Lethal Webinar 2

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The camera zooms in through a window of a high-rise apartment and onto the bed.

On the bed, there’s a topless blonde woman. She’s wearing white stockings and a negligee, and writhing in drug-fueled lust.

The next thing you know, she gets up.

She stumbles over to the balcony.

She climbs onto the railing.

And then she takes a dive, falling some 30 floors down, onto the roof of a parked car.

So begins the original Lethal Weapon movie.

I bring this up because Gene Schwartz, one of the greatest copywriters of all time, called this movie “the greatest training for any merchandiser in the world, especially copy people.”

He advised copywriters to see it at least three times, preferably in the same day.

Why? What could possibly be so great about Lethal Weapon?

In Gene’s own words:

“You’ve got to pick up the rhythm, and you’ve got to see how Silver, who is an absolute genius — Spielberg and Silver are the two communication geniuses of our country at this moment — every timing, every three minutes he throws another blast at you. There’s another head being smashed against a windshield. There’s another fifty people being blown out of an airplane. And then there’s a few minutes of dialogue which means nothing.”

This is the same structure that Gene advised for sales letters as well.

Explosion… Fight… 3 minutes of conversation… Another explosion…

Headline… Cautionary tale… 3 sentences of explanation… Another shocking story…

You might think this structure is just for hyped-up sales copy.

I don’t agree.

At a fundamental level, this is how humans prefer to communicate, or at least how they prefer to consume information.

This same structure works for everything from hard-core sales letters to technical webinars.

Of course, you have to adapt to your market.

For example, if you are in fact doing a technical webinar (as a friend of mine might be doing soon), you wouldn’t start with a coked-up topless hooker jumping to her death.

But you would want to shock and startle your audience a bit — in the appropriate dose. So you could start off the webinar with a dramatic case study, or a cautionary tale from one of your existing customers.

The key is to shake up and disturb your audience a bit, before you get to the more reasoned, serious, and boring content.

At least that’s my opinion.

Of course, technical webinars are not my forte. However, sales emails are. And if you want sales emails that shake up and disturb your audience, then Riggs, here’s what to do:

Click on the link below. And see whether you want to sign up for a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing, specifically for the health space. Here’s where to point your lethal weapon:

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

How to be courteous to trolls

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There’s a scene in The Office where Dwight Schrute does battle with a sentient computer.

Dwight and the sentient computer (actually a couple of his coworkers in disguise) are competing to see who can sell more paper by the end of the day.

At one point, Dwight loses his cool. He tells the computer to “011 1111 011 011” (which apparently spells the letters “F” and “O” in ASCII).

The sentient computer doesn’t flinch, however.

Instead, it replies to Dwight:

“While you were typing that, I’ve searched every database in existence and learned every fact about everything. And mastered the violin. And sold more paper!”

I got a chance to apply a similar kind of response today for an ad I’m running on Facebook.

This ad is promoting a free ebook titled The Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams. One of the sections in this ebook covers the two big MLM essential oil companies, doTerra and Young Living, which have a lot of ardent supporters.

One such supporter commented on my ad:

“You are showing your own ignorance! You promote oils and don’t know the difference between what’s pure and what’s not, and yet try to bash other companies. You couldn’t pay me to waste my time on your book!”

Until recently, I’ve ignored trolls like this.

But then I thought to myself, why be so lazy?

I should take the advice of expert troll-tamer Ben Settle, and try to profit from this.

So I decided to ignore what the troll said, misconstrue it as something positive, and then self-promote. I wrote in response:

“No need to pay for this book, it’s free. And I agree that essential oil quality is important. That’s why I write about several best-selling companies that have been shown to sell adulterated oils.”

Well, the troll didn’t like being misunderstood.

She wrote more angry comments. But I had no intention of engaging with her further. I think one serving of “misconstrue then self-promote” is all each troll is entitled to.

So what’s the point?

I believe it’s possible to deal with trolls with courtesy, as long as you misconstrue or ignore what they have to say.

And then, you can turn it to your advantage and self-promote.

It’s much like the scene from The Office above.

Don’t engage with trolls directly. And take the attitude that you’re winning no matter what.

If you do this, you will find opportunities for subtle self-promotion everywhere.

Speaking of self-promotion: If you read all the way to the end of this post, you might like my upcoming book on email marketing. You can sign up to get a free copy when it’s out by going to the following page:

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

Stinkbug surprise

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Last autumn was the first time it happened.

Stinkbugs, invading my apartment. Flying around aimlessly. Bumping into lamps and walls.

Fortunately, stinkbugs are easy to scoop up and dispose of. As a girl I used to know would say, “They have no instinct for life.”

As stinkbugs kept appearing in my living room, I started to wonder, how can such a stupid creature be taking over the world?

It turns out stinkbugs are not always this slow and useless.

They only come inside homes when the weather turns cold. They then enter a state known as diapause, a kind of insect hibernation.

I found out about this from an article titled “Home Invasion,” written by Katharine Schulz, a Pulitzer-prize winning author.

But don’t worry. I’m not here to talk about stinkbugs. Instead, I want to talk about an interesting writing technique that Schulz used in her article.

While talking about the diapause, Schulz writes:

“It is also thanks to diapause that stinkbugs, indoors, seem inordinately graceless and impossibly dumb. But, as we all know, being graceless and dumb is no obstacle to being powerful and horrifying.”

Did you catch it?

There in the second sentence. That unresolved allusion to something “graceless and dumb.”

For reference, this article is from 2018 and was published in the New Yorker, a left-leaning magazine.

When I read the above passage, a wave of pleasant surprise passed over me.

Not because I am outraged over “graceless and dumb” creatures being horrifyingly powerful.

Instead, I was just satisfied at having solved a little puzzle. After all, Schulz didn’t spell it out who or what she was talking about.

This little puzzle spiced up the article for me. It certainly seems to be a good tactic for Pulitzer-winning New Yorker writers.

But should you ever use unresolved verbal puzzles in sales copy?

It seems crazy.

After all, you want sales copy to be as transparent and easy-to-read as possible. As copywriting coach David Garfinkel likes to say, “Either you work and get paid, or your reader works and gets paid” (ie. he keeps his money and doesn’t buy what you’re selling).

And yet, there might be occasions when posing a little intellectual challenge for your readers can work in copy.

Here’s what Joe Sugarman, who ran and wrote copy for a 9-figure mail-order business, has to say on the topic:

“If you make your copy too obvious, the reader feels either looked down on or bored. Provide a little suspense so that the reader has to come to a conclusion on her own using intuition, thought, sensation, and emotion, and you’ve got a very good force working for you.”

And sure enough, old Joe used to pepper in such bits of “mental engagement” in many of his wildly successful ads.

Something for you too to consider.

Of course, there are places in copy where you never want to leave the reader thinking or scratching his head. Such as, for example, that call to action.

That’s why, in case you are looking to make your sales emails stink less, here’s exactly what todo:

Head on down to the page below. And then make a decision whether you want to opt in with your email. If you do opt in, I’ll send you a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing — once I finish it in the next couple of months. Here’s the link:

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

Five words to get to the heart of why people don’t buy

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A true story about objections:

A chemical supplies salesman goes into a client’s office. The client used to have a big account with the salesman’s company, but about a year ago, he mysteriously withdrew his business.

“Why?” the salesman asks timidly.

“We decided to give your competitors a shot,” says the client. “They’ve proved to be perfectly satisfactory, so we will stick with them.”

Hmm.

What to say?

Well, one option is to take a page out Frank Bettger’s book How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success In Selling.

Back in the 1920’s, Bettger was a pro baseball player. He then got injured and started selling life insurance.

Very unsuccessfully, at first.

Eventually though, he became quite the salesman. In time, he even teamed up with Dale Carnegie on the self-help lecture circuit, and wrote the “How I Raised Myself” book after Carnegie encouraged him.

That book, although it’s not well-known today, had quite the following once.

Gary Bencivenga, widely believed to be the greatest copywriter of all time, and Marty Edelston, the founder of the direct response behemoth Boardroom/Bottom Line, both credit it for their massive success.

Anyways, one thing Bettger says in the book is he kept a list of reasons why people didn’t buy.

He tallied them all up, across some 5,000 sales interviews.

What he found is that around 60% of the time, the initial, logical objection that people gave for not buying was not the real reason.

Bettger advised first asking “Why?” to get this first reason.

He’d listen.

And then, he’d say, “In addition to that, is there any other reason you might have for not buying?”

In total, those five words — “Why” and “In addition to that” — were usually enough to draw out the real objection.

They worked in the case of the chemical supplies salesman above. (It turned out the client was angry that a special discount had been discontinued without notice.)

All of which is great if you can talk to your prospects.

This is something you do in direct sales. You might even be able to do with copywriting, if you can find prospects to interview.

Unfortunately though, it’s not always possible.

So how do you get at those hidden reasons when all you have is a customer avatar?

Well, you need workarounds.

I have my own — basically how I do research.

I’ll talk about this in more detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. If you want to raise your emails from failure to success in selling, you might be interested in grabbing a free copy of this book when it’s out. Here’s how to do that:

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

I screwed up yesterday

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Yesterday, I was sending out an email to my aromatherapy list when the Internet died.

Normally, I write my daily email in a text editor.

I then paste it into ActiveCampaign, tweak the formatting, and then click “Send.”

Yesterday, however, between the pasting and the clicking, the Internet died.

I restarted the router, finished sending out the email (so I thought), and got on with my merry day.

It was only later I realized I’d screwed up. Because the Internet had died at the proper moment, the email body didn’t get saved in ActiveCampaign.

So I managed to send out an email with a tantalizing subject line, “This essential oil treatment only works for 25% of people”…

… But the body of the email talked about something entirely unrelated (it was the template copy, from an email I had written two years ago).

​Most importantly, the email wasn’t promoting what I wanted
it to promote (Essential Oil Quick Start Guide, my book on aromatherapy).

Shamezul.

What to do?

Well, I simply waited. And then today, I sent out another email saying, “I screwed up yesterday.”

I explained what had happened.

And I pasted in the correct email body from yesterday’s email below my explanation.

Many people opened this “penance” email.

Some read it.

And a few might even buy through it, as tends to happen when I include the right link.

Now, you might wonder why I’m mentioning all this. It’s to illustrate a principle I first heard from email marketing guru-in-chief Ben Settle. Says Ben (I’m paraphrasing):

“Nothing bad ever happens to you when you write emails”

In other words, everything can be turned and twisted into a good email.

So far, I’ve gotten new email content out of negative Amazon reviews, doubts about my credibility, and accusations thrown at me on Facebook.

​And as you’re currently reading, out of a story of how I botched my actual email sending.

All of which illustrates that it’s not hard to come up with fodder for daily emails, once you get in the groove.

Of course, you can’t send out an “I screwed up” email every day. You’ll need some other email ideas to keep things interesting for your audience.

If you want my ideas for the kind of email content you could be sending out to your list day after day, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing. For more info or to sign up for a free copy, here’s where to go:

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

Ginsu knives in corporate boardrooms

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“In Japan, the hand can be used as a knife. But this method doesn’t work with a tomato…”

— Original Ginsu knife commercial, cca. 1980

In copywriting, there’s something called the “false close.”

A perfect example of this is from the famous Ginsu knife TV commercial.

After showing you how the Ginsu cuts paper-thin slices of bread, how it’s sharp enough to saw through a tin can, and how it can even be used to chop wood, the narrator asks:

“How much would you pay for a knife like this?”

That’s the setup for the false close. You might expect that the pitch is coming soon. Instead, the narrator continues:

“Before you answer, listen…”

And then he tells you about all the incedible bonuses you get if you order your Ginsu knife right now.

A matching carving fork. A versatile 6-in-1 kitchen tool. A set of 6 precision steak knives. And a spiral potato slicer.

It’s only then, once you’ve been wowed with the craziness of the entire offer, do you get to hear the price. In other words, that’s when you finally get to the real close.

So should you use a false close in your selling?

It certainly seems so.

Not only does it work for TV commercials, but you can find examples of false closes in copy from some of the world’s best copywriters, including Mark Ford and Parris Lampropoulos.

And yet, other persuasion experts strongly warn against the false close.

For example, Jim Camp.

Camp was a master negotiator, who coached corporate executives in billion-dollar deals.

According to Camp, if you ever try a false close, you’ll get kicked out of the boardroom. At best, you’ll blow the deal and you won’t be invited back.

So how to square this with the Ginsu knife commercial?

It’s simply a matter of knowing your audience and your medium.

Yes, there are fundamentals of persuasion that work in just about any situation.

But convincing people to buy a $9.99 set of precision steak knives is going to take a different approach to closing a complex, year-long, corporate sale.

This might seem obvious.

But this basic principle — know what works for your audience — is violated a lot. Particularly when people try to Frankenstein copy from one market to another.

Anyways, this is one reason why it makes sense to specialize.

And that’s why, while I do write for different markets, I’m specializing more and more in writing health copy.

And if you want some of the best insights I’ve gained about writing for the health market (including writing winning sales emails for an 8-figure supplement business), you might like my upcoming book. For more info or to sign up for a free copy:

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

The email that broke the camel’s back

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A while back, I subscribed to the Farnam Street email newsletter.

I’d seen a headline in the New York Times about Shane Parrish, the guy who writes Farnam Street. The headline read:

“How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter”

Interesting.

So I subscribed, without knowing too much about what the content I would be getting.

The first email arrived with a ton of links to important, helpful articles on the Farnam Street blog. I scanned through, but I didn’t read anything.

A second email hit me a few days later, with more helpful content.

Then a third.

And a fourth.

There was nothing wrong with any of these emails. And the content was apparently good — after all, Shane Parrish got a feature written about him in the New York Times.

But none of it clicked with me. It was too earnest, too virtuous, too positive.

Finally, I got an email with the headline “Introducing your new favorite holiday tradition” (it was around Christmastime).

I opened it up. It was about a “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” to exchange books and then spend the evening reading them together with friends and family.

That’s when I unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no beef with Farnam Street or their email newsletter. I personally didn’t find the content interesting. On the other hand, a lot of other people obviously get a lot out of the same emails that I unsubscribed from.

I only bring up my experience with Farnam Street emails to illustrate a point:

It wasn’t that last email that made me unsubscribe.

That was just the straw, or the email, that broke the camel’s back.

All the previous emails had already primed me to open up the “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” email and say to myself, “Oh, hell no.”

This is something to remember in case you do a lot of email marketing.

It’s very hard to assign blame (or praise) to an individual email.

Odds are, it’s the entire email sequence that’s driving readers away — or winning them over.

Of course, there are things (unvirtuous and unearnest things) you can do to stack things in your favor early on in the relationship, while you still have your reader’s attention and good will.

If you’d like to find out what some of those unvirtuous ways are, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info or to sign up to get a free copy (once it’s out), here’s where to go:

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

 

How to harness the reverse testimonial

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In his Adweek copywriting book, marketing genius Joe Sugarman described an interesting technique.

He called it the “reverse testimonial.”

Let me illustrate it by talking about myself. Or more specifically, about my persona on my aromatherapy website, Unusual Health.

You see, in the aromatherapy world, the man at the top of the pile is a guy called Robert Tisserand.

​Robert is extremely knowledgeable about essential oils.

​​For several decades, he’s lectured around the world about the science behind EOs and about how to use them safely.

​​He’s co-authored a massive book on the topic, filled with literally thousands of scientific citations. He has a huge following online, and he’s routinely considered to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, expert on essential oils.

So how does this apply to me?

Well, several people have recently asked me what my qualifications are to write about essential oils.

So I wrote an email to my aromatherapy list to answer exactly this question. And I started by talking about Robert Tisserand, and how great he is.

I then said how I don’t claim to be an essential oil expert, and how I never expect to have the kind of EO knowledge that Robert has. But then comes the twist, where I explain why this is actually a good thing for my readers.

You’ll have to be on my aromatherapy list to know exactly how I pull this off.

But how I pull off the twist is not the point. The point is that I used Robert Tisserand and his status as “one of the world’s leading experts in aromatherapy” to work for me.

That, in a nutshell, is Joe Sugarman’s reverse testimonial.

You start off by talking about the unbeatable advantages a competitor has over you — including testimonials and social proof — and then you turn that around to actually work in your favor.

Anyways, this might work for you as well, if you are not yet the man at the top of the pile in your market.

By the way, if you need help with sales emails, you might like my upcoming book on the topic. It distills what I’ve learned by writing for clients in the health space (and for my own aromatherapy list).

For more info, or to sign up for a free copy, here’s where to go:

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

I get bullied on Facebook, woman comes to my rescue

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About a week ago, a woman named Alexis came to my defense on Facebook.

The back story is that a growing number of people had started calling me out as a scammer.

I had been running an ad to promote The Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams, a free lead magnet for Unusual Health, my aromatherapy mailing list.

The ad was running successfully for a long while.

But eventually, people started accusing me (yes, me!) of being the scam. They said I was trying to charge $10 for The Little Black Book, which I claimed to be giving away for free.

The real issue was that I had a “thank you” page after people opted in for the free lead magnet.

At the top of the page, I had instructions (in regular font) that explained the ebook will be sent by email.

Below that, I gradually worked my way into a sales letter (including a proper, large headline) for another aromatherapy book I am selling, Essential Oil Quick Start Guide.

Now last Friday, I was on a webinar offered by copywriting legend Parris Lampropoulos.

And Parris explained exactly why I was getting bullied and called out as a scammer (and no, he wasn’t talking about me specifically).

Said Parris, people’s eyes are drawn to large text on the page. That’s why he’s against using pre-heads (text before the headline) if they have any kind of critical message. People simply won’t read them.

And that’s what was happening with my thank-you page — the pre-head was effectively the download instructions, and many people weren’t reading them.

Easy enough to solve.

I kept the exact same message, but upped the font of the first sentence of the download instructions to make it clear that is something people should read.

Voila.

The complaints stopped immediately.

And several people, including Alexis, even came to my defense against the angry mob, saying how people should read the instructions and how I’m not trying to scam anyone.

So the lesson is to avoid pre-heads.

And more broadly, it’s to realize how design and overall marketing can completely dominate the copywriting message you might have.

This is something I’ll talk about in more detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info on this book, or to get a free copy when it’s out, here’s where to go:

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

How to abuse your customers into buying from you

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There’s a lot you can learn from chick flicks.

Take for example, the evergreen romantic comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary. It’s about a 30-something single woman, a bit fat, a bit messy, not too successful.

Throughout the movie, Bridget is searching for a nice, sensible boyfriend to go out with. She eventually succeeds — by not becoming bitter, by putting herself out there, by picking herself up when she’s down. At least that’s the surface script.

But there’s an underlying script as well.

After all, the guy that Bridget winds up with — Mark Darcy — starts off by cruelly and unironically insulting her:

“I do not need a blind date, particularly not with some verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother.”

Ouch.

Mark keeps this up for much of the movie.

Of course, it turns out he’s not such a bad guy after all. This makes it ok that Bridget winds up with him before the credits roll.

It gets better —  we hope

And that’s the underlying script.

It seems to say, even when somebody verbally or emotionally abuses you, there’s hope that they might actually like you.

I think many people subconsciously hope for this in real life as well. And that’s why abuse can help you make sales — as long as you keep it subtle and ethical.

As an example of this, take Joe Karbo’s famous ad, The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.

I’ve been talking about it for the past few days.

In one part of this ad, Joe says something like, “I will ask you to send me ten dollars for something that won’t cost me 50 cents.”

That’s borderline insulting.

And then he twists it further by calling you a “darned fool” if you don’t take him up on his offer.

At this point, you might be ready to boil over with indignation.

So Joe stops the abuse. He tells you how his offer is so valuable that you shouldn’t care if he is making a profit, because you’ll make a lot more.

This abuse-then-soothe pattern is something you can use on different levels.

At the sales argument level, like Joe did. Or to structure an entire sales letter. Or even across different sales messages — for example, within email campaigns.

Speaking of which, if you want info on how to structure email campaigns, you’ll want to read my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.

You’d be a darned fool not to do it.

After all, I’ve written successful sales emails for some very big businesses, and I’ll be sharing my insights within this book — which you can get for free, if you sign up now. More info here:

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