Salvation for low self-esteem prospects

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Martin Luther was obsessed with images of the devil’s butt.

Luther was tormented, day after day, by the awareness of his sins and impurities.

He went to confession so often and confessed in such detail that his confessors grew angry.

Had Martin Luther been born today, there’s a good chance he would be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and medicated accordingly.

But because Luther was born in the right environment for his particular kind of crazy, he went on to become one of the most influential persons of the last thousand years.

Point being, a seeming weakness or fault can actually be a tremendous strength — in the right circumstances.

Yesterday, I promised to tell you one way you can convince your prospects that success for them is probable, and not just possible.

This is something I picked up in a talk by Rich Schefren. Rich said that one of the biggest things you have to do as a marketer is increase your prospect’s self-esteem.

And the way to do that is to take something your prospect doesn’t like about himself… and to twist it, so it becomes a potential strength.

“You say you’re obsessed with images of the devil’s butt? That’s actually a good thing. It means you’re on the lookout for moral weakness, which can help you and others from sliding into sin.”

Of course, you’re probably not selling to Martin Luther types.

But with a bit of thinking, you can show your prospect how his procrastination… or shiny-object addiction… or never following through… are just bad manifestations of a good kind of crazy inside him. In slightly different circumstances, the underlying positive characteristics would make him a success.

And how could he change his circumstances in the right way? The path to salvation is quick and easy. It lies in taking you up on your offer.

Here’s an offer that is sure to help you rid yourself of intrusive images of demonic behinds: I write a daily email newsletter. It talks about the fine points of persuasion and copywriting. And if you’d like to keep yourself far from the temptation to slack off in your learning about persuasion and copywriting, then click here to subscribe.

Possible vs. probable in murder and in marketing

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A few days ago, as part of research for a copywriting project, I watched a movie called 12 Angry Men.

There are some spoilers about it ahead. So if you’re ever planning on watching this 1957 classic, it may be best to stop reading now.

Still here?

All right. Then I can spoil for you that this entire movie is about a jury deliberating a murder case.

An 18-year-old kid is charged with killing his father. Did he do it?

All the jurors believe so. Except for juror #8, who has a few doubts.

Over the course of the movie, through some unlikely twists and turns, this one guy, played by Henry Fonda, manages to flip all the other jurors.

The toughest nut to crack is a bull-necked businessman. He refuses to believe the kid shouldn’t go to the chair. After all, what about the woman who saw the kid do it?

And then the following exchange takes place:

Henry Fonda: Don’t you think the woman might have made a mistake?
Bull-necked businessman: No!
Henry: It’s not possible?
Bull-neck: It’s not possible!

Stubborn. Of course, what this last juror is saying is, it’s so improbable it’s practically impossible. And that reminded me of something insightful I heard from marketer Rich Schefren.

Rich was talking about prospects in direct response markets. These markets tend to be filled with people who have repeatedly failed to solve their problem. In time, many of these people conclude that solving their problem is so improbable that it is practically impossible.

The standard marketing approach ignores this. A typical sales letter explains how great the offer is. And then it gives testimonials to prove it.

“It might work for them,” your bull-headed prospect will say. “But my situation is different. It’s impossible!”

So your job as a direct response marketer is not just to show your prospect his problem can be solved. Instead, you gotta give the prospect hope that this time it’s different, and that success is probable, not just possible.

How do you do that?

I can think of a few different ways. I’ll tell you about one of them, which works well for swinging a jury of skeptical information buyers, in my email tomorrow. If you don’t want to miss that, here’s where you can subscribe to my newsletter.

“Reality is a shared hallucination”

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“A student working under the direction of anthropologist Edward T. Hall hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm.”

I ventured out of my apartment today for a rare night-time sortie into the city. And I found a proper summer evening outside:

Teenagers stood around on curbs in groups, giggling to themselves.

Couples strolled down the street and talked in a self-absorbed world.

An occasional single person, just getting out of work at 7:30pm, walked alone, staring at the ground and looking beaten.

All this reminded me of an article that I read years ago, just when I was starting to learn about copywriting. I want to share it with you tonight.

Let me warn you first that this article has no copywriting tactics in it, and nothing about marketing.

But it does talk about human psychology on a really fundamental level, which I haven’t seen discussed much elsewhere.

The article affected me very much. It’s stuck with me for years. It’s colored how I approach marketing, and how I see the world.

It was written by one Howard Bloom. Originally a music publicist for big names like Prince and Billy Joel, Bloom also wrote about group behavior in his spare time.

The quote up top is from one such article of Bloom’s, titled “Reality is a shared hallucination.” That’s the article I read many years ago, and the one I think you might find interesting.

​​In case you’re curious, here’s the link:

https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Reality-is-a-shared-hallucination-3412882.html

Copywriting playboys get treated like a piece of meat

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A while back, when there was still such a thing as professional sports, I noticed that the top three or four men’s tennis players all had one unusual thing in common:

They were all in settled, long-term relationships, often with the same girl they had started dating while they were still teenagers.

Further down the rankings, you had tennis players who were known to be playboys. Regardless of their natural talent, these playboys hovered around the top 20, but could never break into the very peak of the sport.

Coincidence?

Probably. But maybe not. Maybe a stable relationship really is crucial for massive success.

Don’t worry. I’m not telling you to go in search of a ball and chain to lock around your ankle. My point is simply this:

When I look at top copywriters — meaning people who get paid millions of dollars a year, with schedules booked up months in advance — they all fall into one of two categories.

One is guys like Chris Haddad or Jon Benson, who got successful promoting their own offers. The other is guys like Dan Ferrari and Stefan Georgi, who worked in-house at a direct response publisher for long enough to get a pile of successes in their knapsacks.

What you don’t see are playboys who came up by bouncing around from client to client. Maybe this promiscuous lifestyle worked many winters ago. But I don’t see it happening today.

Not to say you can’t make good money as a copywriting playboy. It’s what I’ve done in my career. I now make more money for less work than at any job I could have ever held.

But if you want to make it to the top… or if you want to be perceived as more than a commodity service provider… then jumping from client to client is unlikely to get you there. ​​If you want clients to stop seeing you as a piece of meat, you will have to get hitched — either to your own business, or to somebody else’s.

That’s something I’m working on as well right now. If you want to follow how I’m doing that, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.

Use the Force to avoid copy that’s too long

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George Lucas’s early drafts for the Star Wars script talked about “the Force of Others.”

These early drafts gave detailed explanations of what the Force of Others was, how it tied into a “Kyber crystal,” and how there was a “Bogan” side and an “Ashla” side of it.

Following his better instincts, Lucas stripped out all the explaining in the final draft. He got rid of the crystal and the Bogan nonsense, and dropped “the Others” and simply called it “the Force.” Star Wars went on to become a pretty, pretty big hit.

There’s a copywriting lesson here. But first, here’s another illustration:

Back in 1982, Darryl Hall was writing the prototype of a song called Maneater. He was stumbling on the last line of the chorus. “Oh here she comes… She’s a maneater and a …”

Hall can’t remember the original final line, because his girlfriend told him to “drop that shit at the end.” So he did. Maneater went to the top of the charts ​and stayed there longer than any other Hall & Oates song. Hall said that cutting down the last line made all the difference.

Conventional direct response wisdom says that longer copy outperforms shorter copy. It’s been proven over and over in many tests.

Copywriter Victor Schwab, who wrote How to Write a Good Advertisement, definitely supported the use of longer copy. But Schwab also wrote the following:

“Some ads don’t need much factual under-pinning… The copy about some products can soar successfully — without ‘coming a cropper.’ An abundance of factual material merely inhibits its flight. If too explicit about the “why” and “hows,” such copy pulls the reader’s imagination up short.” ​​

I can’t give you a recipe for when you should take out the “whys” and “hows” of your copy. I think it’s a matter of having a good feel for your market and your product, and knowing what they need to hear — and what not — in order to make the sale.

In other words, trust your intuition. Or use the Force. The Bogan Force. Of Others. And stop yourself if you say too much.

I should have stopped there. But I have one final thing to say. I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to get my emails, much like what you just read, you can sign up here.

How to avoid disappointing readers and burning yourself with “secrets”

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If you go on Amazon right now and look at the top 15 bestsellers in the Internet Marketing category, you will see a curious thing:

6 of those 15 books have a title of the form “[Topic] Secrets.” So there’s Traffic Secrets, YouTube Secrets, Instagram Secrets, plus three others.

Obviously, “secret” is a powerful word in direct marketing. It goes back to Robert Collier at least, who published a book called The Secret of the Ages back in 1926.

In the decades since, you had Gary Halbert with his sequence of “amazing secret” ads… Boardroom’s collection of “secrets” books… and today, Agora’s newest imprint in the IM space, which has a newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.

Like I said, secrets obviously sell. Then and now.

And yet, I’m writing this email to warn you about “secrets.”

For one thing, “secrets” can make you sound like everybody else. 6 out of 15, remember?

For another, “secrets” might attract the wrong kinds of buyers. They might also put the right kinds of buyers into the wrong frame of mind.

For a third thing, and most important, relying on words like “secrets” can allow you to coast instead of coming up with better content. For example, here are some of the secrets from one of those Amazon best-sellers:

“Secret #1: What is copywriting?”
“Secret #13: It’s all about them — never about you”
“Secret #31: Polish your sales copy”

I don’t know how chipper you would have to be to avoid getting down in the mouth when this treasure chest of secrets is opened up.

But what’s the problem? The book is a best-seller, right?

In my experience, being on an Amazon best-seller list doesn’t mean much. But even if this book were a legit best seller, putting out generic content and calling it a secret leaves you wide open to competition. Your only defense is this thin mist of curiosity, which can dissipate in a moment.

Maybe I’m digging myself into a moralizing hole. So let me finish up by telling you what I tell myself, because it might resonate:

Put in a bit of extra work to come up with unique content and a unique perspective. Once you’ve got that, if it warrants being called a “secret,” then sear that on its rump and let it run.

But odds are, once you’ve done that bit of extra work, you’ll come up with a better, more interesting title or headline for your content. Maybe you’ll even start a new naming trend. One which half a dozen Amazon best-sellers will copy for years to come.

By the way, I’ve also got a daily email newsletter. It’s called John Bejakovic’s Newsletter of Secrets. You don’t have to sign up. But if you want to read all the secrets inside, here’s where to go.

“Meanwhile, back at the copywriting ranch…”

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“The longer [the evangelist] can hold interest, the more people he can convince — and the greater will be the number who will inevitably walk forward and ‘hit the sawdust trail.’ The less able he is to hold interest for a sufficient time, the greater will be the number who will inevitably walk out.”
Victor Schwab, How to Write a Good Advertisement

The most memorable lesson I learned from my former copywriting coach had to do with keeping the reader’s interest. It was most memorable because it made so much sense. And yet, it went against all my instincts for how I normally write.

It’s actually a well-known writing trick.

I’ve come across the same idea in an episode of Every Frame a Painting, the YouTube video essay series. The episode in question actually revealed behind-the-scenes secrets — the underlying structure that made each essay so interesting.

Among other tricks, there was something called “Meanwhile, back at the ranch.” In a nutshell, each episode would have multiple story lines. When one story reached a peak of interest, it would cut out.

“Meanwhile, back at the ranch…”

… and another story line would pick up. When that reached a new level of interest, it would cut out again, to switch to another story line. And so on.

This might seem silly simple when I lay it out like this. After all, that’s pretty much how every soap opera and TV show works.

But like I said, it’s not how most people write. At least that’s not how I naturally write. I usually want to express my point in a logical, linear — and boring — order.

Which brings me back to my former copywriting coach. He likened the structure of a sales message to a spiral that winds around the linear, logical skeleton of the points you need to make. The reader should never know for sure what you’re going to say next.

If you do create that winding spiral, you will keep your prospect interested. And like Vic Schwab wrote above, the longer you can keep your prospect interested, the greater the chance he will walk the sawdust trail. That means more conversions made… and more shekels in your collection box.

No collection box here at the moment. But if you want more of this kind of evangelical content, here’s where to sign up for my email newsletter.

A less painful path to sales and success

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“According to family tradition, my great-grandfather used to say about the mules on his farm, ‘To get their attention you have to hit them between the eyes with a two-by-four. When you have their attention, they can see what they ought to do.'”
— Jim Camp, No

Jim Camp was a top-tier negotiation coach. One of the pillars of his negotiation system was to help the other side get a crystal-clear vision of the problem, and of the pain of that problem.

​​But people don’t usually respond to the two-by-four, Camp said. You don’t want the vision of the pain to be so extreme that people become blinded.

Travis Sago is a successful online marketer. One metaphor Travis uses is called “hell island.”

​​In a nutshell, your prospects are currently on hell island. You can help them get to heaven island. You want to make that clear to them, says Travis. But you don’t want to “burn hell island down.”

That can be hard to accept. Our brains love consistency. If a little bit is good… then a lot is even better, right?

Not necessarily. At least that’s what the two shrewd dogs above are saying.

I bring this up because of my post yesterday. I was writing how one way to get motivated is to focus on all the things you will lose if you don’t succeed… and to make that vision bloody and raw.

I’ve tried this with some of my own projects. It didn’t work for me. I created a fearful and bloody vision of failure. I still quit when the going got uncertain.

So let me wrap up with one last quote for today, this one by Mark Ford:

“Human beings are designed to get better through practice. Everything we ever learn to do – from walking to talking to writing concertos – gets better through practice. […] Practice doesn’t make perfect. That’s a foolish idea. Practice makes better. And better is where all the enjoyment is in learning.”

So that’s the final thought I want to leave you with. Perhaps success is not about inhuman levels of motivation. Or about having sufficient passion.

​​Perhaps success is simply about choosing a field where you don’t mind getting better. Where the daily work is something you find enjoyable enough — or at least, not too repulsive — so you can continue to get better at it day after day.

I hope this idea will be useful to you as you navigate your career or business. But don’t worry, I won’t go on with this froufrou self-actualization stuff. Tomorrow, we will get back on track with hardcore, practical, direct response sleight-of-hand.

In case you want to get tomorrow’s email as it comes out, here’s where to subscribe to my newsletter.

Scientists and Tony Robbins agree but I don’t

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I read some interesting scientific research just now:

People often prefer to hear really bad news rather than somewhat bad news. So for example, “You’ve got a shattered patella” can sound better than the objectively less bad, “You’ve got a trick knee.”

The reason?

Supposedly, it’s certainty. When things get really bad, you’ve got your back against the wall. You’re committed, and you’ll do whatever it takes to make things better. Surgery, rehab, rest, whatever.

On the other hand, when things are only somewhat bad… they’re likely to stay that way. And deep down, you know it.

I also watched a video today in which two Internet marketing gurus — Frank Kern and John Reese — “spontaneously” drop by Tony Robbins’s house. Frank and John want to know why so few of their customers take any action after buying IM products, and what can be done to get more people to succeed.

And Tony Robbins tells them basically the same thing that scientific research said:

The best way get motivated is not to imagine the positive outcome and how swabulous it will be. Instead, it’s more powerful to really imagine all the bad things — the despair and the pain and the self-blame — that will bubble up if you fail to achieve that outcome.

So there you go. A scientifically proven, Tony Robbins-endorsed technique to achieve master levels of motivation.

You can try it right now. Either on yourself, or on a sales prospect. Simply take the red door marked “Failure” and paint it really, really black.

If it works, great.

If it doesn’t, don’t worry. It didn’t work for me either. So in my email tomorrow, I’ll talk about some other viewpoints on this matter, and why the advice above does not always work. If you want to get that email, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Story-writing tropes and worldbuilding emails

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I want to share two things with you today that can help you with writing, particularly with the structure of your stories.

Thing one:

I’m rewatching the Matrix. In one of the opening scenes, a drive-by character says to Neo, “Hallelujah! You’re my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ.”

Of course, he’s just exaggerating. But there are a ton of parallels between the character of Neo in the Matrix and Jesus in the gospels. You probably knew this already, but I’m a little thick about these things, and I take stories too literally.

Anyways, I’m talking about a trope known as “the chosen one.” Besides The Matrix and the New Testament, you can find it in such pop culture sources as the first Dune book, the “Homer the Great” episode of the Simpsons, and even Kung Fu Panda. I found all this out thanks to a useful site I discovered today, called movietropes.org.

Don’t let the name turn you off — it’s not just movies but all kinds of media. A bunch of nerd volunteers break down tons of different tropes, give lots of examples, and link it all together in a wiki. Like I said, might be useful if you write.

Thing two:

A few months back, I wrote an email about the value of “worldbuilding.” Some people wrote in to ask if I had any more resources to share on that topic. I did not. But I do now.

Right now, Andre Chaperon is sending out a sequence of emails titled “Worldbuilding.”

It’s not specifically about inventing made-up marketing worlds. Rather, it’s about how to package up everything you do into a cohesive experience for your prospects. And that’s really the structure behind what worldbuilding, in the more fantastical sense, is all about.

I’m not sure if you can still get on this email sequence because it’s already in progress, and it’s a one-time thing. But if you want to learn about worldbuilding, it might be worth following the white rabbit over to Andre’s tinylittlebusinesses.com and taking the red pill once it’s offered to you.

All right, here’s a third and final resource you might like. Or you might not. It’s my daily email newsletter, where I write about persuasion, copywriting, and story structure. The door to get into that fantastical world is here.