Send me your praise and admiration

by

When I was a teenager still living at home, a fixture in my mom’s kitchen was the Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine aka the George Foreman grill.

My mom spent a minimum of one hour each night cooking after she got home from work. The George Foreman grill was the only “high tech” gadget she ever used. I fondly remember the many hundreds of pounds of olive-oil basted chicken thigh she prepared on the George Foreman grill and fed me over the years.

A few days ago, I looked up the history of the George Foreman grill.

George was unwilling to promote it at first. “I’m not interested in toys,” he said. But he agreed after his wife made him a hamburger on the grill.

And good thing, too. The George Foreman grill has sold well over 100 million units to date. And George Foreman made an estimated $200 million in royalties from having his name — and signature — on each grill.

Most of those 100+ million units were sold through retail. But the George Foreman grill got its start with an infomercial.

Thanks to the wonder that is YouTube, I found the original 28-min George Foreman grill infomercial. I watched it. it’s honestly great — fun viewing.

And if like me you are interested in ideas and the history and development of ideas, this infomercial holds many valuable lessons, as long as you can spare 28 minutes and a bit of brainpower to write down notes.

Today I want to share one note I wrote down while watching the GF infomercial. It might seem obvious to you. But it was a revelation to me.

So, like any successful piece of direct response advertising, the GF infomercial has testimonials. The first batch of testimonials is what you might expect — about the product and what it will do for you.

But the second batch of testimonials has nothing to do with the product. Here, check it out:

TESTIMONIAL 1: “If George is behind anything, that will be the best thing for America. George would never advertise nothing that’s not good for America.”

TESTIMONIAL 2: “George Foreman and food. You can’t beat that. Because George is big on hamburgers. And he’s a big guy. So he’s a great person to find out about new product that has to do with food. I didn’t have any doubts when I knew George was promoting it.”

So that’s my tip for you for today:

People are easier to sell than products or ideas. But you still have to do some selling, even to sell a person.

So have testimonials not just about your offer and how good it is…

But also about who you are, and why that’s a good thing. And like George, you might find one day soon that there are millions of dollars dropping into your lap unexpectedly.

“Oh yeah?” you say. “You know, Bejako, I would consider buying into your tip, if only I trusted you more. If only I had some testimonials to sell me on you.”

Fair point. I have to admit I’ve been very, very slack about collecting testimonials for this newsletter, for my products, and for myself.

But I’ll change that going forward.

And if you want to help me kickstart my testimonial chopper, then hit reply and write me something nice.

If you enjoy these emails or you’ve gotten value out of my books or courses… you can write me that. That would be fine.

But what would be even finer if you write me and say, “If John is behind anything, then I’m sure it’s going to be good.”

​​Write me that you have no doubts if you know I’m promoting something.

​​Or even — if you can somehow stomach to do it — write me that I’m the best thing for America. When it comes to persuasion and influence at least.

Oh, and if you are not yet sure I’m the best thing for America… you might join many other smart and successful marketers and copywriters, and sign up for my email newsletter.

The secret pleasure of self-pity

by

A few days ago, I was walking down a promenade street. The street is on a very, very gentle slope. There was a little girl, maybe six years old, riding a little bicycle up the street towards me.

She started veering left and right on her bike. The gentle slope was getting to her. She came to a stop.

“Oof,” she said, “I just cannot… ride… any further.”

And she passed the back of her hand across her forehead, the way I guess she has seen her mom do a million times.

​​Then she looked around to see if any of her family were there to witness her suffering. But they were too far down the street, and they were busy talking to each other.

For some reason, this scene got me thinking about the exquisite pleasure of feeling sorry for yourself. Perhaps because self-pity is an emotion I indulge in pretty often.

I was wondering what it is. Why is it such a pleasurable sensation? After all, self-pity seems to be completely self-defeating.

Maybe you have an explanation for me. The best that I could come up with is that self-pity, like so much of the human brain, can be explained by our prime directive to think less.

Like for example, how we rely on social proof, so we don’t have to investigate and make up our own minds.

Or how we jump to extremes so we can ignore the full spectrum of options. Like my favorite question, “What’s your number one tip for succeeding as a copywriter?”

And this same drive to think less is why I figure we feel pleasure when we feel sorry for ourselves. Because it’s pleasurable to come to a stop when the going stops being fast, cheap, or easy.

All of which might sound like I’m getting cynical on you, or that I’m trying to bring you down.

No. Quite the opposite.

Because I have this belief that, while we come preprogrammed into life… and while we remain highly programmable throughout life by outside influence… we also have individual agency.

In other words, you might often find yourself giving in to self-pity. But you don’t have to give in — at least not every time, and not in the long term.

Like that little girl on the bike, you can face forward again, exhale with resignation, set your sights on the top of the street, put your hands back on the handle bars, and start pedaling again, back up the gentle slope.

On the topic of bicycling:

I write an email newsletter every day. It rarely has to do with bicyling, but it frequently has to do with marketing, copywriting, and influence. In case you like, you can sign up for it here.

The two kinds of people

by

In a recent opinion piece for the Washington Post, journalist David Goodhart explains his idea that the world is divided between “somewhere” people and “anywhere” people.

​​Anywhere people, Goodhart writes,

“tend to be educated and mobile; they value openness, autonomy and individual self-realization. They tend to have careers rather than jobs and “achieved identities” based on academic and professional success.”

By contrast, somewhere people are

“more rooted and less well-educated; they tend to value security, familiarity and group attachments (national or local). Their sense of themselves is more likely to come from the place they come from and the local ways of life they are attached to, which means that they are more likely to be discomforted by rapid social change.”

So I want you to ask yourself. How do you feel right now?

Did you mentally put yourself into one of those categories in the past moment?

​​Did you think of other people who fit one of these two categories?

​​Did you maybe have a moment of insight, as if to say, “Wow, i never thought of it that way… but this could explain a lot.”

I’ve written before about the power of creating a syndrome or a disease as a way to get people to feel a moment of insight.

The classic example — the one marketer Rich Schefren likes to use — is ADHD.

​​Maybe you’ve gone through life, distracted and flaky, starting but never finishing projects, jumping from one thing to the next. You’re dissatisfied, but you can’t put your finger on what the problem really is.

And then somebody comes and tells you there’s a syndrome — a collection of symptoms — that has a medical name. Maybe this person also points out you have a few others symptoms, once you didn’t even notice, but which can be explained by this new diagnosis.

Suddenly, you feel enlightened. You have a new handle on the problems in your life. Hope swells up inside of you. Maybe all these different bad issues can be solved, you think, and at once!

So that’s one way to create insight. A new syndrome.

An extension, which can be equally as powerful, is to create a partition. To categorize, not just one group of people, but everybody, as either A or B.

That’s what’s going on with the somewhere people or anywhere people above. In more marketingy circles, there’s Rich Schefren’s partition of the world into business owners and opportunity seekers… or Andre Chaperon’s distinction between marketers who are chefs, and those who are merely cooks.

Maybe you haven’t heard me talk about insight before, so you’re wondering what the good of all this is. I’ll explain that in full detail in an upcoming book, all about the use of insight in marketing.

​​But if you want the situation in a nut — insight is a powerful feeling, just like desire. And just like desire, it can stimulate action.

Of course, just because something feels insightful, that doesn’t make it true.

I recently wrote about how I don’t believe in that biggest and most popular partition of the world — between introverts and extroverts. I feel the same about this somewhere/anywhere partition, even more so.

My point being, partitions, syndromes, and insight are powerful techniques of influence. We are all susceptible to them.

Well, almost all of us.

One large part of the population is what I call “insight-unaware” people. These people can be manipulated at will by techniques of insight. But a small part of the population is what I call “insight-aware.” And those people…

… those people often enjoy other essays I write. If that’s you, then sign up to my email newsletter.

“Don’t have the right mindset” to learn the craft

by

A few days ago, a long-time reader wrote to me. He first signed up for my email newsletter in 2019. I hadn’t heard from him in a while, so I asked him how his copywriting career is going.

​​He replied:

“As for the copywriting part, I’m still doubting myself because I’ve come to believe I don’t have the right mindset to learn the craft. I’m not disciplined enough and get easily distracted… And most of all, I lack confidence, because I still believe not being a native is an impediment to writing in English. The good news is: I’ve decided not to give up :-)”

As Mark Ford wrote recently, if you have what it takes, success should be a lay-up.

​​In my experience as a copywriter, that means all you have to do is take on small jobs at small pay to start, deliver on those jobs, continue to develop your skills, and increase the scale of jobs you take on and the money you’re paid for them.

Simple, right?

Well, as the Good Book says, broad is the way that leads to destruction. There are many swamps, quicksand pits, walls of brambles, and patches of stinging nettle and poison ivy that can show up in your way.

The first of these, as my long-time reader wrote above, is being afraid to even get started.

​​But there are others that come up also, even once you’re well on the path. I’ve come across some of them myself, and I’ve seen and heard other copywriters who had or have runins with some of these traps.

A few people have written to ask me about my Copy Zone offer, about succeeding in the business of copywriting. It’s behind schedule, and one reason is that I wanted to address the most common and the most dangerous of these quicksand pits and traps.

Because the best advice in the world is only a part of the story — one path that worked for somebody once, because they didn’t get stuck in the same traps that you might get stuck in.

But let me leave you with something concrete and maybe useful:

In my experience, action >>> mindset. It’s much easier and more effective to change your behavior than to change the way you think and feel.

That’s not a call to “just do it.”

​​Well, ideally, yes — just do it. But if you can’t force yourself to just do it, in spite of repeated tries, then just do something. Create some sort of change in your behavior, whatever that may be. You might just create a real change in your life — and even in your beliefs.

But actually, there’s something else also, which trumps changes in behavior… just as much as changes in behavior trump changes in mindset. But this email is running long, so I’ll save that for another time, or perhaps another place.

In the meantime, if you’d like to sign up for my email newsletter, you can do so here.

Who wants to be a billionaire?

by

The oldest rum brand in the world, and also the oldest living business in Barbados, is Mount Gay Rum.

The Mount Gay distillery, sitting in the middle of wind-blown sugar-cane fields, dates back to 1703. For hundreds of years now, Mount Gay Rum has been a favorite of the pirates, sailors, and tax evaders who landed in Barbados.

When you look at the oldest businesses in other countries around the world, the picture is similar:

Ireland – Sean’s Bar, founded in the year 900

China – Ma Yu Ching’s Bucket Chicken House, founded in 1153

Ukraine – Drohobych Salt Mine, founded in 1250

Looking at businesses that are still running after a few hundred years or more, you will find lots of small breweries… small inns… small mints… small mills… small mines… and an occasional bell foundry thrown in.

Which led author Ted Gioia, who wrote about this topic recently, to conclude:

“You might assume that the best corporate survival strategy is to get bigger and bigger, but empirical evidence tells a completely different story. These long-term survivors are far more likely to be small, focused companies that do one thing very well, rather than ambitious growth-oriented megacorporations.”

Is Gioia right? I don’t know. But it resonated with me. And so I want to warn you:

A business owner recently tried to motivate me into working with him. “This could be a billion dollar company,” he said, “and you can be a part of it!”

I didn’t say so at the time, but I shuddered at the thought of being part of a billion-dollar company.

Who wants to be a billionaire? My idea of being rich is having more money at the end of each month than I had at the beginning — without scrimping, scrounging, or worrying along the way.

I know that when I don’t work, I get depressed. So I’m more interested in enjoying what I do, and being able to stick with it for the long term, than in making a lot of money and cashing out.

So now that you know that, it’s time to make a decision to avoid my email newsletter or not.

​​You might be wasting your time by signing up to my newsletter. What’s worse, you might be exposed to dangerous ideas that steer you away from your primary goal, in case that goal is to get very rich.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for enjoyable work, for the long term, and if you’re ok focusing on one thing and doing that very well, then it might make sense to sign up.

Who knows?

Maybe I can give you good ideas so you can run a business that you enjoy.

​​Or maybe, even so you can build a little legacy. So a hundred years from now, your great-great-grandkids are still running the direct response brewery you start today… while pointing proudly to your picture on the wall.

If you’re interested here’s how to sign up.

Operation “Income Illusion” comes to a close

by

Back to business as usual? I’ve got an industry update for you today:

Back in December of 2020, I wrote an email about operation “Income Illusion.”

That clever name was what the FTC called its sting operation against a few direct response businesses, most notably Raging Bull, a big and successful financial publisher at the time.

The thing is, when the FTC hunts down direct response businesses, they often do so in really flagrant cases of fraud.

​​But the case against Raging Bull was… worrying. Because it was more basic.

​​This is what the FTC said Raging Bull had done wrong:

“The defendants claimed in their pitches that consumers don’t need a lot of time, money, or experience, and that the global coronavirus pandemic represents a great time to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to learn their secret trading techniques, claiming in one ad that the pandemic ‘…might be the most exciting opportunity in decades!’ The defendants also made claims like ‘Learn how you could DOUBLE or TRIPLE your account in One Week!'”

In other words, the FTC took issue with Raging Bull over pretty standard direct marketing practices. Making big claims… using the most flattering testimonials… appealing to people’s greed and sloth.

Well, operation Income Illusion has concluded, at least in the case of Raging Bull. The verdict is in:

1. Raging Bull will have to pay $2.425 million to the FTC.

2. Raging Bull can’t keep making claims about potential earnings without having written evidence that those claims are typical for consumers.

3. Raging Bull can’t keep claiming that investors will be successful regardless of their experience, the amount of capital they have to invest, or the amount of time they spend trading.

Now I don’t know how much money Raging Bull was making back in 2020. But from what little I do know about financial publishing, $2.425 million is what a successful financial promo can pull in a week.

Also, I’m not a lawyer. But again, from what little I know about FTC regulations about marketing, points 2 and 3 above were already law, and are nothing new.

So to me, this entire verdict sounds like an ineffective elementary school teacher pointing to the sign on the wall and handing out detention to the bad kid in the back of the class. “How many times do I have to tell you Billy! No chewing gum! You’re driving me crazy!”

So what will be the consequences of this?

I’m terrible at predicting the future. But personally, I feel like it’s just back to business as usual, if that ever stopped.

After all, a few Agora imprints had a similar verdict made against them almost exactly a year ago. And yet, it hardly stopped them, or anybody else in the industry, from claiming that their next promo “… might be the most exciting opportunity in decades!”

So that’s all I got for you today.

Tune in tomorrow, where I’ll tell you about a little-known statistical anomaly… that’s allowing a small group of American patriots (as well as patriots of a few other nationalities)… to DOUBLE or TRIPLE the odds that their business will be a long-running success.

You are not an introvert

by

In my last-ever real job, some 10 years ago, I was a manager at a 100-person IT company.

Well, not really a manager. I was a scrum master, which might sound either like some kind of S&M role or a made-up demon name from Ghostbusters.

So each each week, I the scrum master and our teams “product owner” (another Ghostbusters-themed managerial role) had to meet with the owner of the company to give him an update on how we were progressing.

We had been working for over a year, building a large piece of software that was one day supposed to be sold to big pharma companies like Glaxo Smith Kline.

But it wasn’t ready yet. Or anywhere close to ready. Our team wasn’t making any money. We were just a giant drain on company resources.

So when we sat down with the owner of the company, he gave us a weary look.

“Tell me guys,” he said a little bitterly, “how many sales have you made this week?”

I put on my straight face. And I shrugged my shoulders as if to suggest it’s all relative. “Do you mean the week starting this Monday,” I said, “or starting Sunday?”

The owner of the company locked his eyes on me. He squinted for a second.

​​And then he brightened and started to laugh, the joke being that we had never made any sales and it was doubtful we ever would. “All right all right,” he said with a smile, “at least tell me how the development is going.”

Now I don’t have a life history of joshing and ribbing and joking with people who have authority over me.

But I did it in this case, and it worked out well.

The reason I did it — the reason the joke came naturally, at the right moment, on its own — was that the previous few days, I had started walking around town, approaching girls on the street, complimenting them, and even asking them out.

On the one hand, approaching unfamiliar girls in the middle of the street, often in the middle of a crowd, and starting a conversation — well, it was immensely hard.

But it was also very liberating. Literally. There were parts of my brain that I didn’t even know were there that suddenly became active and alive.

And that’s how I found myself spontaneously teasing my boss, and instantly turning him from a bitter to a good mood.

My point being that over the past few years or the past decade, there’s been a lot of celebrating of introverts, and a lot of proud ownership of being an introvert.

​​Some people even take a holier-than-thou attitude to it, and claim that they alone are the real introverts, while others are just poser-introverts.

Whatever. I’d like to suggest to you that if you think you are an introvert — even a real, natural introvert, the way I thought of myself for years, and which I had very hard evidence for — it’s only one configuration of the person you can be.

Clinging to the idea you are an introvert is little like saying you are a sitting person. Because whenever you see an empty chair, you are tempted to sit in it, and when you do sit, you find it comforting. And then, concluding from that, “Oh no, I’m not a walking type. I just can’t. It drains me. I’m a sitting person.”

And my bigger belief, if you care to know it is this:

You are lots of things. You have different abilities and resources, including those you are not aware of, until you put ourselves into a situation to make use of them.

​​Yes, it might be immensely hard at first. But it can also be liberating. Literally.

Ok, on to business:

If you are looking for more ideas like this, or if you are interested in psychology, marketing, and copywriting, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

For your swipe file: The first Franklin Mint sales letter I’m sharing with you

by

The Franklin Mint, one of the most successful and profitable direct response companies of all time, has just created its first blockbuster.

Well, not really just. It was more like in 1970. But the following point still stands:

You, as a current reader of the John Bejakovic Letter, are the first to be informed of this Franklin Mint blockbuster.

All right, again, not really the first, but the first this year, probably. Bear with me, okay, because…

Sales letters by the Franklin Mint have always been very popular with collectors. And it is interesting to note that many of these sales letters hide tremendously valuable direct response tactics and ideas.

​​The limited first runs of these sales letters, within just the first few weeks, brought in $1 million and more — even though they were short, often just a few pages each, and were not written by big-name copywriters.

Take for example the first Franklin Mint sales letter I want to share with you. ​It brought in 18,321 orders at $100 each, for a total of $1,8321,000 in sales.

​​Remarkably, it did so with just one page of copy — nine short paragraphs comprising 394 words.

​​And yet these few words featured subtle psychology. And they contain the first instance, in my experience, of a remarkable persuasion technique I would like you to see.

There will undoubtedly be a great demand for this sales letter from seasoned sales letter collectors and professional swipe file sellers.

​​But since this letter came out in 1970, it is hard to obtain, and cannot be found in any Google Docs folder or any website specializing in copywriting.

Consequently, the prestigious swipe files that contain this sales letter will be very limited in number.

Furthermore, I am only sharing this sales letter with established readers of my newsletter — and I’m only doing it for the next 24 hours, until Tuesday, Mar 8 2022, at 8:52pm CET.

Therefore, if you would like to add this sales letter to your own collection, please be sure you sign up to my newsletter within the next 24 hours. You can do so here. Once you get my welcome email, hit reply, and I will send you the Franklin Mint sales letter.

Not getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity

by

A few days ago, I had the cool idea to create a referral program for this newsletter, something like the Morning Brew has.

So if you refer one person, maybe you get an “Insights & More” sticker… for three referrals you get a fridge magnet… for five, you get a coffee mug, because nothing motivates action like a free coffee mug.

I found this idea addictingly attractive, much like the idea of having enough money in the bank to live off interest alone.

So I started to fantasize:

“All I really have to do is get one person to refer me to four others… and then two of those four to refer me to eight others… and then four of those eight…”

Pretty soon, I figured, my list would exceed the total number of atoms in the known universe.

But in spite of this geometric growth potential, I won’t be implementing this referral program now, and probably not ever.

I’ll tell you why. Maybe it will help you to get more value out of your time, and save yourself the stress and frustration of going down blind alleys.

I recently started a 4/4 value/time system for new ideas.

I rate each idea on a 1-4 scale for its possible value. 1 is no value or doubtful. 2 is certain but small. 3 is large value. 4 is “should have done it already.”

And similar for time. 1 is “ongoing project without clear scope or timeliness.” 2 is weeks or months to complete. 3 is hours or days. 4 is “can do it now.”

So every idea that springs out of my head now gets evaluated on these 1-4 scales.

The referral program got a 1/2. The value is doubtful. The time to implement it would probably be on the order of weeks.

So no to the referral program, but that’s ok. I’ve got lots of other ideas, including some that warrant a 4/4.

The bigger point being, you have to be willing to let things not get done.

The fact is, and I’ve seen this in my own life, it’s possible to achieve transformations very quickly.

But in order to do that, you have to focus on the one or two things that really make a difference. The way you get the energy and time to do those things regularly is to kill off cool but distracting ideas.

So there you go.

Use my 4/4 system. Or come up with your own. But figure out which things you can leave undone today, and most likely, forever.

And then watch as your success starts to bubble and mushroom to unseen levels… like money in the bank that compounds faster than you can take it out.

And if you need more ideas to help with your productivity:

You might like my daily email newsletter. I write about marketing, copywriting, and personal development. You can sign up for it here.

Glorious past and a glorious future — but the present…

by

After I finished high school, I worked in a bookstore for a year.

One night, while I was working the register, I noticed we had these chocolate-covered coffee beans for sale.

I grabbed a bag, ripped it open, and threw one of these suckers into my mouth.

Of course, it was sweet and smooth chocolate on the outside. But when I bit through it, I got to the bitter, chalky coffee bean in the middle.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Ok, no problem. I just had another chocolate-covered coffee bean — and the bad taste was instantly fixed.

The sweet chocolate on the outside took care of the bitterness left lingering from earlier.

But then again, I was left with that charcoal-like coffee bean in the middle.

The rest of the evening was a blur. When I came to, hours later, I noticed a half dozen empty bags of chocolate-covered coffee beans all around me. I was sweating, scratching my face, glancing furiously at customers who avoided making eye contact with me.

I hadn’t thought about this scene for years but for some reason it connected to a quote I read recently. It comes from Eric Hoffer who wrote:

“There is no more potent dwarfing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future.”

Hoffer was writing about how leaders of mass movements get people to make big sacrifices. We were great once, these leaders say, and we will great again one day. Whatever is happening right now is nothing in the cosmic scale of history.

This attitude is effective at the mass movement level because it is effective at the individual level. At least for the right profile of person.

For example, I personally had a big realization over the past year.

​​I realized I spend a lot of time daydreaming about how glorious life will be after I just achieve a few more things. And I wince when I think back on the times when I was more productive, successful, or happy than I am right now.

The fact is, that’s how I feel much of the time, regardless of what’s going on in my life externally.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you that it’s not worthwhile working to achieve anything.

​​The fact is, working towards a goal is one of the sure-fire ways I’ve found to feel positive in life.

But what I am telling you is:

You’ve gotta learn to enjoy the present now, as much as you can. This includes the process of working to achieve anything.

Otherwise, you might come to, years later, with a half dozen completed projects all around you… and find yourself sweating, scratching your face, and thinking furiously of the next fix that can take the bad taste out of your mouth.

And now for business:

If you are working to achieve anything, you might find you need good marketing and writing ideas to help your project become a success. In that case, you might like my newsletter, because these are topics I write about on most days. You can sign up here.