What ARGs and QAnon can teach us about marketing

by

Two days ago, I sent out an email with a simple engagement device:

I promised to give away a story with a marketing moral, in exchange for people writing in and telling me their zodiac sign. (Virgos came out on top, by the way. And pisces. So few aquarii.)

I got inspired to do this by hearing Dan Kennedy say he’s been making his own engagement devices simpler and simpler with each passing year. “Send us a piece of paper with a big black mark on it… and you win!” (Even so, I had a few birds-of-paradise write me to say, “I don’t do horoscopes. Can I still have the story?”)

This is part of a general trend.

“Reduce friction,” many high-level marketers will tell you. Tell stories that are as widely appealing as possible. Make your writing as simple as possible. Echo your prospect’s values back to him as clearly as possible.

Well, that’s one way to do it.

But I read interesting article today about the exact opposite way. The article was written by Adrian Hon, who is a successful game designer who has influenced the lives of millions of people.

Hon compared his own field, augmented reality games, with the allure of QAnon and the world of conspiracy theories. The conclusions were these:

1. “But there’s always been another kind of entertainment that appeals to different people at different times, one that rewards active discovery, the drawing of connections between clues, the delicious sensation of a hunch that pays off after hours or days of work. Puzzle books, murder mysteries, adventure games, escape rooms, even scientific research – they all aim for the same spot.”

2. “Online communities have long been dismissed as inferior in every way to ‘real’ friendships, an attenuated version that’s better than nothing, but not something that anyone should choose. Yet ARGs and QAnon (and games and fandom and so many other things) demonstrate there’s an immediacy and scale and relevance to online communities that can be more potent and rewarding than a neighbourhood bake sale.”

3. “The same has happened with modern ARGs, where explainer videos have become so compelling they rack up more views than the ARGs have players (not unlike Twitch).”

The point I take away from this is that people will get fanatically involved in things that require work, struggle, and uncertainty. Because it creates a thrill. And it gives them a feeling of agency.

Second, you can now make a world for your prospects that’s more stimulating and more real than any experience they’ve had before.

And third, if you’re a really calculating type, you can have your cake and eat it too. Because if you set out to create an experience for the engaged, rabid core of your audience… the people who play along with your complex and challenging world-building… well, the passive-but-profitable remainder will still follow along.

But why am I spoon-feeding you these ideas?

Perhaps you are the kind of person who gets what I’m talking about.

Maybe want to discover and experience some things yourself.

In that case, here’s the link to Hon’s article. It’s not a recipe for world-building. But is an entry point into Hon’s world. And it might be just the type of thing to help you crack this puzzle one day:

https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qanon/

The fascist cokehead who raised me

by

How foolishly inconsistent of me.

On April 7 of this year, I wrote an email promoting the idea that you should give your prospects a menu of options. I quoted from Jonah Berger’s book The Catalyst:

But give people multiple options, and suddenly things shift.

Rather than thinking about what is wrong with whatever was suggested, they think about which one is better. Rather than poking holes in whatever was raised, they think about which of the options is best for them. And because they’ve been participating, they’re much more likely to go along with one of them in the end.

Reasonable, right?

Except, only a short while earlier, on February 28, I sent out an email with the exact opposite message. The subject line for that was “The best copywriting tactic ever.” It was inspired by an article I’d read in Scientific American by neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. The email concluded:

The world is complicated. Too many choices. Too much information. That’s why we seek out extremes, to make our lives easier. And that’s something you can use to make your copy not better, but best.

So one email is basically telling you to give your prospects a choice… the other email is telling you to give them no choice.

How to reconcile these two ideas?

I don’t know. Maybe you can do it. I haven’t tried. And I won’t, because I’ve got better things to do. Like preparing for the second call of my Influential Emails training.

The first call was all about writing and persuasion techniques that I use regularly — and that anybody else can use and profit from as well.

But this second call is more personal. It will include some of my own writing and thinking quirks.

Such as for example, the contradiction in my two emails above. The reason I’m ok with this contradiction is because of a third email I wrote.

That third email was about David Bowie and an infuriatingly inconsistent interview he gave to Playboy magazine in 1976. (1976 was the height of Bowie’s cokehead era. A big brouhaha emerged after the interview because Bowie said during it, “I believe very strongly in fascism.”)

This Bowie email is the most influential thing I’ve ever written.

Not because it got me any sales… or any interest from important people in the industry… or even any engagement from readers on my list. In fact, as far as I remember, nobody even commented on this email.

But the ideas in that email had the biggest influence on how I personally write. And not just emails, but influential writing more broadly.

You might think I’m just advocating being provocative in your thinking and writing. It goes deeper than that, at least in my mind.

In any case, if you want to read that short email about David Bowie, so you can see if it will have any influence on you, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/being-authentic-is-overrated/

It’s good whether it’s good or not

by

Dan Kennedy was in the back of the room, getting coffee and a donut before one of his seminars. One of the attendees, a guy named Charlie, sidled over and picked up a donut also.

“I’m really looking forward to this,” Charlie said to Dan. “It’s gonna be good. It better be good!”

The unspoken point was that Charlie, like everybody else in the room except Dan, had paid a ton of money to be there. 10-15 grand. The seminar better be worth it.

Dan Kennedy brushed some powdered sugar off his mustache. He took a sip of coffee.

“How good I am won’t matter much,” he said. “It’s a combination of the who… the expectation… the price paid… the pre-event involvement. Now the expectation is so high, it’s good whether it’s good or not.”

I thought this was really profound. Maybe… because I had a similar thought a few days ago. And whenever I find people who echo my thoughts back to me, I tend to think they are profound. It must be some ego thing.

In any case, you might think I’m telling you to position and “pre-sell” your products or services. Or to sell them to the right “who.”

That would definitely be a valuable lesson.

But what really stuck out to me is what Dan said about pre-event involvement.

Adequate involvement can make your products or services good whether they are good or not. And here’s something extra you might not have thought of:

The same is true of your copy.

I have a little story to share with you that explains just what I mean.

It ties in very nicely to this Dan Kennedy snapshot. It touches on where I think marketing is going in the future. And it might be valuable to you if you create front-end funnels, or if you write emails to drive back-end sales.

So here’s the deal:

Sign up to my email newsletter.

When you get the confirmation email, hit reply and and let me know your sign. Yeah, you know, your horoscope. Libra, virgo, taurus.

I’ll use this information to customize this story so you get the biggest result out of it. And I’ll send it back to you in a personal email.

The only way I could make this more valuable to you is to charge you for it. But I think you will find this custom story good, even at this current low price of free. So get going — our team of crack astrologers is standing by.

Suicidally depressed copywriter tells you how to have more fun

by

“Freelance copywriting changed my life. I went from making 30 grand a year to making 200 grand a year in a year and a half. That changed my life.”

I was talking today to a very successful copywriter who sells his own products. (Not the guy who said the quote above. We’ll get to him in a second.)

The copywriter I was talking to called me out on the fact that I seem indifferent about promoting myself and my list.

And it’s true. One reason is because I do client work. Client work makes me money, and so I don’t rely on my list for an income. But client work also takes up my time, so I don’t have as much drive to promote myself.

“When I was a copywriter making 20 grand a month, I was hustling every day for that 20 grand. I was trading time for money.”

Once my conversation with the very successful copywriter wound down, it was time to write this email. So I started shuffling through notes for an idea to share with you.

And it just so happened that after a handful of shuffling, I came across an interview I’d listened to last year. A second very successful copywriter, also selling his own products.

“My absolute best year as a freelance copywriter I made, I think, $350,000. My worst year as a product owner, which was a few years ago, when I could not work, when I was suicidally depressed, and I was so sick I could barely get out of bed and I was basically crippled, I made $400,000. But I didn’t do any work. I think I wrote one sales letter that year.”

Maybe you can guess from that quote who said it. It’s Chris Haddad.

Chris is​​ who I quoted at the top and throughout today’s email. He’s also somebody I found myself subconsciously imitating on more than one occasion (hello horror advertorials).
​​​
So let me leave you today with a bit of advice from Chris. Or really, am I just telling for my own benefit? In any case, here’s what Chris says:

“The biggest piece of advice I give copywriters is start being a product owner instead. I only wish I had done that 3 years earlier. I would have made a lot more money. And it’s a lot more fun.”

And if you want to get on my list — or not, it’s still up to you, no pressure — here’s where you can sign up.

How to make an Inner Ring morra alive

by

This morning I drove about 20 miles to a little coast town where I used to spend my childhood summers. Excepting one quick driveby six years ago, it was my first time back since I was 11.

The place was unrecognizable. Built up, and polished, and deforested. It almost made me physically sick to walk around, the modern reality at such odds with what I remember.

But one thing was still comfortingly the same.

At a sunny seaside bar, on a Saturday morning at around 11am, there was a group of old men.

They were throwing down hand signals on the table and yelling at each other. Numbers, corrupted from Italian:

Šije!

Šete!

Šije!

Šije!

It’s an old game. In Italian, it’s called morra. In Croatian, šije-šete (bastardized Italian for six-seven).

The game is basically like rock-paper-scissors, but with numbers instead of rocks, and five options instead of just three.

I read a bit about the history of morra. It was apparently played even in Roman times. For the past century, it has been banned in much of Italy because it’s considered gambling and, more important, because it seems to lead to drunken knife fights.

And yet, the game lives on. A short while ago, a video went viral on YouTube, showing 9-year-old kids playing morra with full fury. It’s just what men in these parts do. And these boys, at 9 years old, know it, and they are getting ready.

I’ve written before about the Inner Ring.

It’s a powerful motivator. A big part of what it means to be human.

We want to belong to a community, or to a dozen overlapping communities.

In the ancient, precorona world, these things happened spontaneously — work cliques, friend groups, drinking buddies.

Today, the need for the Inner Ring is serviced online in the form of masterminds, lairs, and various kinds of membership programs.

But here’s the thing:

A lot of these online communities suck. One reason is that they are missing rituals.

Rituals are enjoyable for their own sake.

But rituals also keep the structure of the Inner Ring.

Everybody performs the ritual because everybody else performs it, and nobody wants to fall out of the Inner Ring by being a drag.

Men around here play šije-šete because it’s fun and it’s competitive and because they can get a free drink out of it. But also, because a giant and frightening void starts to open up if they don’t play when their buddies do.

So that’s what I’m suggesting to you too.

Maybe you have an online community you run already. Or maybe, like me, you’re just thinking about creating one.

​​In either case, think about rituals you can introduce to give your community some structure and coherence. Even if they lead to drunken knife fights on occasion. It’s a small price to pay for unity and the wonder of the Inner Ring.

Want inside my own Inner Ring? Oh no, it’s not so easy. But the first step is to join my email newsletter. You can do that here.

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?

by

Are you ready to be outraged or maybe alarmed?

Then let me tell you about the research of one Alessandro Pluchino. He’s a mathematician at the University of Catania.

Pluchino’s research was just reported in MIT Technology Review. The article is titled, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

It turns out it’s all about luck. Rich people aren’t any more talented or hard-working.

We know this because Pluchino created a computer simulation. His simulation recreated the real-world distribution of wealth. And within this simulation, it’s chance that makes people rich.

Little-known fact:

I spent a good number of years in academe. One reason I left was I didn’t like the taste of cooked science like the above.

The recipe is simple.

Start with a culturally and politically attractive premise. For example, “wealth is undeserved.” And then find a technical argument to back that premise up.

And then a bit later, say in 2022, send out your sack-carrying bureaucrats to people’s doors to confiscate any extra grain or crypto profits that accumulated over the past 12 months.

If anybody even thinks to complain, have your bureaucrats pull out the science paper and start waving it around.

Make people feel guilty, small-minded, and ignorant for not doing what the state asks. After all, nobody really deserved that surplus in the first place — the science tells us so.

I’d like to give you another explanation of why you’re not rich, even if you’re so smart.

It’s based on uncooked science. It has nothing to do with luck. And it’s more empowering than Pluchino’s conclusion above.

Here’s the upshot:

You’re not rich because you’re not focused on money.

Maybe you’re focused on building up your skills or services, and waiting to become so good they can’t ignore you.

Maybe you’re focused on doing what you’re told — the next diploma, the next promotion, the next opportune moment.

Or maybe you’re focused on entirely other things — like playing badminton or reading books about religion.

Whatever the case, you’re not rich because your focus wanders elsewhere. Bring your focus to money, and watch it start to multiply.

How do we know this?

Like I said, science. Specifically, a crossover study of one. One person’s controlled scientific experiment of many years of not focusing on money… and not making much of it, except from occasional windfalls…

Followed by a few months of focusing on money and… well, I’ll tell you more in the coming weeks and months how that’s been working out for me.

Meanwhile, if you want to get rich — not today, not tomorrow, but maybe some time soon — then start focusing. And start keeping an eye out for those sack-carrying bureaucrats.

My exception that disproves the #1 copywriting rule

by

I feel no shame about the story I’m about to tell you. I just feel a quiet and pleasing smugness for being able to say, “I’m not wrong. You’re wrong. And I can prove it.”

About a year and a half ago, I got an invitation to work with some very successful young copywriters.

They wanted me to write emails for them, but they didn’t want to pay so well. Instead, they thought of a creative way to sweeten the deal:

Being very successful, expert copywriters, they offered to critique my emails on top of the stumpy fee they would pay me.

As a show of good will, they asked me to send them some copy I had written, so they could show me the depth of their copy understanding.

At this point, I was already established as a copywriter. I had paid good money to get my copy critiqued by A-listers. And I wasn’t willing to get my own pay docked as a way of getting critiques. Still, out of curiosity, I sent over an email I’d written a few years earlier for RealDose Nutrition, an 8-figure supplement brand.

The subject line for this email read, “The evil twins blocking your path to good health.”

The body copy talked about a scientific study I’d found. Inflammation reduces the number of taste buds on your tongue… which makes you want to eat more… which drives up obesity… which in turn drives up inflammation, repeating the cycle one level down.

The expert copywriters read my email and sent me the following feedback:

“Feedback: you broke the #1 rule in copywriting – The Rule Of One (Write about only one thing at a time. Because one good idea, clearly and convincingly presented, is better than a dozen so-so ideas strung together.)”

And it’s true — I had two ideas in there. The burned-out taste buds on the tongue… plus the interplay between obesity and inflammation.

But here’s what I didn’t tell these guys, but what I kept smugly for myself — until now, that I share it with you:

This email was part of a campaign I had written for RealDose to replace an earlier sequence that they had used for years. My new sequence increased sales by 300% in this particular funnel. And this “Evil twins” email, with its violated Rule of One, was responsible for most of that 300% boost.

“Harumph,” somebody out there is saying. “The point still stands! That’s just the exception that proves the rule! The Rule of One! It must not be broken!”

To anybody who genuinely believes this… all I can do is shrug. Particularly since I still have work to do, preparing for the first call of my Influential Emails training, which is happening tonight.

When I was designing this training, I looked at some of the most influential emails I’ve written to this list. And I found that they inevitably break the Rule of One.

They break it in deliberate, consistent ways. But they break it nonetheless. In fact, breaking the Rule of One has become a kind of trademark of the emails I write.

And if you ever hear some authoritative copy guru telling you about this rule that cannot and should not ever be broken… maybe you will think of me and my not-so-humble exception here.

Now if you signed up for Influential Emails, then you will hear tonight about the specifics of how and why I choose to break the Rule of One.

If on the other hand you didn’t sign up for Influential Emails, well, maybe you can sign up in the future, if I ever offer this training again. Or just sign up for my email newsletter, because really, all my secrets are out there, lying in plain sight, each day that I send out my emails.

Forming a marketing cavalry without money or influence

by

One morning in late October of 2018, professor Samuel Abrams arrived to his office to find that pictures of his family, which he normally kept on his office door, had been torn down. In their place were dozens of notes stuck to the door and lying on the floor.

QUIT
QUIT QUIQUIT QUIT QUITITQUITQUIT
QUQUIT QUITTIT QUIT
QUIT

A few of the notes offered more detail:

“Our right to exist is not ‘idealogical,’ asshole”

“QUIT go teach somewhere else you racist asshat (maybe Charlottesville?)”

A few days earlier, Abrams had published an editorial in the New York Times, titled “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” The editorial reported the results of his own research.
​
Among first-year college students, Abrams said, there was a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives. Among university professors, that ratio jumped to six-to-one. But all of that was dwarfed by the ratio of liberals to conservatives among university administration: 12-to-one.

This was incendiary enough to prompt an emergency student senate meeting at Abrams’s university. Abrams said the result of this meeting a declaration calling for him to be stripped of tenure and dismissed from the college.

I got on the spoor of this through an article in the Economist, which looked at the spread of wokeness from universities to the mainstream.

The Economist claimed it took a few key ingredients. The one that caught my sparrow eye was the role of university of administrators.

It turns university bureaucrats have been mushrooming in recent decades, outpacing both student and professor growth. For example, administrator numbers at the University of California, where I went to college, doubled since 2000.

Yesterday, I promised to tell you how to get other people to fight for you. One way of course is to have money and to use that to buy yourself an army. That’s what I talked about yesterday.

But if you don’t have money or power, well, you can still have an army. Or, rather, a cavalry.

Ideal recruits are to be found among newly arrived, low-grade influencers. People who have some power at the moment, but who are very insecure about their position and their future. Like university administrators.

If you can offer these people a new way to shore up and legitimize their position by championing you or your product or idea… well, they will do it, even if you don’t pay them.

“Uhhh… I really don’t get what the hell you’re talking about,” you say. “How exactly would I use this to get other people to promote me or to make money?”

Ok, let me give you a sketch that might help. It’s based on my vague memories of a story told to me by a friend who is active in the crypto space.

My friend was telling me there is some fraction of the crypto world, filled with new businesses and investors. Let’s call it Segment X. People in Segment X are invested in some new crypto approach, and they are flush with cash.

But they also have a ton of anxiety about where their sliver of the crypto market is going, and if any of them will be around in a year.

My friend had started a podcast around crypto. At the start, it didn’t have too much reach or audience.

But he occasionally turned the focus of his podcast to Segment X.

And as a result, all those people, and all their resources, latched onto his podcast and helped push it and promote it.

That’s basically what I’m telling you with all that wokeness stuff above. Find yourself a stable of nervy and twitching parvenus. And then get your saddle ready. Because, in the words of Al Ries and Jack Trout:

“The truth is the road to fame and fortune is rarely found within yourself. The only sure way to success is to find yourself a horse to ride. It may be difficult for the ego to accept, but success in life is based more on what others can do for you than on what you can do for yourself.”

For more horse-talk, you might like my daily email newsletter.

The magic “red clause” — get others to fight on your behalf

by

The entire direct response industry emerged out of the sea of patent medicine. And much of what people keep figuring out about persuasion today was first discovered in the late 19th century by men looking to sell more nerve tonics, seaweed cakes, and soothing lung syrups.

What I’m telling you is that it’s worth reading about these patent medicine men, so you don’t have to reinvent their strategies yourself. For instance:

Some time around the turn of the 19th century, a man named Frank J. Cheney stood up, piece of paper in hand, at a meeting of the Proprietary Association of America.

​​The Proprietary Association represented the interests of hardworking snake oil hucksters, quacksalvers, and nostrum men.

Cheney, for example, was the proprietor of Hall’s Catarrh Cure, and would eventually become the president the Association.

That day, Cheney stood up to show off a special advertising contract he had been using. It contained what was later called the “Magic Red Clause.” This helped Cheney fight government interference and win, over and over again.
​
It worked like this:

Like all patent medicine men, Cheney advertised heavily in local newspapers.

So he started putting a clause in his advertising contracts in big red letters. “This contract shall become VOID in case of HOSTILE LEGISLATIVE CHANGE.”

And one time, when a local legislator threatened Cheney with an unfavorable new law, Cheney simply wrote 40 newspapers, his advertising partners.

“Look at that big red clause in our contract,” Cheney wrote. “If this new law passes, I’m afraid our contract will be void and we must stop doing business together.”

Sure enough, by the next week, all 40 newspapers had published articles critical of the new law, and Mr. Legislator had to pack it up, tail between his legs.

My point is straightforward. Have the media in your back pocket and sic them on your enemies whenever you feel threatened.

And if you don’t yet have the media in your back pocket, then spend large amounts on advertising until you do.

My point might be straightforward. But perhaps you find it impractical.

Perhaps you have neither power nor money to get others to fight your battles for you.

The point still stands.

It might not be obvious how it stands. So I’ll tell you another story, equally momentous, in my email tomorrow. And I hope all things will soon be clear, like a bottle of Liquozone.

A quick and cheap boost in status and authority

by

Today, I read about a guy who writes a Substack newsletter about parenting, and it’s made him a celebrity throughout his neighborhood.

Well, it wasn’t really the newsletter.

Rather, it was a specific fact about his own parenting success, which he revealed inside the newsletter. This one fact spread like wildfire among his neighbors, and soon everyone knew him, or at least wanted to. For example, when the guy got his hair cut last week, the following conversation went down:

“Hey, I know you, don’t I?”

“What? How’s that?”

“You’re the guy who has two sons at Harvard.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”​​

Status. All of us are aware of it. And the most pure of us all quest after it like Galahad after the Holy Grail.

I’m not saying anything new here. But here’s an unrelated idea, which might be new to you, and which can help you if you quest after status:

Don’t give too much proof. Argumentation and proof are sure ways to put a ceiling on how authoritative you seem and how much status you have.

“This guy sounds like a leader… but why does he have to buttress his claims with evidence and explain everything in so much detail? Something’s off.”

So cut down on the proof and avoid ruining or hampering your status.

And as with all things authority, things go in both directions. In other words, you can also get a quick and cheap boost in status simply by refusing to make an adequate argument for the claims you’re making.

You might think I’ll just leave that claim hanging as a way of demonstrating my point.

Not so.

For one thing, I’m actively avoiding pursuing status. I have other ideas of how I want to get into people’s heads.

For another thing, none of what I told you is really my idea. ​​I don’t mind telling you I heard it all from Rich Schefren.

​​So if you want proof for what I just told you, you should haunt Rich, and see if maybe he slips up into explaining why he believes all the stuff I just told you. If you don’t know Rich, you can get to know him here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKSG9Ug9FKrFCYxSlTRwGiA