Announcing: 1-Person Advertorial Agency

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This Wednesday, Thom Benny and his protege Sam will hold a workshop titled 1-Person Advertorial Agency.

As you might know, Thom is an ex-Agora copywriter who now co-runs a fintech company and coaches copywriters on the side. And as for Sam, he is a copywriter who:

1. Drove $50M worth of sales with advertorials he has written for ecom clients, on cold traffic, over the past year alone

2. Takes less than an hour to write one of these suckers, and can churn out 20+ of ’em a month, because he’s getting AI to do much of the work

3. Is finding it easy to get good new clients, because he makes them an offer to reanimate their once-performing, recently dead ads.

And that entire system, everything that makes this possible, is what Sam will be sharing on this workshop:

The AI setup… how to tweak what the AI gives you so it actually converts on cold traffic… plus how to get clients who see the benefit of such advertorials and are happy to pay you generously. (Says Thom, “$5,000-$10,000 per project, delivering in just days, not weeks”).

For reference, Thom wasn’t gonna promote this workshop via affiliates. I insisted and nudged and insisted some more until he said ok.

In case you’re wondering why I’m eager to promote Thom and Sam’s workshop, it’s because advertorials are a kind of copy that I used to write a lot of for clients.

I know the effects advertorials can have on an ecom funnel. One client I worked for dropped in one of my advertorials into his existing funnel, and could immediately scale ads from $2k a day to $12k a day.

I also know the demand for such work. I recently had an ex-client write me to ask if I’d write advertorials for his new business. Another client, the CEO of an ecom brand, once paid me $2k to give him a brain dump of how I write advertorials.

That’s why I’m promoting this workshop to you in the short time that remains.

I was gonna offer bonuses because that’s what you do when you promote somebody else’s offer.

But frankly, Sam gives you everything you need on this workshop, including how to get clients, how to produce advertorials, and how to make them convert so clients keep hiring you and paying you.

And the deal on this workshop is frankly ridiculous.

This “1-Person Advertorial Agency” is a legit business-in-a-box. You don’t come across those so often. When you do, it’s the kind of thing that typically sells for $5k or $50k upfront, plus often sort of unpleasant monthly licensing fee.

For whatever reason, perhaps because selling trainings is not their main business, or because the opportunity is so big and so live, Sam and Thom are not stretching this out into a weeks-long course, but are delivering a one-day workshop that lasts a couple hours, and still gives you everything you need.

What’s more, they are not selling this workshop for $5k or $50k, plus monthly fees, but for $199, one time.

For the full info on this workshop, or to sign up before this business-in-a-box disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorial-agency

Madoff’s secret of member management

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I was listening to a podcast yesterday about con men, and I heard the following interesting titbit:

Bernie Madoff, the hedge fund manager/operator of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, would threaten to kick out investors from his funds if they expressed doubts or asked too many questions.

(Podcasts are in general a trash source of information, so I did a bit of due diligence myself. I found a WSJ article from 2008 that corroborates this exact statement.)

Perhaps the significance of this titbit is not really clear to you. So consider for contrast how most people would handle that same situation.

Imagine that you have, say, a club or a membership or some kind of in-or-out thing that people have to pay to be on the inside of.

If a member asked you questions or expressed doubts about the value of what they are getting, what would be your natural reaction?

Think about it for a moment.

I can’t speak for you might do, but I can tell you what I might do.

I imagine my natural reaction would be answer those questions or address those doubts to the best of my ability, and maybe even to ask the member how I could make my thing better and more valuable. In effect, my reaction would be to do the best job I could selling and reselling my offer to that doubting or questioning member.

That is clearly not what Madoff did.

In fact he did the exact opposite. His approach was to appear to want to break up the sale, and kick the doubting investor out of the fund.

The result of this, as the WSJ article put it, was that “Mr. Madoff shifted investors’ fears from the risk that they might lose money to the risk they might lose out on making money.”

That’s something to ponder on, even if you are not a con man, and even if everything you do is completely ethical and above board.

In fact, I found this bit of Bernie Madoff trivia interesting because it is yet another illustration of the apocryphal 11th Commandment of con men, pick up artists, magicians, door-to-door salesmen, etc.

I give that 11th Commandment away via a link at the end of my new 10 Commandments book. In that bonus 11th Commandment, I summarize much of the book, including the underlying principle of what Madoff was doing above, in just three words of powerful influence strategy.

And like Madoff’s strategy above, my new 10 Commandments book, including that apocryphal 11th Commandment, is not only relevant to you if you have criminal tendencies. Here’s a very nice review I got about that from a new reader by the name of Joe Vigliano:

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Life changing?

Yeah, it is. Despite its unfortunate title 🙂 I almost passed on it since I don’t consider myself a con man, pick up artist, magician, etc. Can’t tell you how glad I am that I clicked Buy Now. The information John shares is invaluable for both your personal life and your professional life…especially if that professional life involves influencing others. I’m a kinesthetic reader–i do a lot of highlighting. This book is almost an entire highlight, it’s that good. The information is solid gold and it’s written in an absolutely engaging, entertaining way. If you have the paperback, the pages will be dog-eared from use. Not sure what that looks like on my Kindle. Either way, this is a book to spend time with. Lots of time.

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But you know what?

I’ve been promoting this book for a long while. I’ve been giving you testimonials and curious stories from the book. I’ve been linking to it on Amazon, over and over in my emails, for months now.

If you still haven’t gotten my book, then there’s no sense in me trying to persuade you any more. I officially throw up my hands. This book, life changing or not, is not for you.

So don’t get it. It’s too late. And if I catch you getting it, say, if I catch you signing up for that bonus 11th Commandment, then you’re OUT, off my list, for good.

When 4.9 is bigger than 5

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It finally happened — I got my first 4-star review for my new 10 Commandments book.

Part of me is of course annoyed — “How dare you” — but a part of me is also relieved. The book has had 26 reviews so far, all of them 5 star.

My average ranking has now tanked from a perfect 5.0 to a more reasonable 4.9.

This brought to mind a Gary Halbert bullet:

* Almost foolproof contraception: It’s over 99% effective but… so new… most people have never even heard about it!

Unless you’ve been through my Copy Riddles program, you might wonder what this new and unheard-of form of contraception is. That depends, like Bill Clinton said, on what the meaning of “is” is. But I will tell you this:

The secret Gary is talking about is actually 100% effective.

The question then becomes, if Gary’s “almost foolproof contraception” is actually 100% effective, why did Gary knock it down to “99%”?

I mean, isn’t 100% better than “over 99%”?

Isn’t “foolproof” more attractive to the foolish, which includes all of us, than “almost foolproof”?

The answer is no, not in the strange way the human brain works, which master copywriters like Gary intuitively understood and additionally proved by experience.

It’s another one of those bits of elite copywriting you would never pick up on by looking at the finished copy alone.

In order to figure out that Gary’s “over 99% effective” is not an ordinary fact, but a bit of A-list wizardry, you need to peek behind the curtain.

That’s the basis of my Copy Riddles program.

And about that, here’s a quote from copywriter Kevin Orellana, who is going through Copy Riddles now for I believe the fourth time, and who won last week’s Copy Riddles bullets contest:

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Being a Copy Riddles customer has been one of the best decisions I’ve made!

I’ve actually been going through Copy Riddles since 2021 and till this day, I still get new insights from it.

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If Copy Riddles had a rating, it would be over 4.99. For more info on this program:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The foundation that personal positioning is built on

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Back when I was researching my new 10 Commandments book, about con men, pick up artists, and among others, door-to-door salesmen, I came across a 10-minute documentary titled, “The Bronzer.”

The Bronzer is about a door-to-door salesman named Stu Larkin, who has been selling bronzed baby shoes his whole life.

(The movie came out 10+ years ago, but Larkin is still at it as far as I know.)

There weren’t any useful door-to-door selling techniques in this documentary. But there was a kind of wake-up call.

Bronzed baby shoes are nice. I guess they sell for $50 a pair? or $100? or $200? In any case, Larkin had this to say:

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The thing about selling that I’m kind of disturbed about, because I know that I’m so good at what I do, is that I think I missed my calling in something else. That I could have made millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars selling something else. Like someone would be going, “We know that guy. He’s the most renowned salesman in the world.”

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There are good techniques for positioning yourself at the top end of your market, and I want to write my next book about those.

But those good techniques are like the blueprints for building a skyscraper. The foundation of that skyscraper, without which even the most sound blueprints will result in a janky leaning tower that nobody wants to live in, is choosing which market you will be in to begin with.

Fact one:

It takes as much skill to sell to people who aren’t interested in buying or who have no money… as to sell to people who both are eager to buy and who have the money to do so. Often, it takes more skill and more work, far more, to sell to the first group.

Fact two:

If you’re selling something right now, then there’s sure to be another market where your exact skills, and maybe even your exact offers, could sell for 5x or 10x or 100x of what you’re selling for now.

Of course, it’s not an easy or light decision to switch markets and to basically set sail in an unfamiliar and possibly shark-infested sea. But it’s worth thinking about, or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I’ve been thinking about it too.

I’ll leave you with that seed for today.

Meanwhile, as that seed germinates, if you wanna see what valuable techniques of door-to-door salesman I did find, and how those tie into related fields like copywriting, standup comedy, and con games:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge (lights)

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A long time ago, in a chair very very near away, I read a story about a guy who bought the Brooklyn Bridge.

Well, he bought the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, which were due to be replaced with new, brighter, more energy-efficient lights.

And then, some time later, one by one, the same guy sold the same lights, at a profit.

This guy, name Joe Pilato, flips random stuff for fun, because the business is not really all that great.

Pilato bought 123 of the Brooklyn Bridge lights for about $4.3k, and and he “made in total” between $13k and $14k. It’s not clear if that’s profit or revenue because it took Pilato a year to offload the lights — and along the way he had to pay for storage, transportation, cleaning, and even marketing.

But do the numbers really matter?

That snippet, “the guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge (lights),” was good enough to get Pilato featured in a national magazine (one of a few still left with circulation of millions).

It will be a tagline he can use for the rest of his natural life to sell himself and his “flipping insider” knowledge if he were to create a bizopp course out of it, or a book on the matter, or if he wanted to get featured on podcasts or when Oprah does a segment on flipping (yeah right).

The point being:

A notable, simple, fascinating tagline, which is actually based on a pretty lousy reality (the numbers again are maybe $5k in profit, over the course of a year, and are completely unscalable), is worth more in positioning gold than an unremarkable, complicated, unglamorous summary of a genuinely successful project (“I flipped a beat-down house in Towson, MD, in just 4 months and made a profit of $67k, and that was just one of five such projects in the last year”).

He who has ears, let him hear.

Meanwhile, one thing I didn’t realize until pretty recent (I’m a slow learner, and much isolated from the world) is that “the guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge” is such an effective tagline because it’s actually been used to describe a number of famous con men over the past century.

Con men have legitimately been selling the Brooklyn Bridge, often for cheap, to very gullible newcomers to New York, who were hoping to get something for nothing, but who ended up getting nothing for something.

That’s a bit of research that that didn’t make it into my new 10 Commandments book.

But there is a lot in that book about con men, and about valuable and even legal marketing and business and persuasion lessons that can be extracted from their sneaky and deceiving ways.

If that’s something you can imagine finding interesting:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

A billionaire’s personal positioning test

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A few days ago, a new reader and Copy Riddles member named Tim wrote me an email with the subject line, “a billionaire’s bullet idea.” Tim’s email said:

“This guy, Jason Cohen, founded a few billion dollar companies. Anyways, he wrote an article you might like and seems relevant to Copy Riddles.”

Tim linked to Cohen’s article, “The Opposite Test,” the gist of which was the following:

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So here’s my Opposite Test: For each feature/benefit bullet point, construct its negative and see if that statement is ridiculous. Would anyone be able to construct a rational strategy with that negative? Perhaps a competitor already has! If the negative is indeed ridiculous, if it would be impossible to have a product or positioning or strategy that included the negative, it means this bullet point is trivial, obvious, mandatory, or at least undifferentiating from the competition.

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This one of those ideas that is not 100% true but is 100% useful. Try it yourself and see. Take any well-established promise or positioning idea in your industry, even one that seems unassailable, and turn it around:

“Get rich quickly” => “Get rich slowly” [worked for Gary Bencivenga]

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” => “Winning Through Intimidation” [worked for Robert Ringer]

“Getting to Yes” => “Start with No” [worked for Jim Camp]

The underlying psychology here is that we don’t just align ourselves to certain people and ideas. Just as often, or probably more often, we align ourselves in opposition to certain people and ideas. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t… unless you’ve really grown to hate the devil you know, in which, case any other devil, no matter how bad, will do.

I’m telling you this because I’m thinking of the next book I want to write, about personal positioning, and I’m testing out ideas for that.

In the meantime, I can point you to my new 10 Commandments book in case you still haven’t read that. My book has been on sale since May and has slowly accumulated 26 reviews, all of them 5 star. Here’s one from the same Tim who wrote me about the Opposite Test:

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“A new favorite”

You know, I’ve read a lot of books in this space and this is one of my favorites. He skips over the common knowledge and dives into really eye opening insights.

He condenses lots of research into a really fun book. I’ll be rereading this one soon.

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If you want to read probably the best thing I’ve written to date, in a fun and small package, for just $4.99:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

“A little scary”: X-ray goggles revealed

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In an email last week, I teased a pair of “X-ray goggles” that let you peer into places you maybe shouldn’t be peering, like your prospect’s wallet.

I thought these goggles might be particularly relevant for people who do lots of sales calls. They allow you to only get on calls with people who can afford what you’re selling, so you minimize the time you spend on the phone while maximizing the actual sales you make.

Last week, I talked to a few such people to find out more about their situation. At the end, I revealed to them what these goggles are, plus where to get ’em. Here are a few responses I got:

“I didn’t know such a tool existed, and I’m sure people on my list would like to have a pair.”

“That is interesting (and a little scary). Thanks for sharing that, John.”

“Damn! I WISH I could use that! I ran it on myself and it blew me away! That’s a killer app. Have you used it? Has it helped you?”

I have not used these X-ray goggles myself because frankly I don’t do sales calls. I am also not running lots of paid or affiliate traffic to generate leads I have to wade through.

But maybe you do?

Or maybe you have a sales team that does?

Or maybe you work with such a client?

If so, these X-ray goggles are worth a look:

https://bejakovic.com/xray

How to be a charming cad

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Many years ago, back when I had a proper office job, I used to work with a handsome and muscular guy named Roland.

One time at lunch, a woman on our team started reaching across the table and straining to get the salt shaker, which was in front of Roland.

Roland noticed this, and reached for the salt shaker himself, as though to push it closer to the woman and make her job easier. But instead of pushing the salt shaker towards the woman, he pulled it further towards himself, and firmly out of the woman’s reach.

The woman, now fully splayed out across the table, gave out a bit of an shocked gasp and then started laughing.

(I’ve repeated this little trick several times and it’s never failed to produce the same result.)

Example two:

Keith McNally is a New York restaurateur. Back in the 1980s, he opened up a restaurant called the Odeon that became a cultural icon — it was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney’s book “Bright Lights, Big City” and in movies like American Psycho.

When McNally used to walk around the Odeon, a new customer might ask where the bathroom is. To which, McNally would smile and say, “We don’t have one.” And then he would walk away, leaving the confused costumer to wonder for a second whether that could possibly be true.

It was small details like this that made McNally’s restaurant the “in” destination, and kept people coming back over and over.

So those are two examples of how to be a charming cad.

Though it might not look like it at first, they share a common structure. Perhaps you can see the structure, or perhaps you’ve heard me talk about it before. If not, you can find it laid out and explained in chapter, I mean, Commandment IV of my new 10 Commandments book.

But I won’t give you the link to buy that.

No, I wish. Here it is:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

What really makes for a good sex scene?

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As of last night, I’m about halfway through a 3-hour-long movie, titled Nymphomaniac, Volume 1. (There’s also a Volume 2, with more hours.)

I’m only halfway through it because I can only watch it in 25-minute increments. The movie is dark (literally, full of brown and black frames), heavy-handed, and worst of all, filled with gratuitous, very unsexy sex scenes.

I’m telling you this because, though you can’t tell it from Nymphomaniac, sex in movies can apparently be sexy.

Back in 1980, Francis Ford Coppola, best known as the director of the Godfather (volumes 1 and 2, each many hours long), was making a movie that was to feature a sex scene.

Coppola, who is a bit obsessive about making his movies good, tasked a UC Berkeley PhD student named Constance Penly with phoning up hundreds of famous and influential people to find out 1) which sex scenes were the best and 2) what those sex scenes had in common.

Would you like to know also?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

After hundreds of interviews and many hours of uncomfortable sex scene watching, Penley had her answer. The best sex scenes had two things in common:

1. The sex wasn’t supposed to happen, because of some big difference between the sexers

2. One or both of the characters were under threat of death

Penley gives the example of the sex scene in the original Terminator movie, between the characters of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. He is a rebel soldier from 45 years in the future, sent back in time. She is a woman of the present, being hunted by a cyborg assassin. Sarah and Kyle have sex, and apparently Penley thought it was hot.

(Incidentally, the Skynet future of the Terminator movies, which both Kyle Reese and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin are sent back from, was set in 2029.

That was distant back in 1984 when the Terminator came out, but it’s near to us now. And it looks like we’re right on track.

I saw a video just yesterday of an AI conference in China in which a woman was kickboxing with a humanoid robot that looked like it was trained on thousands of hours of UFC footage. For demonstration purposes, the robot was tuned to a setting of “Not Kill.”)

But back to those good sex scene criteria. What is it about these two criteria specifically?

I realized what makes a good sex scene is just like what makes a good promotional sales event — there’s a time-limited window and a real cost for not acting during it.

Is this a coincidence? Or am I reaching? I don’t think so. I think it goes back to the fundamental and age-old questions that all human minds are always asking:

Why? Why this? Why should I care? Why is it now or never?

And with that, I can finally wrap up my email and point you to the offer I have been working up to promoting. It’s a book, one I’ve written.

The reason I’m promoting it today is that it ties into the question of “why.” In fact, my book has the question of “why” running through it in different ways, from beginning to end. And not just that. It also shows you how to answer that question, implicitly and explicitly, to influence others without being heavy-handed and gratuitous about it.

Would you like to know how?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

17 ideas to salvage a huge cold list

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Yesterday, I sent out an email asking for advice on what to do with a huge cold list that someone I know is in secret possession of.

This list is not only huge, not only cold, but there are also a bunch of other strange restrictions. Can anything be done?

After asking for advice yesterday, I got a buncha responses, including from people who manage email lists as a job (one guy for 20 years) and from others who have been in similarish situations and shared their experiences and suggestions.

I was honestly grateful to get so many thoughtful, detailed, and helpful responses. I read them all. I selected the ones that sounded feasible to me, and boiled related ones to get 17 separate ideas, most of which were new to me. I then organized them in three categories:

1. Technical ideas (how to email)

2. Content ideas (what to email)

3. Out-of-the-box ideas (how not to email)

I don’t know a better way to say thanks to everyone on my list who wrote me than to “pay it forward” and share the total collection of ideas with my whole list. You can find it below.

If you yourself are in secret possession of a list that’s huge, cold, possibly dead but maybe not, then read these ideas, and if you find them valuable, pass them on.

And in case you take any of these ideas and apply them, let me know — I’d love to hear about it and update the doc. Here it is:

https://bejakovic.com/salvage