Scams and losers for your bulging swipe file

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Nasty little scammerses:

A report came out a few days ago about a guy who recently lost over $4k in a Facebook scam. If like me, you start to feel superior whenever you hear somebody has been scammed (“That would never happen to me!”), let me give you the details.

The guy in question is Niek Van ​​der Maas, the founder of an adtech company.

​​Van der Maas saw a Facebook ad that offered $3k of free credit for advertising on Tik Tok. This is a legit program that Van der Maas had read about, so he clicked on the ad, downloaded the required Android app, logged in with his Facebook account, and waited for the $3k credit to land.

Except the credit never did land. ​​Instead, what happened is that Van der Maas’s own Facebook ad account was charged over $4k.

​​The scammers, who ran the Facebook ad to an imitation version of the Tik Tok ads app, used Van der Maas’s Facebook account info to log into his FB ad account… lock the guy out… and spend $4k on Vietnamese-language ads promoting some kind of aluminum gizmo.

A pretty sophisticated way to make (or lose) $4k. And I’m not 100% sure it would never happen to me.

So I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1) Because the Internet is a dangerous place, and as your surrogate email uncle, I want to make sure you keep yourself safe, and

2) Because marketers and copywriters are always told to “Keep an eye out on what’s working now!” and to throw it in their already-bulging swipe files.

But is an ad working because it’s got good copy with a sexy offer and a well-thought-out back end… or because it’s a scam?

You might think scams are rare. But I’ve read plenty of reports of advertisers scamming customers in various ways, from sneakily putting them on autobill… to cloaked “free but enter your credit card for kicks” offers… to sophisticated scams like the one above.

And when I see crazy ads in Newsmax for ED pills endorsed by President Trump and Tom Selleck… I can easily imagine something shady is going on behind the scenes with those same offers, too.

Likewise, sometimes ads run for weeks and months — and never make any money.

For example, ​a few years back, I worked with several companies preparing for an ICO — that was the cryptocurrency rage at the time. There was simply so much money in this field that many of these crypto investors were perfectly fine throwing away a few hundred thousand on Facebook ads for different loser projects, hoping to strike gold with one massive success.

So what’s my point? Don’t click on anything. It could be a scam. And just because an ad is running all over the place, that doesn’t meant it deserves a place in your swipe file.

In case you want more advice from your surrogate email uncle, you might like to sign up to my daily newsletter. No Facebook login or credit card info required.

Stripping off for better paying copywriting jobs

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I read a news item that said Las Vegas is like a ghost town these days. The neon cowboy is pointing to nowhere… the fountains of free booze have been turned off… and even the strip joints have a sign on the marquee which reads:

“SORRY, WE’RE CLOTHED”

Here’s another thing I read today:

A technical and creative and digital marketing copywriter, with five years of experience warming a chair at different offices, was asking with a touch of frustration where all the good jobs might be. He even wrote the following:

“yeesh, do I need to go straight DR and start my own business to make any real money?”

My thoughts on this:

If you are a “creative” copywriter, then going direct response or selling your own offers are both good paths to making more money.

But so is getting better at what you do, specializing, charging higher rates, and working on attracting higher-paying clients.

Because you can’t stay clothed, call yourself a “stripper,” and expect people to throw one-dollar bills your way.

In the same way, you can’t just declare you are a “copywriter,” and expect people to line up and pay you the big simoleons.

​​Sure, there are a few naked and gyrating copywriters are out there, making really good money. But if you want to get paid more, then like with those other guys… some of that warm and insulating clothing is gonna have to come off. And you’re gonna have to put on a show.

The good news is, getting better at copywriting, specializing, charging higher rates, attracting better clients… while it takes time… is definitely possible.

And if you want my take on how to do each of those things, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

The ABT’s of writing persuasive stories

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“I was sitting in a park today when I spotted a leggy girl in a blue dress, walking with a certain sashay. And so I ran after her. I stopped her, ready to give her a compliment. But once I was there, face to face, I was no longer sure she was a girl. I wasn’t even sure she was a she. She was taller than I was, and stronger in the shoulder and jaw department. When she started to speak, my suspicions deepened. Therefore, I started looking for ways to gracefully exit from this situation — not so easy to do, because my new blue-dress acquaintance seemed pleased with me and ready to talk.”

I did eventually get out of there and get to the apartment I’m staying in, where I started to read about copywriting. Specifically, I started to read about a way of structuring your stories so they keep readers reading. It’s a simple technique called ABT:

AND – that’s your setup of the story

BUT – that’s where the conflict or complication happens

THEREFORE – that’s the outcome or resolution

If you’re a diligent duck, you can go back and see how I ham-fisted those conjunctions into my park story above. Or just take a look at this next short story:

“An immigrant from a developing country arrives to the US, learns basic English, AND decides to become a professional copywriter. BUT his initial results are underwhelming and he doubts whether he can succeed. THEREFORE he develops his own unique copywriting system, which causes his sales jump 10x, making him the most successful copywriter at a major direct marketing publisher.”

Like my blue-dress adventure above, this immigrant story is true. It is the story of Evaldo Albuquerque, who over the past few years has been the most sellful copywriter at Agora Financial.

I read about the ABT technique in Evaldo’s short book, The 16 Word Sales Letter, in which he lays out his unique copywriting system.

​​I haven’t finished the book yet, so I won’t give you my opinion. ​​But Bill Bonner, the founder of Agora, says, “This is the book I’ve been waiting for.” And Mark Ford, a master copywriter who helped grow Agora to the size it is today, says, “I’m going to recommend this as a must-read to all my copywriting proteges.”

And that’s that. But maybe you don’t know where to find Evaldo’s book so you can see if it’s for you. Therefore, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/evaldo

The one weird trick to making easy sales

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Today I listened to an interview with a marketing dynamo called Kim Walsh Phillips. I’d never even heard of her before today, but I was very impressed.

The long of it is, Kim ran a kind of virtual event, which she peopled by running ads to cold Facebook traffic. The result was revenues of $250k on $6k ad spend — a 40x return.

I won’t go through the details of how Kim did this. For one thing, it’s available inside this month’s Steal Our Winners, and is worth your $4. For another, the whole system was so complex that I’m sure I’d miss 90% of the important stuff.

Which brings me to something Kim said during this interview. She said people will often ask her some version of, “What was the one thing that made the most impact?”

To which she answers, “There were 17.”

The fact is, the human brain loves simplicity, and it loves extremes. When I write copy, I always have to catch myself and beat this fact into my own head.

Because people don’t want systems, nuanced answers, or anything that smacks of work. They want tactics, opportunities, and the “one weird trick.”

Maybe your market is more grown up than this. But you’d be surprised.

​​It takes time and discipline to train your customers and prospects to stop being opportunity seekers… to accept the complex reality behind any kind of success… and to not backslide as soon as you turn your back.

​​But that sounds like work to me. And who the hell wants that?

Here’s something that won’t take any work at all:

I write a daily email newsletter. In other words, you just sit there, and my emails arrive to your inbox, to entertain you and show you new marketing opportunities. And all you have to do is press this magic button.

Getting your prospect and yourself to obey

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Over the past 36 hours, I’ve written a 20-page VSL.

It wasn’t completely from scratch — there were a bunch of notes and research and a fairly detailed brief I had written earlier.

But still. Yesterday morning, all that stuff looked like a rotting head of cabbage on the shelf of a Hungarian grocery store.

And as of 3 minutes ago, I have a polished VSL, along with several alternate headline complexes, suitable for handing off to the client.

The point I want to make here is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful. It goes all the way back to that demi-god of persuasion, Robert Cialdini.

I’m talking about the power of urgency, and specifically, the power of a deadline.

Human beings will do all sorts of things because of a deadline, including writing a 20-page VSL in 36 hours.

But in most cases — certainly in my case yesterday and today — a deadline really doesn’t mean anything.

I’m not sure my client even realized today is the deadline for this project… And if he did, I doubt it would have been any kind of problem to ask for a bit of extra time, say until Monday.

But my brain never treated either of those as options.

“Deadlines are deadlines,” the gray blob said, “and they need to be obeyed.”

Your prospects are the same way.

So invent a deadline. If your deadline is genuine, great. But even if not, people will be moved to obey. And often, they will be moved more than by any inducements or promises or blandishments you could ever make.

Speaking of which, here’s an offer that will expire at the top of the hour:

I write a daily email newsletter. Joining it is free if you do it now. Click here to sign up.

“I’ve made a huge mistake”

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I loved the original run of the TV show Arrested Development, in large part because I identified with the no-good character of Gob Bluth.

If you’ve never seen the show, I can’t do it justice here. So let me just say Gob is an irresponsible, childish, struggling stage magician.

He doesn’t think too far ahead and he consistently jumps into problem situations, such as making unintended marriage proposals or voluntarily going to prison. This sets him up for his catchphrase:

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

Like I said, it might not be funny here in this post, but it’s funny in the show. And it’s funny because I, and I guess many other people, know that sinking feeling.

It happens when you’re here on your grassy but dull knoll… looking at that other grassy but sparkling knoll over there.

Your desire builds until it becomes unbearable. So you charge down your grassy knoll and up the other grassy knoll. And once you reach the top, all sweaty and winded, you notice this new grassy knoll is no better, and is probably worse, than where you started.

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

Thing is, this pre-existing condition in the human mind — that anything else must be better than what you’ve currently got — can be exploited for sales.

Don’t take my word for it. It’s an idea that many successful marketers have expressed in slightly different ways.

Todd Brown advises not selling improvement on what your prospect already has, but a new solution.

Rich Schefren’s koan for this is, “Different is better than better.”

And Dan Kenendy says, “Sell escape, and not improvement.”

But doesn’t that mean setting your prospect up for a huge mistake? It certainly can. But if you are more forward-thinking than Gob Bluth, then you will water and prune your grassy knoll… so when your prospect arrives, all sweaty and winded, he will see the grass truly is greener there.

And now for something completely different:

I write a daily email newsletter. It can help you escape the dull and mundane workday for a few minutes. Click here to sign up.

Weird but effective pattern interrupts in current VSLs

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Perhaps you’ve seen those videos of hypnotized sharks.

They usually involve a guy on a boat, reaching like an idiot into the water where a massive great white shark is licking its chops. But the before the shark has a chance to rip off both hand and arm, the man grabs the shark by the nose.

The shark is stunned by this audacity. It won’t bite, it won’t move, in fact it looks entirely focused and absorbed on the tip of its nose.

From then on, the idiot in the boat can do whatever he wants with the shark.

I’ve noticed the same principle at work in a bunch of recent financial and investing VSLs.

Of course, no hand reaches out of the screen to grab you by the nose.

But at the very start of the video, instead of jumping into the promise or the pitch or the proof, all these recent VSLs do something weird. Literally weird.

Like showing a disembodied hand holding a mysterious document.

Or showing a standard deviation curve — “Probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but…”

Or showing $32 million in cash laid out on a table.

As you probably know, in any market, and in particular in markets hardest-hit by heavy advertising (like financial and investing newsletters), people will get jaded. Prospects become like that great white shark — ready to rip apart anything that smells familiar.

So marketers have to keep innovating and inventing.

Right now, these kinds of bizarre pattern interrupts, preceding an otherwise standard sales message, seem to be working very well. That might be something to keep in mind if you too sell in dangerous, shark-infested waters.

On a non-shark note:

I write a daily newsletter. If you’d like to get on it to keep your copywriting teeth sharp, click here.

The “knitted eyebrows” copywriting technique

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If you ever wished you had the nerve to engage in more risk-seeking behaviors such as unprotected sex or high-stakes roulette, here’s some good news:

Scientists have found a way to help you out.

According to a study published by researchers at the University of Ohio earlier this summer, a 1,000-mg dose of acetaminophen — ie. Tylenol, Panadol, etc. — not only reduced physical pain such as headaches, but also increased risk-seeking behaviors in a batch of 545 college students.

So the next time you find yourself nervously turning away from a suspect sexual partner, or walking away from the big bets table at the Casino in Monte Carlo, just pop a couple Tylenol and you will be good to go.

You might think I’m being foolish or trivial, and perhaps you’re right. But there is a point I’m trying to get to, if only my fingers would follow my brain.

I’ve read somewhere, and I think the Tylenol study above supports it, that we humans have grafted modern brain processes onto old physical hardware.

In other words, when we have the intellectual or emotional experience of, say, trusting somebody, this is connected to physical sensation of warmth in our bodies. The link goes both ways — trust inspires warmth, and warmth inspires trust. (Again, some scientists have run experiments to prove this.)

Similarly, other human emotions such as fear, disgust, anger, and joy, can and do trigger — and are triggered by — physical cues.

“So why is this relevant to me,” I hear you asking as your eyes roll to the back of your head.

Well, if you’re in the business of writing some frightening or infuriating or energizing sales copy, your first move might be to reach for adjectives. Like “frightening.” Or “infuriating.” But that’s for kids.

What grownup copywriters do is pay attention to their own bodies.

​​Dry swallowing… gritted teeth… a fully expanded chest… these are just some of the hundreds of physical cues you can include in your copy, and play your readers’ emotions like a keyboard. ​​Or if you want them to focus and read on, just talk to them about their eyebrows knitting together.

Maybe your face is forming into a frown right now. But maybe you’re nodding along after your eyebrows have shot up. If your reaction is the latter, you might like to sign up for my daily email newsletter.

Super germ ideas for profitable ad formats

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3 years ago, an astronaut on the International Space Station bounced his way outside of the calm and protected interior so he could set up a little experiment in open space.

He left some bacteria on the outside of the station, in the cold, in the dark, only occasionally to be pummeled by murderous space radiation.

It turns out these resilient bacteria survived. I bring this up for two reason:

1) Scientists say this means life COULD have come from somewhere else than Earth, which would certainly explain how the platypus got its beak, and

2) Because I learned about this super bacteria from a stock footage, subtitled video on the BBC site today.

That was interesting to me. I realized this is where the format came from for the Facebook ads I’ve been writing a lot of.

These Facebook ads look and feel the same as the BBC videos. They are made of stock footage, with overlaid subtitles that tell a story. Except the story is not about space-riding bacteria, but about bamboo kitchen towels or silicone freezer bags.

And here’s why this might be relevant to you:

These stock footage video ads are doing very well on Facebook right now. They are outperforming other ad formats my clients are trying (and these guys do a lot of trying and testing).

So if you do any Facebook advertising, it might be worthwhile going on the BBC site and checking out some of these science videos to see what makes them tick, and how you can mimic the same.

And there’s a deeper message I want to leave you with:

If an editorial format is working for a massive site like the BBC, it’s a good idea to try to adapt it into an ad.

Regular articles and these stock footage videos are not the only formats that work for news sites. I can think of other ways that places like CNBC and CNN deliver content, which might be relevant for Facebook advertisers.

The point being, it makes sense to pay attention to your own news consumption. You might find the germ of an idea. That idea can start to spread and multiply… until it forms a colony of money-making ads for your business.

For more biologically inspired marketing ideas, you might like my daily email newsletter. In case you’re interested, put on your space suit, unlock the hatch door, and sign up here.

Getting comfortable copybragging on Facebook

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Speaking on a podcast recently, marketer and copywriter (though not freelance!) Chris Haddad had the following harsh truth to share:

“If I was a freelance copywriter, I would be posting on Facebook about copy all the time. And I would be posting all of my testimonials and all of my successes. Because that’s the gig. And if you can’t do it, you need to go out and do something else.”

Chris was saying how back in the day, what made him successful as a freelance copywriter is he was willing to go out and shout, “Hey I’m Chris Haddad and I’m fucking great.” But that kind of bragging causes a discomfort in his seat these days. It’s also one of the reasons Chris doesn’t offer any copywriting training.

What if you’re the same?

​​What if you have a fear of the spotlight, and you cannot imagine bragging about yourself on Facebook? And what if, unlike Chris, you haven’t yet reached the levels of success that allow you to say, you know what, I’ll do something else instead?

Well, I think you’ve got several options. Such as creating your own product in a non-marketing niche… or writing a daily email newsletter in hopes of establishing your credibility without bragging… or taking a page out of Sasha Fierce’s book.

Yes, Sasha Fierce.

​​Maybe rings a bell. Maybe no? It’s the alter ego that Beyonce created for herself in her early days. Here’s Beyonce:

“Usually when I hear the chords, when I put on my stilettos, like the moment right before when you’re nervous… then Sasha Fierce appears, and my posture and the way I speak and everything is different.”

Psychologists agree. By conducting experiments on children and the weak-willed, they have shown how inventing an alter-ego for yourself (or at least asking yourself, “What would Chris Haddad do?”) works wonders in changing your perspective, your resolve, and your behavior. Search online for the “Batman Effect” if you want to know more about this.

But for now, maybe it’s time to start inventing a braggartly Facebook alterego for your copywriting business. It might not be what you like to hear. But as Chris says, that’s the gig.

Some personal bragging:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s fucking great. If you want to see what all of my raving readers are swooning over, you can sign up here.