliated, scared, and unable to provide for his wife and two kids.

What happened to Jeff? How did he get trapped in this hole? In Jeff’s own words:

I got talked into a 100% commission job with a company in Philadelphia, while my wife and children were living here in Chicago. I stupidly allowed the company to talk me into moving my family to Philly, uprooting them from the only home they knew, away from Peggy’s large and close family, and all the kids’ friends.

Here’s the killer. Two weeks after Peggy and the kids moved into the home I bought with our last nickel, I found out the company was going under. Shutting the doors. Without paying me one cent of the six-figure commissions they owed me. (Because they weren’t paying me, and like an idiot I believed their lies of future money coming, I was using credit card advances to live on.)

I don’t know how true this story is in Jeff’s case. But it rings true enough, based on my experience.

I don’t mean I’ve ever racked up $100k of debt by accepting a commission-only job. But I’ve never made a single cent from such a job. And not for want of trying.

I’ve had three client arrangements that were commission-only from the start.

In each case, there were lots of stupid meetings, wasted weeks or months of time I could have spent on others things, and even free work that I did. And I never saw a cent from it.

Maybe it’s just been bad luck. Or maybe it’s the reverse of my “Why royalties are good for everyone” argument.

If a client has never paid you anything, and feels they never have to pay you anything until you make them some money, maybe they don’t take the project seriously. They become eager to drag their feet, or to have things done exactly how they imagine it, or to pursue dumb ideas, instead of taking your expert advice into consideration.

So what’s the point?

Well, all this is not to say commissions or royalties aren’t great. Or that commission-only arrangements can’t be great.

The fact is, the most money I’ve made to date from copywriting came from a commission-only arrangement.

But it came from an existing client, who had paid me a lot of money already for other work I was doing for him. The commission-only project was a bonus on top of that other work. ​​

On the other hand, whenever I started a new client relationship with working only on commission, it’s lead to nothing except the stress and hassle of eventually having to call it off — with the client being offended that I don’t want to keep working for them for free.

So should you just say no when somebody makes you a commission-only offer?

In my experience, it’s certainly better than saying yes.

​​Of course, you can also try to spin it a little. Set yourself up with a better deal than zero. But that’s a conversation for another time, and perhaps, for another Jeff Paul sales letter. In case you want to join that conversation, whenever it does happen, sign up for my email newsletter.

An Internet stranger offers to pick my brain

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A couple days ago, an Internet stranger wrote me to say he’s “pretty open” to having me do some free work for him.

He had seen a podcast I had done about ecommerce advertorials. He’s in the dropshipping space, is interested in advertorials, and would love to get on a call to “pick my brain for a few minutes.”

When I read this, I just raised my eyebrows. “Sounds like a great opportunity to do some free consulting,” I said to myself.

I replied to the guy to say I’m not taking on any client work at the moment, but if he is interested in hiring me, I can let him when I am taking on client work in the future.

And then I took a moment, and I lit up with satisfaction. Not because the guy was asking for something valuable for free, while offering nothing in exchange. I was just happy with the way I instinctively responded.

Here’s why this might matter to you:

Last autumn, I wrote an email where I said, never do anything for free. Especially give out advice.

The thing is, I have done things for free since. Including doling out free advice. Even in situations where I could have asked for money. Even though I knew what I was doing was not smart.

My point is this:

It takes time for a new dam to change the course of a river.

In my life, I’ve often found myself making personal development resolutions, working on them earnestly, not achieving much, or not a damn thing, and then getting exhausted and discouraged and quitting.

And then one day, once I had forgotten all about it, I found to my wonder and surprise that the change I wanted had happened somewhere along the way.

In time, I’ve grown to accept this slowness of change. I’ve stopped being frustrated about it. I’ve found it’s even something you can use to motivate yourself.

It was Bill Gates or Tony Robbins or Kermit the Frog who said something like, most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year, and underestimate what they can achieve in five.

Progress is not linear. It’s often not visible. Don’t let that stop you. At least that’s my free advice.

For more free advice, and more valuable things I don’t do for free, sign up for my email newsletter.

How to come up with email topics your list will love to read and not buy from

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I just got home from a beautiful, sunny, morning walk. Not only is it Sunday morning, but where I am right now, it’s Easter, which means the streets are blessedly empty. Just the sun, trees, birds, and occasional whining cat are out and about.

I got home filled with positive impressions and opened my laptop. YouTube asked — resume video?

Suddenly, a weight settled on my shoulders.

​​I have a habit of leaving music playing when I go out of the house. It happened this morning too, until YouTube paused it at some point. Now it was asking if I want to continue.

My finger lingered over the resume button. I could see the next song that would play. It was both appealing and repulsive:

Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street.

I’m telling you all this as an example of a real problem I’ve noticed in my life.

​​My mind is becoming a closed garden, with songs I have known before and humor and ideas I have known before as the only plants that have a chance to take root.

I’ve listened to Baker Street, by my estimate, some 13 million times in my life. Do I need to listen to it again? No, in fact, it’s become irritating. But do I want to listen to anything else, anything new? Not really.

I don’t have a solution to this problem.

​​Perhaps you have a solution for me.

Or perhaps you don’t. Perhaps just have the same problem, and feel a little excited that at least one other person shares your problem.

Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps you don’t have this problem at all, but you just found it curious to read that somebody could experience such a deep life crisis around the topic of Baker Street.

If any of these is true, then I guess I’ve done my job.

Because when I opened up my laptop, closed down YouTube (sorry Gerry), and got to work, I made a list.

​​It was titled, “10 problems I have in my life right now.”

Making this list wasn’t depressing. In fact was a relief to get it out of my head and on to the page.

#8 was the “closed garden” problem above.

#6 was that I have no email topic for today.

​​Well, at least that problem’s solved for now.

So maybe you can do the same. If you have to come up with ideas, topics, or content, start by making an honest list of problems you have in your life. And then pick one of those problems and write about it.

​​It always does well for me when I send out an email like that.

“You mean you make lots of sales like that?” you ask.

What, have you been reading my “10 problems” list?
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​​The answer is no, if you really must know. I don’t make sales like that, but that’s because I don’t have enough offers to sell. That’s a real problem in my life. Well, at least until I turn it into a topic for another email. If you want to read that when it comes out, or if you’re interested in copywriting and marketing, sign up to my email newsletter.

Selling drugs to kids

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IN ONLY SIX MONTHS, that formerly desperate man bought a $385,000 house with half down, and became a millionaire in less than a year. He also bought a vacation house, put away enough to cover his kids’ college educations, easily stopped his bad habits, and attained complete personal and financial freedom… all accomplished automatically, without effort or willpower!

That’s the back envelope copy from a direct mail sales letter written by one Jeff Paul.

​​Jeff was a student and protege of Dan Kennedy, and this sales letter is actually selling Dan’s Psycho Cybernetics program.

I’m sharing this copy with you for two reasons:

First, because I want to point you to Info Marketing Blog. It’s got a few decades’ worth of brilliant direct response ads, and smart and interesting commentary. And if you need proof of that, the guy who runs Info Marketing Blog, Lawrence Bernstein, was called out as a valuable resource during Gary Bencivenga’s farewell seminar by Gary Bencivenga himself.

Second, there’s a masterful marketing and copywriting lesson in those two sentences of copy above. It’s right there at the end:

“… automatically, without effort or willpower!”

When I look outside at the people I know… and when I look inside, at my own feelings and frustrations… I find this is what we all really really want, deep down.

Peace. No effort. Definitely no struggle, and no demands on our willpower. No opportunity for it to go wrong. Instead, all done automatically, by some mechanism outside of us.

That’s why smart marketers like Dan Kennedy and Jeff Paul, and millions of others like them, make those promises.

And if you want to sell, in big numbers, at high prices, you should make these promises too.

Only be careful those desires you stimulate in your sales copy don’t seep into your own subconscious.

Because in my experience, life is all about effort, about exerting your willpower, about getting things done yourself instead of sitting around and wishing they could be done automatically.

How exactly do you reconcile selling something to people that you wouldn’t consume yourself? It seems a little like going down to the elementary school each day to sell drugs to kids, while being religious about never allowing that filth near your own family.

I don’t have a good way to reconcile these things for you. But facts are facts. And if you want to see some market-tested facts, here’s Jeff Paul’s complete sales letter. It’s worth reading. So much so that I’ll even talk about it tomorrow.

Sign up for my email newsletter if you want to read that when it comes out. And here’s the link to the sales letter if you want to get a head start.

https://infomarketingblog.com/wordpress/jeff-pauls-greatest-story-selling-ad/

Misdirection is not illegal

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Last autumn, a conservative writer named Alexander Macris wrote about Florida governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis was planning a new state militia and he was facing a lot of blowback.

To which, Macris had this bit to say:

“If state defense forces are both constitutional and common, why the outrage? Part of the outrage is simply partisan, of course. If Ron DeSantis walked on water like Jesus to save a drowning child, the Daily Beast would report it as ‘DeSantis refuses to get wet to save drowning child.'”

I found that made-up Daily Beast headline funny and clever. It got me wondering why. So I put my finger on the page and traced out exactly what’s going on.

Here’s what I figured:
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Macris brings your attention to an unimportant detail (what De Santis wouldn’t or didn’t do)… to keep your attention from the actual, important, big thing (that he “walked on water like Jesus to save a drowning child”).

There’s a name for this type of thing. It’s called misdirection.

“Magic is misdirection. And misdirection is getting people to look at the wrong place at the right time.”

That’s a line from the 1978 movie Magic. I don’t know much about magic, though I love it. But I have heard pro magicians say that yes, magic is at core misdirection.

And it’s not just magic where misdirection has value. Writing too, like that fake Ron DeSantis headline above.

​​And if you’ve gone through my Copy Riddles program, then you’ve also seen A-list copywriters use misdirection to create intrigue and make sales. Like Gary Bencivenga did with this intriguing warning:

“If you’re a man, do you know why you should never wear a gold bracelet to a job interview?”

Well, do you? If not, I’ll tell you in a second how you can find out.

For now, my point is that misdirection is not just tricky, but it can be valuable, too. So keep an eye on it.

Or keep an eye on me. I’ve started collecting examples of misdirection. And maybe one day I will put them together into a little presentation, and show you how you can misdirect people’s attention, in your writing, with the snap of your fingers, for your benefit and maybe theirs.

You can help me get this done sooner. If you have any good examples of misdirection, anything that comes to mind, whether from magic, design, political PR, tabloid journalism, thriller novels, con artistry, standup comedy, or persuasive and influential writing, then send them my way.

In exchange, I’ll tell you the secret to Gary’s bullet above, in case you don’t know it already.

Oh, and sign up for my email newsletter. Bet you didn’t see that coming.

Should you specialize as a copywriter? Maybe you should generalize

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I talked to a successful business owner a short while ago. We got on the topic of Alex Hormozi’s book $100M Offers, and the exposure it’s brought to Hormozi.

“You know, you should put out a book like that,” I said to the successful business owner.

“Yeah man, for sure,” he laughed, “but who’s gonna do it?” And he looked at me and blinked expectantly.

I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter my immensely profound observation that business owners are busy. So even when some super valuable opportunity comes up, they might not be able to devote their time, heart, and brainpower to it.

My point for you is:

There’s a lotta fawning out there over the value of specialization for copywriters. But there’s equal value in generalization.

So if you’re a copywriter, then start providing solutions to business owners… instead of offering them a piece of the puzzle.

Propose the book… write the book… get it edited… get the cover designed… get the formatting done… write up the marketing materials… put a bow around all of it. And charge the business owner for all these steps.

Generalize, and you will soon be swamped with client work. And you’ll be praying for somebody somewhere to come and offer you some solutions… to make your own busy workdays a little less busy.

Last point:

I am putting together a guide about the business side of copywriting, called Copy Zone. It’s not out yet. But if you’d like to get notified when I do release it, sign up for my email newsletter here.