Why practice does not make perfect

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I just read that a guy named Justin Blackman forced himself to write 100 headlines a day for 100 days.

Result?

Writing got easier by the end, and he feels he got better at the headlines.

I’m sure the first is true. The second might well be true.

But it also reminded me of something I’d heard from Parris Lampropoulos, one of the most successful copywriters working over the past few decades (he’s been paid a million dollars in royalties for a single sales letter — multiple times over).

“Practice doesn’t make perfect,” says Parris. “Practice makes permanent.”

If you’re moving in the wrong direction, then more practice just means you will be building up bad habits that will be harder to break down the line.

It will help you build confidence, yes.

But then one day, when you find yourself in a smokey roadside bar and two dangerous-looking biker-types start harassing your girlfriend, you’ll walk over, shake your shoulders loose, crack your neck, and say, “Guys, you don’t wanna do this. Because I’ve seen Steven Seagal handle this exact situation, and I’ve practiced his move 100 times a day for 100 days.”

So how do you avoid building up bad copywriting habits?

Well, the same way you avoid winding up in the gutter with a broken jaw. One option is you find people who have proven themselves in the skill you want to learn (think Daniel Cormier, and not Steven Seagal), and you do exactly what they tell you to do.

Another option is you pick fights on the street, but with people you feel you can handle. Sure, you might get a black eye or a bloody nose now and then, but if you adjust and learn from the beatings you get, you will slowly progress and build habits that work.

Or, of course, you can choose to do both. Which is what I’ve done and continue to do. Because practice is important. But deliberate, meaningful practice, and not just Steven Seagal’s patented trachea grab.

Anyways, if you need some of that copy jiujitsu to flip your customers upside down so change starts falling out of their pockets, get in touch with me and we can talk.

Russian bankers, fraudulent contracts, and copywriting

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True story:

Back in 2008, a Russian man named Dimitry Agarkov got the world’s best credit card deal.

Initially, Agarkov got an offer in the mail for a credit card from an online outfit called Tinkov Bank.

Agarkov read the contract, and was shocked that the interest rate was 45%. Not very attractive. So he scanned the contract into his computer and altered the terms.

0% interest.

Unlimited balance.

A fine of 3 million rubles (around $100K at the time) every time the bank failed to play by these rules.

A fine of 6 million rubles if the bank tried to cancel the contract.

Agarkov then printed out his slightly altered contract, signed it, and mailed it in to Tinkov Bank. The contract was promptly accepted, and Agarkov got his credit card, 0% interest and all.

This shows you just how much people love to read boring-as-beans stuff.

It’s easy to not pay attention even when it’s your job and big money is on the line.

So what to do? Well, all the standard copywriting and marketing advice applies:

Repeat your message often.

Don’t take it for granted your audience hears you.

Keep it simple.

Keep it easy on the eyes.

Tell stories instead of using legalese.

Anyways, back to the story of Dmitry Agarkov:

Tinkov Bank challenged him in court. But no soap. The court upheld Agarkov’s contract, because it was in no way fraudulent.

Agarkov then sued Tinkov Bank for 24 million rubles, about $700K at the time, for not honoring the contract and breaking the agreement.

The suit was eventually withdrawn, because Agarkov said the joke had gone too far. That, plus the veiled threats from the owner of Tinkov Bank made him fear for his life.

Can you make veiled threats to your own customers to get them to buy? No? Then better try the softer kind of persuasion like I listed above. And if you want my input on how to do that, simply fax me a contract. Or just write me an email.

The fake search for the true you

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There’s a service in Europe called BlaBlaCar.

It’s a kind of decentralized, Wild-West, long-distance Uber.

I’ve taken it many times when shuttling from one eastern European metropolis to another, and it’s always been a good experience.

Except once.

Once, I was set to go with a Hungarian woman.

She was two hours late and didn’t think to apologize.

Instead, she started complaining immediately about how difficult life is and how nobody understands her troubles.

This went on for a couple of hours.

And then, for a break, she put on a 40-minute infomercial by Deepak Chopra, M.D.

The product being sold was some kind of “law of attraction” course. “Once you strip away all the nonsense,” Dr. Deepak seemed to be saying, “once you uncover the true you, then the universe will start to work with you instead of against you.”

Want a promotion at work? Find the true you.

Lonely and unlovable? Find the true you.

Mountains of credit card debt? Find the true you.

Eventually the Hungarian woman dropped me and the other Blabla passenger — a frustrated Spanish girl who missed a reunion with her friends because of the two-hour delay — on the outskirts of Budapest.

I was glad to get out of the car and away from the brainwashing of Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Because I think this “true you” stuff is nonsense.

And not just because finding the true you won’t help you get a promotion or make more money or magnetically attract an attractive mating partner.

Instead, I think the whole idea of your true self is fake. I’m not sure what the real truth about our “selves” is. But I know from observing myself and from observing other people that we are very different people throughout the day. Sometimes from moment to moment. If we’re hungry, if we’re reading the news, if we’re talking with one friend rather than another. In each of those situations, a different self takes life.

But maybe you’re not into this kind of philosophy stuff. So let’s talk turkey.

I once had a client selling a “male enhancement” info product. We’ll call it by the codename JELQ4LIFE.

In order to sell this product, he decided to run ads on Pornhub. You know, where bored, sexually frustrated guys go to watch men with much larger penises terrorize small women.

I advised against it. Sure, many guys on Pornhub might be interested in a 200-page JELQFORLIFE ebook, sold through a 15-page sales letter. Maybe, when they are in a different mental state. But not when they are bored or impatient or primed by having watched 15 porn videos.

But my client insisted. Aaaand…

It bombed completely. Lots of random clicks. A few optins. Zero sales. (I hate being right all the time.)

This is an extreme example. But it applies just as well to more mundane businesses that advertise their products by running straightforward “Here’s our exciting product!” ads on Facebook, or Instagram, or Pinterest…

The people these businesses are reaching with their ads might have the same social security number as their target audience — but they are not the same people in that moment.

That doesn’t mean you cannot reach those people. But you’ll have to think a little bit in order to avoid wasting your ad money. And if you want my ideas on how you can do this, write me an email and we can continue to talk turkey.

Why I don’t stress about the “big idea”

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Once upon a time, I read a thought-provoking article by multimillionaire copywriter, marketer, and investor Mark Ford.

Mark’s article was titled, “Why Every Copywriter Needs a Big Idea”.

As you might know, the BIG IDEA is a very hot and trendy topic in copywriting circles these days. Mark even says the big idea might be the “best direct-marketing technique of them all.”

Woof! ​​So what exactly is it?

Well, let me give you a few examples. There are a couple of “big idea” promotions that almost everyone agrees on —

1. Mike Palmer’s “The end of America” (the growing debt of the US government will lead to catastrophic consequences, buy our investment newsletter to figure out how to protect yourself)

2. Porter Stansberry’s “New railroad” (the rail made fortunes in the 19th century, fiber-optic cables can do it today, buy our investment newsletter to get our stock picks)

Those two promotions most often get hoisted up on the flagpole of the Republic of the Big Idea.

However, explaining what exactly makes a big idea big depends on who you ask. For example, Mark gives the following four-part definition:

A big idea is important, exciting, beneficial, and leads to an inevitable conclusion.

Sounds reasonable.

But when it comes to applying this definition in practice, that’s when things seem to get almost mystical, or as Mark puts it, Yoda-like.

​​(​​At one point, Mark even makes a distinction between a “big concept” and a “big idea”. Unravel that for yourself.)

The upshot is that I personally don’t stress about the big idea.

One reason is that I’m not sure what it really means.

Another is that I get the sneaking suspicion that a big idea is simply an idea that worked — which copywriting teachers, gurus, and coaches then retroactively mystify as part of their job.

Finally, I think that the big idea, as illustrated by the examples above, is only NEEDED in markets in the end-stages of sophistication — those markets that are so wary of hearing anything resembling a pitch that they need to be seduced and lulled by a new and surprising approach.

For example, that’s how the financial newsletter market is, like in the examples above.

But those aren’t the kinds of that I often write in.

So instead of stressing about the big idea, I simply look to come up with a hook — a story, a big benefit, a metaphor, a conundrum — to suck the reader in and to get him reading more.

​​And many times, whether that qualifies as a big idea, a big concept, or merely a sales hook, it’s good enough for me to make sales, even on cold, unfriendly traffic.

So if that’s something you do — running offers to cold traffic — then I hope you have reached an inevitable conclusion by now.

​​And I hope you want to talk about important and exciting ways to benefit your business.

​​If so, simply write me an email and we can take it from there, on a new railroad across America.

Climbing the customer palm tree to pick one coconut

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I recently heard from an ongoing client in the ecommerce space.

He has a couple of different brands selling niche physical products (I won’t say exactly what because that’s part of his success).

Anyways, the branded physical products seem to offer steady but limited profits.

And so he is looking to launch a few “one-off” products. These are popular, trendy things, the likes you can see on FB or Amazon all the time (think wifi repeater). He wants to launch one of these campaigns each week, in hope of scoring some quick wins to pad out the income from ongoing branded product sales.

Which is ok for me, because it means I get ongoing work writing copy for all these products, as well as feedback on what’s working and what’s not.

At the same time, I feel it’s a bit like climbing a tall palm tree to gather some coconuts, one at a time.

Getting up to the top of a palm tree is rough, scary, and dangerous work.

And so imagine you somehow climb all the way up to the top, where there are about a dozen ripe coconuts.

You roll one back and forth in your hand until it comes loose…

You let it fall to the ground…

And then you start your own scary and dangerous descent, ignoring all the other coconuts in the canopy, to repeat the same thing over at the next coconut palm.

You can see where I’m going with this.

Getting a customer to buy something from you is rough, dangerous, and expensive work.

So once you’ve climbed that palm tree, it doesn’t make sense NOT to pick all the coconuts that are up there.

In part, my client is already doing this, by offering day-zero upsells.

But there’s more he could do.

Specifically, he could keep trying to sell other things to these same customers, days or weeks after that first sale.

That might seem blindingly obvious to you. But what’s really obvious is that some otherwise smart and successful businesses — like my client’s — aren’t actually doing it.

Perhaps the reason is that they really don’t know how.

Or they simply don’t have the resources to do it.

That’s why I’m making my client a risk-free offer — either he will get some “free” sales or he won’t. But either way, there’s no cost to him.

And I’ll make the same offer to you right now. If you’ve got a customer list that’s sitting idle after the initial sale, get in touch with me and we can talk about how you can get some “free” profits out of your customer list — with zero cost to you.

The other way to persuade

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Let me ask you a personal question or three:

Are you very politically conservative?

Do you care passionately about the fate of the planet and about climate change?

Were you out in the streets last night, partying after the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship?

If you said “yes” to any of the above questions, then I believe you’ve got a leg up in the copywriting, marketing, and persuasion game.

Here’s why.

Dan Kennedy, possibly the most influential educator when it comes to direct marketing, once shared his four guiding principles for writing direct response copy. The one that’s relevant for us right now is:

“Great direct response copy makes people identify themselves as one or the other.”

In this way of looking at the world, there are two ways to persuade. One is based on self-interest — that’s 95% of “How to write copy” guides will tell you. But there’s another way. And it’s to appeal to somebody’s identity.

As Dan puts it, “they tell you the identification, and you tell them the behavior.”

This can be overt, such as, “If you’re politically conservative, then you should be outraged at the state of illegal immigration in this country.”

It can also be more subtle. Such as, “Choosy moms choose JIF.”

Now, I hope if you dig around in your brain right now, you will find at least one or two strong “self-identifications.”

Maybe that’s an alignment with an outside group, like a party or a cause or a team.

But it might also be the kind of person you strongly feel that you are (for example, a good mom).

Once you find this self-identification in yourself, start observing your own feelings, your own behaviors and attitudes when it comes to protecting and cherishing that identity.

Bottle all that up.

And use that insight and experience to become a superhuman marketer, persuader, or copywriter, by talking to other people’s self-identifications.

You will have a new and powerful arrow in your quiver — which the majority of your competition won’t even know about.

And you don’t even have to do much to attain it besides what you already love to do.

As for me, I’ve been working lately with some choosy owners of online businesses. They’re trying to build up a stockpile of copy assets that get their prospects to buy, and their customers to buy more.

I’ve also heard from other business owners who are in the same position, but who aren’t working with me yet. And you know what they did? They wrote me an email to talk to me and see if I could also help them grow their business.

One half of “mad genius”

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On the morning of February 4, 1912, a mustachioed Austrian by the name of Franz Reichelt climbed up to the first stage of the Eiffel Tower.

Reichelt was a tailor by trade, but he was up there on the viewing platform as a groundbreaking inventor.

In fact, he wore his invention — a large padded suit, which contained a parachute.

Reichelt’s initial tests with dummies had been successful. However, he was unable to reproduce those early successes.

As a result, he became convinced that he needed a greater height for his parachute to open.

So he got permission from the Paris authorities for a test from the Eiffel Tower, claiming that he would only drop a dummy or two.

Reichelt’s real plan, however, was to toss himself off the tower to dramatically prove his invention was sound.

The morning was of February 4 was cold, with temperatures around freezing. A short film taken of the event showed Reichelt’s breath in a fog as he climbed up on a table and a stool, and put his foot on the railing of the viewing deck.

He stood there rigidly, leaning forward bit by bit, apparently willing himself to take the decisive leap. This hesitation went on for about 40 seconds.

And then he did it.

He pushed off from the railing, stepped into empty space, and jumped down from the tower.

A second film, shot from ground level, showed the parachute wrapping around Reichelt as he fell for a few seconds, before hitting the ground in what appeared to be a cloud of dust.

Reichelt’s parachute design did not prove successful.

He did not survive the drop from the Eiffel Tower.

In fact, he made a 6-inch dent in the turf below as he slammed to his death. He was gathered up, taken to the hospital, and pronounced a fatality, an inventor killed by his own invention.

It’s a morbid story.

But I don’t bring it up to illustrate the folly of chasing your dreams at any price (though I think that’s a good lesson in today’s go-go society).

Instead, I want to point out why somebody would basically wrap himself in a bunch of bed sheets and jump to his death, even though small, safe tests with dummies didn’t give him much reason to believe he would survive.

The Paris newspaper Le Gaulois claimed that it was because only half the term “mad genius” applied to Reichelt.

But maybe it wasn’t even one half.

Because according to his friends, Reichelt felt pressured to make a dramatic demonstration.

This, he believed, would be the only way to attract sponsors and make a profit before his patent expired.

So he convinced himself his invention was sound, he decided it was now or never, and he took the decisive step.

So much for the story of the unlucky Franz Reichelt.

At least people know his name 100 years after his death.

But if that’s not the kind of success you aspire to, then perhaps you can take Reichelt’s story as the illustration of the power of urgency. Which, incidentally, might just be the most powerful appeal in any kind of persuasion.

I don’t have any urgency in the form of a deadline for you today, but I will have one soon. In the meantime, if you want to talk about having me write sales copy for you, just send me an email and we can talk about more mundane, but cheerier things, such as growing your business.

7 Batman rogues for evil sales bullets

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Ken McCarthy has said that the fundamental, no. 1, can’t-do-without-it skill for being an effective copywriter…

Is the ability to write a good bullet.

And Ken should know what he’s talking about.

He was a successful direct mail guy, before becoming a successful internet marketing guy, before running some very big and expensive copywriting and marketing seminars and influencing generations of millionaire marketers.

All right, so let’s say Ken’s right and bullets are important. So how then do you write a good, or rather evil, bullet?

Well, lots of different ways.

Below I’m giving you 7 different templates, which, for my own enlightenment, I paired up with top villains from Batman comic books (some of the connections are obvious, some less so):

[#1 The Riddler]
Are you younger than 34? Here’s why you are at a disadvantage when it comes to writing bullets… Plus, the 5-minute daily habit that will help you write bullets on command. Page 79.

[#2 Ra’s Al Ghul]
The one element every bullet must have (besides a benefit or a warning). Used correctly, this activates the most powerful motivation for buying, according to legendary copywriter Gary Halbert. Page 10.

[#3 Two-Face]
The popular NPR show that doubles as a school for writing killer bullets. Page 108.

[#4 Poison Ivy]
How to write twice as many bullets in one-third the time. No stress or swipe files required. Just a simple shift in preparation — inspired by a jungle plant, and recommended by marketing genius Perry Marshall. Page 70.

[#5 The Joker]
How to write a killer bullet without having access to the product. A secret technique, used by irrational, violent psychopaths, that can also help ethical copywriters. Page 25.

[#6 Scarecrow]
When putting a big benefit in a bullet can backfire. This one mistake can ruin your whole sales letter. Page 44.

[#7 Catwoman]
Why you should never start your bullet off with a number. Plus a better way to get readers hooked when your product offers a 9-item list. Page 78.

And there you go. A rogue’s gallery of 7 evil yet effective bullet formats.

What, that’s not enough?

Quite hungry you are.

Here’s a bonus one for you then:

All successful sales letters need bullets, right? Wrong. Here are the cases when bullets can actually hurt conversions. Send me an email for details.

Getting ghosted by copywriting clients

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I saw the following question today:

“I took a freelance project and then my client ghosted me. What can I do?”

I’ve fortunately never been jiffed out of money by a copywriting client.

Largely, that was due to getting my clients through Upwork for a long time. Upwork has an escrow system, so even when a client did ghost me (and it’s happened a few times), I could get paid for the work I’d done.

Off Upwork, even though some clients have been slow with payments, in the end they’ve all made good.

But what will I do one day — and I suppose it’s gotta happen once — that a client doesn’t pay?

The Internet seems filled with freelancing village elders who are ready to give advice: keep sending reminders, put up nasty reviews online, take legal action, send the “magic email” (“Well I guess your priorities musta changed!”), eat the loss.

All of those sound more or less reasonable.

And I’d probably try some of them.

But in the end, if getting my money was still no-go, I might simply take a listen to Longmont Potion Castle.

This guy has put out a dozen albums, all recordings of his absurd, bizarre, and incessant prank calls.

He calls up businesses on a Skype call and says threatening, accusatory things — but all in such a calm and comic tone that the person on the other side of the line doesn’t know if this is really an argument or a joke. From a call to a tire shop:

“I’ve got a Daihatsu Blooper. I’m gonna come up there and wring your neck. I want quadruple my purchase price. Period. End of discussion.”

So I might start making such calls to my non-paying client friends to kick off my working day and get myself in a good mood.

Of course, you might think that getting paid is not a joke.

​​Particularly if you were really counting on that money.

And I agree with you.

At the same time, why give somebody the opportunity to cheat you twice? Once, by not paying you, and twice, by putting you in a frustrated, angry frame of mind for days or weeks?

Instead, get what you can out of them. Even if that means making absurd prank phone calls. And who knows, the derelict client might be so irritated by the end they will simply pay you to stop.

I hope you’ve haven’t been jiffed by a client. But if you have, and you need inspiration, here’s the mind-bending tire shop call from Longmont Potion Castle himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADR6VNm6Qb0

Nobel-winning scientist cuts brakes on “most powerful killing system in the world”

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How’s that for a sensationalist headline? But before you turn away in disgust, here’s the story that pays it off:

Back in the 1890s, a surgeon named William Coley was searching for information on sarcoma, a type of bone cancer that killed one of his patients. He came across the record of a house painter with sarcoma, who had had four surgeries to remove the cancer.

Each time, the sarcoma came back. And then…

The house painter developed a severe streptococcus infection, which was close to killing him. He somehow recovered from the infection.

And when he recovered, his sarcoma — which no surgery could eliminate — was also gone.

Coley concluded that the infection killed the cancer. So he went around the country, preaching the new cancer-killing gospel, and purposefully infecting many cancer patients with streptococcus.

​​All the infected cancer patients got very sick. Some of those who didn’t die wound up cancer-free, just like the house painter.

As a result, Coley’s ideas and methods became popular in the early 20th century. But eventually, they were forgotten as radiation and chemotherapy started to develop.

It was only in the 1970s that Coley’s ideas resurfaced again. Scientists realized it wasn’t the streptococcus infection that killed the cancer. Instead, it was the body’s own immune system.

Long story sh-, scientists started trying to figure out how to activate the immune system to attack cancer cells, even without infecting the patient with a dangerous disease like streptococcus.

It would be a kind of holy grail. Because as one scientist working in the field put it, “the immune system is the most specific and powerful killing system in the world.”

Anyways, one big breakthrough came in 1996, when a harmonica-playing immunologist from Texas named James Allison located a “checkpoint” on a specific type of immune cell known as a T cell.

This checkpoint acts as a kind of brake, stopping the T cell from going on a rampage against foreign invaders and local slubberdegullions such as cancer cells.

Allison figured out a way to “cut the brake lines” of this checkpoint, activating the T cells, and killing the cancer.

Fast forward a few more years, and this new approach, known as immunotherapy, started becoming a standard cancer treatment.

That’s a giant breakthrough, because until now, there were only three major ways to get rid of cancer cells — cutting (surgery), burning (radiation), and poisoning (chemotherapy).

Immunotherapy is a fourth way, and it seems to work well in some otherwise hopeless cases. (A famous instance was former president Jimmy Carter, who had advanced melanoma successfully treated with a immunotherapy drug in 2015.)

So yeah.

It’s kindofa big deal.

And it was all cemented last year, when James Allison and another scientist, Tasuku Honjo, received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discoveries of mechanisms related to immunotherapy.

The end.

What, you’re wondering what this has to do with copywriting?

Well, not much. And also quite a lot.

There’s no direct lesson from immunotherapy itself that I can spot right now.

But there is a general rule of copywriting that says you want to present convincing and credible proof to buttress your sale and to make the close.

And if you’re doing anything related to health (the way I often am), then there are few better pieces of proof than being able to say:

“Based on a Nobel-Prize-winning discovery”

This is something I’ve spotted often in top health sales letters, and I’ve also had it confirmed, in a throwaway comment during a webinar, by Parris Lampropoulos, who is the equivalent of a Nobel-Prize winner when it comes to copywriting.

And that’s why I’ve decided to regularly go back in the annals of Nobel Prizes, and see exactly what those folks did to win.

Anyways, now we’re really at the end.

Or as the brothers Grimm might say, my tale is done, there goes a goose; whosoever catches it, may make himself a pillow out of it. In other words, if you need more guidance on how to write effective sales copy, including strong proof elements, you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/