Start a profitable repositioning business… with your own home as headquarters

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If you sell a product people don’t want — whether physical or information — then I’ve got an idea for you.

​It will allow you to get into a completely new business, without any startup costs, and without any of the hassles you’re currently facing. Plus demand is almost guaranteed.

All right, you ready?

Then let me tell you I’ve been reading a lot of old ads that would still work today. I referenced one of them a few days ago — a real estate opportunity ad from the 1920s in Popular Mechanics.

But I kept flipping through old issues of Popular Mechanics. And I found a bunch of other ads that kept running over and over. Here are a few from a 1956 issue:

1. “New Rubber Stamp Business Pays Beginners Up To $9.20 an hr. Start at home in spare time with this little table top machine”

2. “Start a profitable manufacturing business in spare time with your own home as headquarters”

3. “Make up to $18 per hour! With this NEW PLASTIC SANDWICH MACHINE!”

Mmm… plastic sandwich…

But do you see what’s going on here?

How much demand was there in 1956 for lamination machines or plastics manufacturing equipment?

Probably not that much. Certainly not in a typical household.

But a business opportunity? A chance to be your own boss… work when you want and how you want… make more money than you’re making now…

So here’s my idea:

If you sell dog clippers today and nobody’s buying, then bundle your clippers with a video. Tell people how to set up their own dog grooming business in their back yard in their spare time.

Charge 10x what the clippers cost… and find yourself in a marketplace of one, instead of a commodity market.

Or, if you sell an information product nobody wants, reposition it as a business opportunity.

I did this last year by accident. I was promoting a Clickbank course on reconditioning car batteries. In a moment of inspiration, I wrote the main appeal:

“How to resurrect dead batteries and save (or make) money”

This sold strong at the start — to a group that normally NEVER buys information products. And it keeps selling today.

But maybe you don’t buy any of this.

Maybe you’re glad you didn’t pay for this advice… and in fact you’re sure you never would pay for it.

In that case, I’d like to announce I’m launching a new training and certification program.

It will allow you to make tens of thousands of dollars a month… all from home… in your spare time… by helping struggling business owners reposition their offers.

I’ve prepared a step by step instruction manual that not only tells you how to reposition offers, but also tells you how to get business coming in at a profitable clip right from the start.

I’m giving away a free copy of this book to any serious-minded man or woman. Reading it will not cost you anything. Simply follow the instructions here.

3 ways for freelancers to lose less

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A few days ago, I wrote a post about loser’s games:

Situations in life where the outcome is all about what the loser does… rather than what the winner does.

I wrapped up that post with advice given to amateur tennis players. “Lose less. Avoid trying too hard. And keep the ball in play.”

To which a freelance copywritress wrote in to ask:

“How do you lose less in freelancing? Not trying too hard and keeping the ball in the game is straightforward. But I wasn’t able to figure out how I could lose less. Any insights or tips would be much appreciated by this seasoned loser.”

My answer was that losing less is about all the stuff that’s really 100% within our control, but we muck up for reasons of our own. Like…

There’s a great job that you want to apply to, but you convince yourself not to do it, or you don’t do it in time.

Or…

Client comes to you and says, “Here’s what I need” and you say, “Yes boss” instead of saying, “What’s the ultimate goal you’re looking to achieve by doing this?”

Or…

You hear 50k times that you’re charging too little and yet you still don’t raise your rates.

Basically, losing is self-sabotage and mistakes that we really can’t blame on anybody else. And losing less is not doing that.

Of course, maybe that’s just deflecting the question. How exactly do you not make mistakes and avoid self-sabotage, whatever form it takes?

I’ve got three unsexy but true ideas for you:

1. Habit. Start small and low risk. Build from there.

2. Willpower. Sleep. Eat. Drink your orange juice. Grit your teeth.

3. Self-awareness.

Because those three losing behaviors above, those are all things I did and sometimes still do. But maybe they aren’t exactly your own.

Whatever yours are, identify them. In the spur of the moment those losing behaviors just happen. You shrug them off, either blaming circumstance or yourself.

But if you take time and identify them… that can sometimes be all you need to change when loserliness threatens next.

I’ve got my own homebrewed journaling system for this. In fact I’ve got close to 30 separate journals, for different aspects of my life.

In each journal, I ask myself, what happened? What did I do right? What could I have done better?

This doesn’t always mean I never act like a seasoned loser. But when I do act like a loser, that goes into a journal, and maybe reduces the chance of it happening again. And if you sometimes play loser’s games… this might be worth a try for you too.

By the way, one of the journals I keep is all about interesting and novel ideas for emails. Because I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to read some of the ideas I write about, you can sign up for it here.

49-year-old secret to creating big changes in awaren

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In 1972, two psychologists split a bunch of guinea pigs, I mean students, into separate groups and played one of two audio tapes for them.

Both tapes contained the audio of a regular 30 min TV show. Squeezed in between were commercials for cigarettes and chewing gum and mouthwash and a headache pill.

At the end of the show, the students were asked a barrage of questions. Including a few about the commercials.

“Can you recall the type of product in the commercials? What about the brand name?”

The psychologists also followed up. Two days later. A week later.

“Can you still recall the type of product in the commercials? What about the brand name?”

The results:

One group of guinea pigs did as you might expect. They remembered the commercials pretty well right after the show… but less so two days later… and much less so a week later.

The second group was more interesting though, at least if you’re in the business of persuading.

This second group could remember the commercials better than group one right after the show… and the recall stayed at that same high level. Two days later. A week later. No drop off.

So what was the difference between the two groups?

​​Simple.

Group one heard the commercials in their original, unedited form.

Group two heard the same commercials, but with the last 5-6 seconds cut off.

You might recognize this as an example of the Ziegarnik effect.

​​In a nutshell, there’s a part of our brain that’s in charge of alertly waiting for the other shoe to drop. When the other shoe does drop, that part of the brain relaxes, and its alert attention slips away. But if the other shoe never drops…

By the way, the above study is not the only confirmation of the power of the Ziegarnik effect. That has been replicated in various settings in hundreds of different studies. The conclusion is clear:

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” increases attention, improves memory, and raises active participation.

You might be wondering what I’m getting at. After all, direct response copywriters aren’t in the business of boosting recall, not two days later, not a week later.

 

 

 

Unethically creating demand

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Earlier this year, NY Times reporter Aaron Krolik went on a site called cheaterboard.com. And he wrote this nasty post about himself:

“Aaron Krolik is a complete loser. Will do ANYTHING for attention. ANYTHING.”

The post included an ugly selfie of Krolik and a caption that read BUSTED.

Cheaterboard is a site that allows burned men and women to out their cheating exes. Except… is there more to it than that?

Within a few days, Krolik’s post had spread to a bunch of other sites, like bustedcheaters.com and worsthomewrecker.com. Similar concept to Cheaterboard.

Soon, these posts made it to the top of Google Images when you searched for Krolik’s name. Bing helpfully suggested “loser” when you started typing “Aaron Krolik.”

In a nutshell, Krolik had successfully ruined his own “cool guy” reputation.

Now was time to fix it. So Krolik contacted 247removal.com, a company specializing in cleaning up online slander.

It was easy to find them because they ran ads on sites like Cheaterbaord.

​​For a paltry fee of $750 per individual post (typically adding up to thousands of dollars to cover a bunch of sites), 247removal offered to scrub “Aaron Krolik is a complete loser” from the world.

Let me pause here and ask you…

Do you suspect any foul play here?

Krolik did. In fact, that’s why he went through the experiment of slandering himself.

It turned out that hundreds of online slander sites, and dozens of reputation management firms, all boiled down to a few people. Specifically, a programmer in India and a man and woman in Dayton, Ohio.

They would encourage and spread the slander (or who knows, maybe you really did cheat on your wife)… and then for fees up to $20,000, they would take it down.

Unlike my usual posts, this is not a business idea I’m recommending.

Although there is a kernel here that can be useful and even not so unethical.

And that’s the practice of serving a specific customer, rather than selling a specific product. So put Cheaterboard out of your mind for a second, and consider these examples instead:

Example 1: Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager. He secretly sold buttons that said something like, “Elvis sux!”

Why slander his own star? Because some people didn’t want to buy any Elvis… but they sure needed to buy something.

Example 2: Copywriter Abbey Woodcock has a clever page that you hit once you unsubscribe from her email list.

​​”Sorry it didn’t work out,” it says, “but here are a few resources that might be a better fit you.” And then, Abbey puts in a bunch of affiliate links to other copywriting programs.

Example 3 is apparently standard practice in the newsletter industry:

If you have a company with a bunch of different gurus and newsletters inside it… what do you do when a subscriber fails to renew? Of course.

You offer them any of the other newsletters to subscribe to. Maybe they didn’t like that first guy. But they’re clearly interested in the promise of getting rich with financial advice… so maybe they will like guy #2.

So that’s my advice to you. Once you identify demand, think beyond the product or products you offer.

And if there is no demand… then sometimes you can create it, ethically. But this post is getting long already, so I’ll leave that topic for another day. If you want to read that when it comes out, you can sign up for my email newsletter.

How to become an opportunity specialist

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Back in 2019, while I was writing my first-ever real estate investing promo, I faced a bit of a conflict.

My copywriting coach at the time told me to talk about the mechanism. Basically, HOW you’re going to get rich in real estate.

But he told me something else also. “Go on YouTube,” he said, “and check out old infomercials in the REI space. See what they do.”

So I did. And each 80s and 90s infomercial basically looked like this:

1. You’re gonna get so rich.

2. You don’t need no cash, credit, experience, skills, charm, nothin’!

3. Look at all these people who done it. $10k for this guy. $20k for that guy. $30k for that third guy, and he was totally broke before!

And that’s all the infomercials were. Over and over and over, for 28 minutes. No mention of “how” anywhere.

“Yeah, but that was then,” my copywriting coach told me. “The market has matured. You need a mechanism today to stand out.”

I took his advice and worked the mechanism into the promo. ​​But I’m not sure any more that he was right. ​(The VSL never got produced, so we can’t say either way.)

But I’ve got my doubts, because I’ve been going through a Dan Kennedy course called Opportunity Concepts.

One of the things Dan says is that “Get rich in real estate” has been selling, using the same appeals, since the Civil War.

Have things changed in last 20 years?

Maybe… but probably not.

Instead, Dan says that as marketers, we underestimate how perennially conflicted, confused, self-doubting, inert, and entitled our prospects really are. In all markets. Even in markets that consist of successful, proactive people.

That’s why Dan’s advice is to sell whatever you’re selling as an opportunity. Or as close to it as you can get.

Opportunity? What does that mean?

Well, I tracked down a successful opportunity ad from 100 years ago so you can see. Variants of it ran for years in Popular Mechanics and other magazines in the late 1920s.

Frankly, it could have worked in the 1980s or today just as well. Nothing has changed.

If you sell real estate investing advice, this ad is worth a look. If you don’t sell real estate investing advice, this ad is worth a look. So take a look:

https://bejakovic.com/opportunity-ad

A new way to approach copywriting

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I recently started keeping track of every article I click on mindlessly, purely because of an intriguing headline. Here are a few:

* After Years Of Conflict And Instability, Iraq Is Opening Up To Tourism

* A Writing Tip I Learned At Oxford

* A New Way To Approach Wayback Machine

* The New Credible Science Of Longevity Versus The Old Anti-Aging Snake Oil

* Nikola Tesla Invention From 100 Years Ago Suddenly Makes More Sense Today

So I record those headlines, and then I ask myself, Why? Why did I click on this?

If you’re in the business of marketing, I’d like to suggest this new habit to you too.

But why?

Because, as Gary Halbert said, you have to steep yourself in what’s working now. If you’re clicking it, others are clicking it. Pay attention, and you’ll find out what’s working now, both in terms of format (“A New Way To Approach X”) as well as in terms of topics (“Wayback Machine”).

But Gary also said something else. He said you have to ground yourself in the fundamentals of marketing.

That’s why asking why is useful.

Human psychology changes very slowly, if at all, from what I can see. And if you ask yourself why, you’ll get back to a few fundamental answers, over and over and over. And then you can make your own formats, for your own topics, and still have people clicking and reading.

By the way, human psychology changes so slowly that there are some ads that ran a hundred years ago, which could still run successfully today.

If you want to see an example, I’ll share one tomorrow in my email newsletter. And if you want to get on that newsletter so you get to see that ad, here’s where to go.

My Airbnb pre-suasion ticket

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I moved into a new Airbnb a few days ago. The host met me there to let me in. Fine. But then he wouldn’t leave.

He pointed out where the bedroom is. He showed me where he keeps the ironing board. He mimed how to press the button that turns on the hot water heater.

And then he walked to the front door and said apologetically, “Well… I guess there’s nothing else…”

But there was. Three more times he started to leave… and three more times he went off on another tour of the apartment.

He highlighted the lacquered kitchen counter.

He explained the quirks of the TV to me, even though I told him I don’t watch TV.

And when he was finally leaving for real, he said:

“People tell me there’s something about this apartment. A good vibe. I don’t really get it. But a few people who stayed here made me an offer to buy it outright. They say it just makes them feel good to be here.”

I told him I’d keep my antenna out for the special vibe.

And the craziest thing happened.

I think the guy was right.

I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s the quirky mix of decor. Maybe it’s the shady maple trees in front that reach right up to the windows. Maybe it’s because I’m sleeping like a bear in the cool and dark bedroom.

Anyways, I probably would have let all this slip into oblivion. Except I’ve been reading Robert Cialdini’s Pre-suasion over the past few days.

And that book got me thinking. Because the first few chapters are all about the power of attention.

Draw somebody’s attention to a fact, says Cialdini, and that fact gains in importance. (“Good vibe, huh? Well, we’ll see.”)

Not only does a highlighted fact gain in importance, but other facts lose in importance. (It took me days to notice the apartment is very dark. Must be the maple trees.)

And there’s more:

Attention can create causality. Even where there is none. (“The kitchen counter really is nice. Could that be why I like this place?”)

Well… I guess there’s nothing else I want to tell you today.

​​(1… 2… 3…)

​​Except let me just add one last thing:

You probably already knew how important it is to manage the attention of people you want to persuade.

You probably even knew that you want to draw attention to things that help your case… and to keep attention away from things that hurt your case.

Whatever. I thought it was still worth pointing all this out to you.

Because now that the power of attention has been pointed out, maybe you will start to see its importance in a way you hadn’t seen before.

​​Maybe you will see how it’s being used on you to guide your own decision making.

​​​​And when that happens, maybe you will become more effective at persuading others… with a creative light show, which highlights just what you want, at just the right moment.

I guess there’s really nothing else. Except just one more thing:

I write an email newsletter. I’ve had a few people who subscribe to it say it’s surprisingly fun and valuable. I don’t really get it. But if you want to try it out, here’s where to sign up.

I wanted your advice

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Today I was planning on writing about an undercover method to persuade people, or to actually let them persuade themselves.

This method is sweet because it does double duty. It gives people good reasons to believe what you want them to believe… while at the same time sweeping under the rug any reasons they might have to object.

But then something unexpected jumped out at me in real life, like a tiger out of the dark. And so I won’t have the chance to give this topic its proper treatment today.

Instead, I sent out a very special email to my newsletter subscribers, asking for help and advice. Unfortunately, since you’re not on my newsletter, you didn’t get that email.

If you’d like to join my newsletter, you can sign up here. An extra reason to do so is that tomorrow, I’ll write and send out an email with that promised marketing lesson, which I didn’t get to today.

Prophet positioning

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“Let me explain something to you right now,” the goofy looking guy said to the camera. “Here’s a $10 bill.”

And he started to tear the bill up into small pieces in front of the interviewer’s face.

“This is garbage. This is going to zero. Euros are going to zero. The yen’s going to zero. All going to zero… against bitcoin!”

The Bitcoin prophet got louder and his voice started to crack.

“If you don’t understand this, you’re going to be impoverished! You’re going to be out on the street! You’re gonna be begging! You’re gonna be out of business!”

That’s from a little clip I saw today. It went viral so even somebody like me, who doesn’t follow crypto news, got to see it.

The question is why.

It might be because the Bitcoin prophet looked like a kook. He was dressed like Elton John. Even the interviewer was giggling at him. Maybe people who shared the video just wanted to make fun.

But I’ve got my own theory.

Which is that making strong predictions, saying X is dead, Y is the future, is a great way to grab attention and carve out a position for yourself in the mass mind.

Now the clip I saw had a tongue-in-cheek element to it. It seemed even the Bitcoin prophet was about to crack a smile as his performance built up.

But if you don’t hedge your bets like that…

If instead you have the conviction (or connivance) to paint the future black and white… and you do it in a way where people can believe you really mean it…

Then that’s the road to being seen as an authority. A leader. A prophet.

And that’s something all of us crave.

Because few things are scarier and more motivating than the uncertainty and lack of control that come from looking at the frosted glass window that is the future.

Which is why it doesn’t matter if your predictions are right or wrong. People will follow you, or at least some will. Even if you’re wrong. And even if the rest of the world thinks you look like a goof or a kook.

But perhaps pretending to be a prophet doesn’t suit you. Maye you think that’s garbage.

What’s not garbage is your need for positioning in the market. If you don’t understand this, you’re gonna be out of business, begging, out on the streets.

I write about positioning on occasion. I have many ideas about it. If you want to read about them as I write about them, sign up to my email newsletter.

Entrepreneurship: A loser’s game

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A couple nights ago, I stayed up two hours past my bedtime to watch TV and witness a miracle.

Well, a sports miracle:

Novak Djokovic beating Rafael Nadal at the French Open.

In case those names mean nothing to you, I’m talking tennis. And what Djokovic did is the hardest thing in that sport.

After all, Rafael Nadal has won the French Open 13 out of the past 15 years.

The only times he lost, it was in the early rounds, because he was crippled, hobbled, or hamstrung. Whenever he made it to the end stages, like this year, he was unbeatable. Until this past Friday.

It took an incredible effort. In fact, both Djokovic and Nadal played at the highest levels.

They made tennis look like ping pong, because of how they moved each other around, with crazy angled shots, delivered from far off the court and from seemingly impossible positions.

Other pros and commentators gushed afterwards that it was one of the greatest matches in history, and probably the greatest clay court match ever. Nadal and Djokovic are from another world, they said.

Well. Contrast that to my real-life experiences with tennis.

I started playing when I was a kid. If you saw me play, you might think I have skills. But I don’t.

In fact, I have such an extreme lack of skills that two years ago I vowed never to play again. It was just too painful.

I’d play a match against somebody who I should be able to easily beat. And I’d still end up losing.

Double faults… routine balls dumped into the net… attempts at winners that sailed a foot wide.
​
Each mistake-filled loss would set off a binge of self-hate that lasted for days, until it was time to play (and usually lose) the next match. So I decided to give it up.

And that’s my point for you for today.

It turns out that the sport played on tennis courts is actually two entirely different games.

That’s according to a Dr. Simon Ramo, who analyzed the data. Ramo’s research can be summed up simply:

Professional tennis players win points. The rest of us lose points.

In the pro game, outcomes are determined by the actions of the winner, like in the Djokovic-Nadal match.

In the non-pro game, the amateur rarely beats his opponent. But he beats himself all the time.

It’s two opposite games. And Ramo’s data bear it out. Pros win 80% of points. Amateurs lose 80% of points.

Of course, tennis is not the only loser’s game.

So is campaigning for political office… warfare… and modern dating.

In all these fields, outcomes are determined more by our own mistakes and self-sabotage, rather than anything the other side did.

And from what I’ve seen, entrepreneurship fits into this mold too.

We look to the highest performers, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. We see how they run laps around the competition and create daring offers that wow customers.

But that’s not the game the rest of us play.

For the rest of us, competition is largely irrelevant and potential customers usually never even see our offers.

Instead, the outcomes we get (typically not good) are really the result of our own mistakes and self-sabotage.

If that’s the case, then what’s the fix?

I don’t have a good answer for you. But I can leave you with the advice that Simon Ramo gave to tennis players:

Lose less. Avoid trying too hard. And keep the ball in play.

But let me take my own advice:

I have an email newsletter. I write an email about persuasion, marketing, copywriting, and occasionally business, every day. Keep the ball in play. In case you want to sign up, click here and fill out the form.