How to “remember” your way out of the hard labor of writing

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Samuel Coleridge awoke from a deep opium slumber, grabbed a pen and paper, and scribbled down three stanzas that he says he composed in his dream.

At that moment, an unidentified person from Porlock interrupted Coleridge.

Once Coleridge made it back to his pen and paper, he found that the visions had vanished and he couldn’t complete the poem he had started.

The poem that Colerdige had written lingered unfinished for years, when at the suggestion of Lord Byron, it was published under the title Kubla Khan. It remains famous to this day, some two hundred years later.

Meanwhile, “the person from Porlock” has entered the lexicon as an unwanted intruder who disrupts inspiration or a moment of creativity.

If you ever struggle to write something, there’s a lesson hidden there in the story of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. At least I think so.

I personally often write by “remembering” the finished product — before it is written.

Of course, this is a complete trick and a lie. But it works for me. It might work for you too. Here’s what to do:

Basically, instead of outlining or writing what you have to write, you pretend you’ve already written it. It’s there vaguely in your memory, as though you dreamt it.

So you grab a pen and paper, or more likely your laptop, and start furiously writing down whatever you can remember.

If you’ve already forgotten some part, just leave some XXXs to be filled in later.

The key is to get as much of your structure and individual words down as you can before your poem — or your sales copy or whatever — disappears into the darkness of the night.

And of course, beware of the person from Porlock. Any kind of distraction — whether checking your mail, doing a bit of research, or picking up your phone — can kill your visions. And then you are left with the hard labor of writing, instead of the easy act of remembering what was already written.

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The biggest and baddest dog in the direct response junkyard

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Two days ago, I set up an A/B email test and the results came back conclusive:

Version A made three times as many sales as version B — and this wasn’t a statistical fluke.

So here’s the background of the test:

The subject lines of the two emails were the same. The body copy was the same. So was the copy on the landing page.

There was a difference between the the two funnels…

But it’s so obvious that you will probably roll your eyes when you hear it.

The difference came all the way on the order page — funnel B had a $59.99 price point, while funnel A was only $39.99. That’s why the number of sales (3x) and revenue (2x) in funnel A were so much higher.

You might think this is one of those “dog bites man” pieces of news.

And it is.

Except in the world of sexy direct response copywriting techniques, people often forget about the tendency of dogs to bite.

Fact is, your offer is the biggest and baddest dog in the direct response junkyard.

And from what I see, few businesses give enough thought to this big bad mutt — the fundamental promise of it… the price… the name… the format… the bonuses.

That’s not just an opportunity for business owners. Copywriters too can profit by pushing back on a mild and toothless offer — thanks to the win-win-win nature of the direct response game.

But let’s get to business:

I have a daily email newsletter. It’s about direct response copywriting and marketing – the sexy as well as the profitable. If you’d like to sign up for it, click here.

How to sell a broccoli-of-the-month subscription program

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One of my copywriting clients has a marketing conundrum:

He sells an app that helps real estate investors track down info on vacant houses. He charges $49 a month for the app. It’s a good product and customers love it. But it’s too practical and too unsexy to sell to people who just click over from YouTube or Facebook.

So what to do?

I had an idea. I told him to create a course on getting hot seller leads… price it at 10x the cost of the app… and put it up for sale on his site.

It doesn’t matter if anybody buys the course. What matters is that he can now legitimately say, “Here’s how to get my premium $497 course on getting hot leads for FREE.” The answer, of course, is that the prospect has to sign up for a trial of the app.

This is not my idea, by the way. It’s been in use in one form or another since prehistoric times, when some Neanderthal started selling a newsletter on mammoth-hunting strategies. But I thought of it because I once saw a Frank Kern VSL that did this exact same thing.

Frank was selling a $397 membership program for consultants and clients. That’s a tough sell to cold traffic.

What wasn’t a tough sell was getting somebody to accept a FREE gift of Frank’s $4k course on getting clients. Of course, the way to get this FREE gift was with a risk-free trial of the $397 membership course.

My point is this:

If you’re in the business of selling a broccoli-of-the-month subscription program, give away a FREE 10-layer chocolate cake to get people to sign up.

You can even offer crazy bribes if you’re giving your broccoli away.

For example, I write a daily email newsletter. It’s totally free to sign up for it. But if you sign up for it here, and you reply to the welcome email and refer to this blog post, I’ll give you a FREE half-hour consult on any topic you may want — such as writing horror-story advertorials… daily emails that bring in the bacon for ecommerce businesses… or getting started as a copywriter and marketer.

A technique for $100k+ copywriters only

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How’s this for under-the-radar persuasion:

In 1999, tobacco company Lorillard (which owns brands like Newport and Kent) ran an ad campaign to keep teens from smoking.

This was part of Lorillard’s public relations work. Officially, the goal was to make the company seem like your alcoholic but benevolent uncle, trying to steer you away from his own wayward path.

But beneath the surface, something else was lurking.

The ad campaign featured the message, “Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen.” This might sound awkward or quaint, or like a typical example of brand advertising with a stupid slogan.

But it’s not that at all. Dig it:

A later statistical study found that each exposure to this ad increased the intention of middleschoolers to try cigarettes by 3%. In other words, if your kid sees this ad 30 times, his or her odds of trying a cigarette double.

What’s going on?

Well, it’s the tail of that message. “… if you’re a teen.” Which by extension means, tobacco ain’t whacko if you’re grown up. In that case, tobacco is cool-o and sexy-o. No wonder millennial McLovins figured it was time to light up.

My point being:

In traditional direct response marketing, you can’t mess around. You tell people what you’ve got and all the irrefutable reasons why they need it.

But in today’s world, you’ve email and youtube vids and instagram posts. These media are free, so it pays to experiment with alternate messaging. For example…

Instead of telling your prospects your offer is perfect for them, tell them your offer is not right for them. At least not yet, because they are not yet the person they want to become. And then hit them with that same message thirty more times — and your odds of making the sale might double.

And now let me come clean:

My daily email newsletter is totally whacko unless you’re already making $100k+ as a copywriter. But if you don’t believe me, click here and subscribe.

A scary story for Halloween

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It being Halloween today, I want to tell you a scary story from my own life:

Many years ago, I had an ill-advised one-night stand with a friend of a friend. The next morning, as I was leaving the girl’s house, she told me she was flying home for two weeks. She lived in another country.

“Thank God,” I said to myself. “I won’t have to pretend to want to see her again.” So I told her to have a safe flight and I walked out of her life.

Or so I thought.

Because about six weeks later, I got a text message.

“Hi Bejako. It’s A. [Common friend] gave me your number. Could we meet? I have to talk to you and I’d rather do it in person.”

I could clearly hear a baby wailing somewhere nearby. Images of a shotgun wedding fired in my head.

We agreed to meet that evening in a cafe. I was there on time, she was not. With each passing minute, life drained out of my body and by the time the girl arrived, I had sunk so far in my chair that just my eyes were above the level of the table.

She sat down. She ran on for a few minutes, chipper and chatty.

I eventually collected enough strength to speak. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Yeah…” she said with a bit of embarrassment. “I guess we should really get to it.”

It turned out she had started working with a life coach. And as part of her transformation, she was supposed to contact people from her past — such as one-night stand partners — and ask them,

“Do you have any feedback for me?”

That was it. No pregnancy. No marriage. No on Golden Pond.

At this point, I brightened considerably. I told her my feedback was she shouldn’t scare people like that. I also ordered four drinks in about 15 minutes and — lesson never learned — even tried to take the girl home again.

So what’s my point?

Well, for the past few days, I’ve been writing about ideas taken from NLP. And the scary story above popped up in my head when I read one such idea:

“Failure is only feedback.”

This is a way to reframe an instance of rejection or failure… take the sting out… and maybe even get something useful out of it.

Whenever I practice this approach to life, I always come out amazed and amused. Thing is, I often forget.

So I wanted to remind myself, and maybe you, to treat failure as feedback. And no better way to remember something than to tie it to a scary story.

And now for something even more scary:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s filled with gruesome persuasion ideas to make you gasp and to chill your blood. If you want in on this haunted house, click here to subscribe.

How to make $75 million with an email newsletter

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News broke today that Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider.

Morning Brew, as you might know, is a daily email newsletter started a few years ago. The insight behind it was to take business news — a boring topic, thanks for nothing, Wall Street Journal — and make it more millennial-friendly.

Well it worked. Business Insider paid $75 million for a controlling stake in Morning Brew. Not bad for an email newsletter.

I bring this up for reasons one and two.

Reason one is that it fits my post from yesterday. That’s where I suggested that if you take a dry but useful topic and sexy it up, you can become a star. Or in the case of Morning Brew, you can earn yourself a $75 million buyout in about five years’ time.

Reason two has to do with my current romp through NLP axioms. The axiom I have in mind is,

“The past does not equal the future.”

In other words, even if a shadow has trailed you all your life — I mean a phobia, or some limiting belief, or just “how you are” — that doesn’t mean you cannot change, and change quickly.

That, in theory, is what NLP is all about. Of course, there are also other ways to effect change quickly.

For example, a few months ago I listened to an interview with Alex Lieberman, the founder of Morning Brew. Lieberman said how he can’t see any reason to sell his company.

Well, $75 million later, he found a reason.

“The past does not equal the future.”

Human brains love patterns and trends. But that’s not how the world works much of the time. Things can stay the same, day after day after day, and then suddenly — your tomorrow can be different.

Speaking of a different tomorrow:

I have a daily email newsletter. Its current valuation is -$39.17, which is what I’ve paid for the software to send the emails.

The insight behind my newsletter is to take the boring topics of marketing and copywriting and sexy them up. If you’d like to get on this rocket ship before it shoots to the moon, click here to subscribe.

Tony Robbins leaves clues

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In a recent post, I used the phrase, “Success leaves clues.” I didn’t realize somebody had colonized my mind and those words were not my own.

This phrase, as far as I could find, goes back to Tony Robbins. It makes sense he would say it. After all, the idea of success leaving clues is basically the central idea of neuro linguistic programming — NLP — and NLP is where Tony Robbins got his start.

I’ve been curious about NLP for a long time. Unfortunately, from what I see, the field is filled with blowhards and snake oil salesmen.

​​The first, the blowhards, are people who use fancy words like “Primary Representational System” to impress their seriousness and authority on you.

​​The second, the snake oil salesmen, make ridiculous claims like “if any human being can do anything, so can you.”

That’s a shame, because NLP is interesting and in my experience works. The reason I know is that I’ve gone through and applied Tony Robbins’s Personal Power, which is pretty much NLP for the masses.

And that’s my message for you for today:

If you can take a dry, inaccessible, but useful topic, and simply sexy it up without venturing into snake oil territory, you can become a star. (Maybe not Tony Robbins, but you know what I mean…) The good news is that right now, there are more such dry but useful topics than ever.

Let me leave you with a quote from the book Positioning by Jack Ries and Al Trout. This is basically what I’m trying to say but more concise — just swap “blowhardness” for “poetry” and “credibility-destroying hype” for “creativity”:

“For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.”

For more clues about success, you might like my daily email newsletter. To try it out, click here.

Persuasion world: Men wanted for hazardous journey

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A few days ago, I was talking to a successful copywriter. He said he had studied Dan Ferrari’s sales letters in detail.

(Dan, as you might know, is another successful copywriter, with a string of big-name controls.)

So I mentioned a presentation Dan once gave, where he broke down one of his most successful promotions. I offered to send successful copywriter #1 this presentation.

But he seemed reluctant. It seemed he had gotten what he wanted from Dan’s sales letters alone… and he didn’t want or need to hear Dan’s take on it.

And you know what? I can understand.

I liken it to going to see a movie versus reading a review of that same movie. The review might be good, might be bad… but even if it was written by the director himself, it’s certainly going to be a very different experience than seeing the real thing.

It won’t stimulate the same random pathways in the brain. It won’t trigger the same emotions. And it won’t allow for much independent thought.

This applies to you too. Right now, you may be reading books… going through courses… skimming emails like this one. Fine. They can give you the lay of the land when you’re new to a topic.

But the map, as they say in NLP, is not the territory.

Somebody else’s second-order interpretation of what persuasion is all about can only take you so far.

​​The good news is there’s a whole wild and dangerous world of TV shows, movies, current events, tabloids, political propaganda, real-life experiences, and yes, even books and articles, just waiting for you to start exploring and asking — why do I think this is compelling?

If you found this argument compelling, you might like my daily email newsletter. Not for any persuasion lessons it might contain… but rather as an example of content that you can dissect yourself. If that doesn’t turn you off, then click here to subscribe.

A three-act election story

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I broke my long-standing rule of not reading the New York Times to bring you the following:

In Povalikhino, a tiny village in the Russian heartland, the incumbent mayor was running for re-election. But there was a problem:

He had no opposition candidate.

According to the NYT article, Russian elections always need an opposition candidate. That’s to make it appear fair, because the ruling party candidate always wins. Well, almost always.

In this case, the political machine went in search of a patsy to run against the mayor. They asked the local butcher, cobbler, and the high school chemistry teacher.

Nobody was willing to get roped in.

Fortunately, Marina Udgodskaya, the janitor at the mayor’s office, finally accepted the role of running against her own boss.

And she won. In a landslide.

Nobody’s quite sure where it all went wrong. But the fact is that the villagers of Povalikhino voted Udgodskaya into office. She now sits behind the mayor’s desk in the office she used to clean. She said her first priority will be to fix the public lighting in the village.

Meanwhile, the old mayor refuses to speak to the media. According to his wife, he never even wanted the job himself. He finds the topic of losing to the cleaning woman painful… and blames his wife. “You got me into this,” Mrs. Former Mayor reported her husband as saying.

I’m not sharing this story with you to illustrate the importance of voting. I’m of the school that voting doesn’t matter (well, unless you’re voting in a village of three hundred people).

Instead, I just thought this was a good story.

It’s got an Act 1, an Act 2, an Act 3. It’s got tension, drama, and surprise.

I bring this up because I often see people telling “stories” in copy that don’t have these basic elements.

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, but cannot find one. The end.”

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, gets a local lawyer to run against, and then the mayor wins as usual. The end.”

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, which is how things go in Russia, for example this other time there was a second election and…”

Those are events, yes. But they are not stories — at least the kind that suck readers in and sell something.

Incidentally, if you want an education in how to write good stories in your copy… you can’t go wrong by reading the New York Times. Not for the facts. But to observe the outrage they evoke in their readers, and for the subtle sales techniques.

Or you can just sign up for my daily email newsletter. It’s not as outrageous as the New York Times. But it can teach you something about sales and storytelling. If you’re willing to take the risk, click here to subscribe.

Rejection stings, this might help

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“You have to love yourself first. How else can you expect anyone else to love you?”

I knew a girl once who shared that bit of wisdom with me. I was young and naive and it sounded reasonable.

But then I lived a bit more. There were times when — not only did I not love myself — I didn’t remotely like myself.

And yet, other people loved me. My mom and my dad, of course. Friends and girlfriends, too. They didn’t know or didn’t care whether I found myself unlovable — they loved me.

Message received, loud and clear. So I concluded the following:

When somebody loves you, it says much more about them then about you. It says they are able and ready to love. All we know about you (not you specifically, you know what I mean) is that you are adequate.

Anyways, that’s a bit of personal philosophy I wanted to share with you. I’m not trying to depress you, by the way. Quite the opposite.

Because I believe it works the same the other way. If somebody does not love you… well, it says more about them than it says about you.

But this blog is about marketing and copywriting. So let me tie it up:

I bring this up in case you’re hustling, in business for yourself, or trying to flush customers or clients out of their hiding places. If that’s you, then you know (or soon will) that rejection is part of the game. Leads dismiss you. Customers and clients leave you.

I’ve been rejected thousands of times, personally and in business. It still stings. But little logical reminders, like the one above, can help.

Can help what?

They can help you go out there and get rejected again. They can help you keep working. Which is how you find success eventually — and even self-acceptance, if you haven’t got it now.

Now for something less fuzzy:

I’ve got a daily email newsletter. It’s about cold, hard persuasion lessons. If that’s not your kind of thing, then reject it, I’ll be ok. Otherwise, click here to subscribe.