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Why all copywriters are secretly pervy
Spoiler: It’s not just copywriters.
Yesterday, I wrote an email with the word “bondage” in the subject line.
What did that word make you think of?
I happen to know what a couple of my readers thought — what Jordan Parker and his wife Diana thought.
Jordan and Diana have a one-stop agency to help creators grow, helping out with everything from tech to sales to delivery. (From what I know, Kieran Drew is one of their clients, but there are other big-name creators too.)
Jordan and Diana both read my emails. And in response to the bondage one yesterday, here’s what Jordan wrote me:
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Me: “Bondageeeeee 🥳“
Also Diana: “Bondage? Why are you copywriters all secretly pervy??”
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Why indeed? Here’s why:
In the words of the greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga, “As a marketer you only have one power, and that’s to anticipate what people are going to think.”
If the word “bondage” in my subject line made you think of bondage in the leathery, chainy, pervy sense, rather than in the biblical sense of slavery and subjugation (Exodus 20:2, King James Version), then I did my job as an influence professional.
Like I said, it’s not just copywriters who are “secretly pervy,” or rather, who tease and insinuate in a way that suits them, when it suits them.
Other influence professionals do the same. Salespeople obviously use word choice and structure to influence, as do hypnotists, pick up artists, comedians, …
Maybe you see where this is going.
I have a book all about bondage influence techniques common to 10 overlapping disciplines.
All 10 of these disciplines have in common that they move people from A to B, without force or lying, by power of anticipation and occasional clever word choice alone. This knowledge can help you make money — or even get into some pervy situations. If you wanna find out more:
Free advertorial + no bondage
Lemme tell you about my recent positioning fail, so that we’re on the same page, or so you can maybe avoid the same:
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to a guy who runs a big ecom business.
He had heard of my “free advertorial” offer and was interested.
We got on a call. At the end, he asked if I would sign an NDA.
I figured it’s harmless. I’ve never revealed any insider secrets from businesses I’ve worked with, and I don’t mind signing a paper to say I won’t do it in the future. I said, “Sure, send it over.”
The NDA arrived. Except it turned out it was not just an NDA. Actually, it was a noncompete agreement as well, and how.
First, the contract was asking me to agree I would never work with any of the dude’s competitors.
When I refused that, the dude took the offending clause out. He put in a new clause that said I could never use any knowledge or insights gained via working with him with any other clients.
I politely bowed out.
As with everything else in my life, this is my fault.
I didn’t really make it clear to this guy how I am going into this whole “free advertorial” thing.
I’m not a copywriter looking for work. In fact, I might very likely farm out the work to one of the copywriters I am coaching inside my ongoing advertorial cohort, and simply copy chief them to make sure the result is up to my standard.
Rather, I’m going into this “free advertorial” deal as an investor. I’m looking to partner with business owners, contribute valuable assets, tangible and intangible, which I own and will continue to own and have control of, and take a cut of any profits we generate together.
I am certainly not willing to put myself in a situation of voluntary bondage to anybody.
If you’re a copywriter looking to graduate to a new level, and partner with businesses instead of serving clients, I’m sharing my positioning fail with you because you might somehow benefit from my experience.
And if you are not a copywriter, but own an ecom store yourself, or if you know somebody who owns an ecom store, my low-pressure, low-risk, zero-bondage offer still stands. You can find out more about it here:
https://bejakovic.com/do-you-want-a-free-advertorial-for-your-ecom-brand/
How to make a $5 offer easy to sell
This morning, I shut off the cart and concluded my Daily Emails 101 experiment. Results:
* 155 sales
* About 65 first-time buyers
* A sales page conversion rate north of 33%
In my book, that makes this Daily Emails 101 experiment a success.
What done it? Is the usual threesome? An amazing list of dedicated readers and customers… an irresistible offer… my hypnotizing copy?
Yes, yes… but I would like to wager, there’s something else as well.
The price of Daily Emails 101 was just $5.
That alone won’t do it. There are plenty of $5 offers that don’t sell a single copy. So price alone ain’t it.
What is it is that, most of the time, I sell things that are $197 or $997 or $5k.
Yes, $5 is genuinely cheap, particularly for all I was giving away with Daily Emails 101. But $5 is extra cheap if you’ve been on my list for weeks, months, or years, and you’ve seen me promoting other, much more expensive offers with success. Human beings live by contrast.
My point for you today is two-part.
One part is to raise your prices. Once again, people live by contrast, and if you have at least some expensive offers, it makes everything else easier to sell.
The other part is that once you’ve raised your prices, to remind your readers of your high prices regularly, and to justify those prices, so that, whether people buy or not, they know you and your high prices are for real.
Speaking of:
Today, I would like to tell you about my Copy Riddles program. Copy Riddles sells for $997 and has been for years. Several hundred people have bought it and gone through it, some when it wasn’t yet priced at 997, many at $997.
Copy Riddles is the best thing I sell.
I created it 5 years ago, back when I was still orienting this email list to copywriters alone. The sales page for Copy Riddles reflects that.
The fact is though, Copy Riddles is a course in effective communication and persuasion, and it is relevant to if your business involves written communication of any sort.
I would love to repackage Copy Riddles in industry-specific versions tailored to investment fund managers who communicate with investors via reports… to trial lawyers who need to craft persuasive arguments… to carpet cleaners and HVAC installers who do their own marketing.
Maybe one day. For now, if you are interested in learning how to persuade using words, based on hundreds of millions of dollars of tested advertising, in a way that ensures these insights get burned into your brain rather than slip in one nostril and out the other, then take a look at the Copy Riddles sales page.
Yes, you might have to put in a bit of brain work to see how this program targeted at copywriters could be useful to you in what you do.
That’s the cost.
The payoff you can get for that cost is to be the first in your industry to download this proven influence and persuasion knowledge into your brain, and have first-mover advantage for months or years over all your competitors, at least until I create that specific version of Copy Riddles for your industry.
If you’re interested in the full details on Copy Riddles:
Pumpkin deadline for Daily Emails 101
Today at 11:59pm PST I’m closing down my Daily Emails 101 offer. This is the last email I will send about it before the deadline.
Over the past four days, 100+ people have taken me up on Daily Emails 101.
What will happen with this offer in the future? We will see. Like I say on the sales page, this offer was an experiment. The experiment was successful, so now we’re moving to stage two. But more about that maybe another time.
For now, one last pitch about Daily Emails 101, before this offer turns into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight.
Daily Emails 101, in its pre-pumpkin stage, walks you through the first 101 days of writing daily emails and making money from your email list.
If you’ve never written daily emails before, you might (reasonably) think, “Oh nobody wants to hear from me every day! It’s just too much!”
Well, just yesterday I sent out a reminder about this ongoing offer, to which I got a reply from a reader:
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Thanks for the reminder, John!
I saw your first email about, got distracted, and meant to get back to it.
But this one caught me at my computer. So I got it!
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That’s the value, or one part of the value, of following up relentlessly. You make more sales, because people legit missed your earlier messages or they simply got distracted.
But that’s not the only benefit of daily emails.
With daily emails, you become more an expert and an authority in your field.
You build up a stronger relationship with your audience so they even look forward to your daily emails, instead of being puzzled or annoyed when they hear from you once every three weeks.
And maybe most important to me personally, you end up with much more security and stability both in your work and personal life.
Anyways, Daily Emails 101. Good until tonight at 11:59pm PST. If you wanna grab it now, before you get distracted and pulled away from this popular offer:
Is it Kit or something else
Two days ago, I got the following message from a puzzled and spam-quarantined reader:
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One crucial detail I noticed with your emails – they always end up in my ‘focused’ inbox in outlook rather than the ‘other’ where all my subscriptions end up. I use mailerlite and even when I’m using my hostinger mailbox to direct email I have heard people saying the reminders for my workshops have ended up in their spam. Is it Kit or your template or something else that makes your email go to inbox and everyone else’s go to spam? Looking forward to hearing from you!
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I’ve debated long and hard about revealing what I’m about to reveal.
In the end, in the interest of building everlasting goodwill with my audience, I’ve decided to share with you my closely guarded Secret to Perfect Email Deliverability.
No, it’s not my email software.
No, it’s not the template I use.
Instead, my Secret to Perfect Email Deliverability, and the reason why I always land in the most prestigious inboxes…
… is this ugly Times New Roman font, in combination with a column width of precisely 140 characters.
I don’t know why it works. My guess is that when Gmail and Outlook get my emails, and see how ugly they are, they assume I am either the IRS or your high school teacher, and so I consistently make it into the primary or the focused inbox.
Ok. All right. That was… a joke, or maybe a non-joke. In any case, don’t take me seriously. I’m visiting family, it’s a glum situation here, and I’m trying to lighten the mood for myself somehow.
The fact is, I have no idea why my emails (or some of them) land in “focused” or “important” or “primary” inboxes.
Another fact is, I pay precisely zero mind to email deliverability.
My whole mind is instead taken up with writing for and to humans.
I figure if you build a relationship with your readers, many of them will seek you out, whether you land in the “focused” inbox or in spam. And if enough people seek you out, you start showing up in the preferred spots, without doing anything about it.
If that sounds reasonable to you, and if you wanna start writing emails that build trust for you and desire for your offers, while creating curiosity and forming a relationship that keeps your audience reading day after day, you might like my current offer Daily Emails 101.
The deadline for that is tomorrow, Sunday, at 11:59pm PST.
For the full details:
P.S. Part of Daily Emails 101 is a short report I’ve prepared titled Email Tech Starter Pack. It will tell you the email software I recommend if you’re just getting started, and will tell you about the few one-time steps you will want to take when first setting up an email list.
People are buying
Two days ago, I launched a new experiment offer called Daily Emails 101.
I’ve been intentionally vague in my emails about what this offer is, what’s inside, and how much it costs. I’ve reserved that for the sales page.
Here in this email, I’ll tell you this:
The sales page is selling, and people are buying. So far, 27.2% of the people who have hit this page have bought Daily Emails 101. Here’s what some of that have written me after they bought. First, from a curious and patern-interrupted reader:
“Whatever you are doing, you got me super curious. I have never seen something like this. Talk about a pattern interrupt. Now I can’t wait for the rest of this story am in 😅“
Second, from a long-time customer who is now flirting with buyer’s remorse:
“It was a tough decision – that’s a lot of money. Sure hope it’s worth it…. Seriously though – I’m stoked. Thanks, John.”
Third, from a copywriter looking to get back to the basics:
“Thanks John! Excited for this offer, I just purchased it… feel like I definitely needed this and need to get back to the basics. Looking forward to implementing this and sharing my results.”
Do I have you intrigued? Would you like to get the full details on Daily Emails 101? Are you strong enough to resist the siren-pull of the order form linked to on the following sales page?
There’s only one way to find out. If you are game:
2 email marketing tips
Here are a couple email marketing tips:
#1. When you run a promo, run a promo
Don’t announce your offer and your deadline, and then, in subsequent emails, promote other offers while the clock for your big promo offer ticks down.
(If your offer is good, and why would you promote it otherwise, you will have people in your audience who will be pissed that you didn’t repeatedly and clearly let them know about it, and now it’s gone.)
#2. Don’t bury the lead or the close of your promo
The start and end of a promo should be super clear and direct. Don’t hide a sexy or important new offer under a clever but irrelevant subject line and a ton of unrelated copy… and don’t pussyfoot when the deadline is nigh.
(Again, you will get audience members who will be pissed that they missed out on the offer because you were too indirect and effectively snuck the offer past them.)
You might think these tips are super obvious.
But I have seen smart people violate these two rules in email promos, to their own detriment, in the last week alone.
Maybe it’s because they don’t know better, or maybe it’s some subtle self-sabotage going on.
In any case, my point is that seemingly obvious stuff is easy to miss (or ignore) when you are promoting your own offers and your own business.
Which brings me to my own new offer, which I announced yesterday with a big bright “Announcing!” subject line.
One part of this new offer is my Price Increase Promo SOP.
This is the SOP document as well as the recording of a presentation I prepared for a small cohort of folks back in April, who were doing a price increase promo with my guidance. Here are the results that Chris Howes, owner of the online music teaching platform Creative Strings Academy, got from applying this Price Increase Promo SOP:
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JB- I’m fucking swimming in sales over here!!!!!
63 sales of the $30 product based on PIP (“get it before it goes up to $67”) Remember I originally sold 74 of them at the launch in December. That’s almost as many as I sold the first time. So thats $1900.
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Running a price increase promo isn’t hard. Still there are some subtleties and traps to be mindful of. This SOP will help you manage the subtleties and avoid the traps.
And that’s just one part of my current offer, which I’m calling Daily Emails 101. For the full details on Daily Emails 101:
P.S. So far, with that one brief announcement email only 12 hours ago from the time I’m writing this, I’ve made 35 sales of my new offer.
I’m telling you this 1) to highlight that being direct about your offer works and 2) to highlight that this offer is something you might want to look at before the deadline, so you don’t end up pissed at me. If you’re curious, the link is above.
Announcing: Daily Emails 101
What I’ve got for you today:
Daily Emails 101, a walkthrough of the first 101 days of writing daily emails and making money from your email list.
Daily Emails 101 gives you to tools to start writing status-building, desire-creating daily emails, without taking 2 hours per email… to make money from your email list, your expertise, and your personal interests… and to repeatably grow your list with qualified, engaged readers.
The pre-sale for Daily Emails 101 is on right now until this Sunday. If you wanna get it or want more details:
Why I chose my 2 (or maybe 3) Daily Email House partners
This last Saturday, I wrote in an email that I’m looking for two “Daily Email House partners.”
My offer was, “Come and write interesting and valuable content inside my Daily Email House Skool community. You can promote my offers, your offers, or anybody else’s offers, and we split the profits from your posts 50/50.”
I’ve since found my two partners, and I’m also talking to a third guy who might be a good fit.
I once applied for a copywriting job I didn’t get.
The guy who posted that job ended up creating a video where he walked through why he hired the guy he ended up hiring, and he sent it to everybody he didn’t hire.
That video has since made me a lot of money, and I was always grateful to that non-client for taking the time to enlighten me.
I want to do something similar today. Here’s why I chose the two partners I chose, and why I am considering the third guy as well:
#1. All three have email lists and all three email daily
(I’ve seen they can write, they know how to run promos, and they are comfortable with selling. Very relevant since my Skool group is all about making money via writing daily emails.)
#2. All three have courses and offers they can legitimately promote to my audience
#3. All three have their own Skool groups that they are actively running
(A Skool group is not a sales page or a sales email, and while copywriting and marketing knowledge is helpful, it is not sufficient or even necessary for creating good group content.)
My point being:
Yes, there is value in partnering with people who have assets.
That said, you are dramatically more likely to be taken seriously as a partner if you are coming at it not as a newbie hoping to be given an opportunity, but as an “equal” bringing an opportunity.
And before you have a chance to throw up your hands in exasperation:
“Equal” is a matter of perception. You don’t need a certificate to turn you into a “business owner,” “investor,” or “chief of a Skool community.” In the words of Dan Kennedy:
“While you’re sitting in the bath, anoint yourself. Sprinkle some water in your head and call yourself a life coach…”
… or, I would add, list owner, or Skool group owner, or offer owner.
You can set up an email list and start emailing it for free if you want.
You can set up a Skool group for $9 a month.
You can launch an offer even if nobody buys, and even if you haven’t created any deliverables yet.
You can experiment, learn, and practice.
Within two months, nobody will be able to tell you were once a beginner, and not so long ago.
My personal preference for where to start, if you are just starting, is with an email list.
Nobody knows how big your email list is. You can write for years even if nobody’s reading (don’t scoff, I did it). Of course, you can also be proactive and energetic, and start making money with your very first email.
One way or the other, it’s a completely different thing to to approach a potential partner when you have your own assets, when you have real-world expertise, when you know you don’t need the partner, even if you’d like to work with them.
If this resonates with you, get started today.
If you wanna do email, all you need is email software. My recommendation, and what I myself am using, is Kit. It’s not perfect, but nothing is, and out of all the email software I’ve tried, it’s the most acceptable. You can try it yourself with a 14-day free trial here:
P.S. If you sign up for Kit with the link above and actually use it to send out your first email, forward it to me. I have some bonuses with your name on them.