Do your customers really want a relationship with you?

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I talked about the legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga yesterday.

​​Gary wrote sales letters that brought in millions of dollars for big publishing companies. He rarely if ever lost a split-run test, even when competing against the highest level, against other top-of-the-pile copywriters.

​​I’ve been going through Gary’s farewell seminar for the fourth time. I’m finding all kinds of nuggets of gold that I had missed before.

For example:
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At one point during his farewell seminar, Gary mentions in a slightly exasperated tone the idea of “relationship marketing.” And he says:

“I buy an aspirin because I have a headache, not because I want a relationship with my druggist.”

Maybe you’re ready to pick this statement apart. And I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can do a good job proving that Gary’s statement isn’t true, not most of the time, not with all people, and that it doesn’t apply to your particular situation or to the way the whole market has changed since Gary was in his heyday.

That’s fine.

​​I don’t have a dog or a cat in this fight. I’m just here to share Gary’s idea with you, and maybe give you something new to think about.​​

But if you think a bit, and realize that maybe your customers aren’t primarily interested in buying from you because you are you, because they want to imagine you’re their friend and they like your sense of humor and they feel good about obeying your commands, then what are you left with?

Well, you can always talk about your offer.

​​Or about your customers’ problems.

​​Or about convincing proof that your offer will solve your customers’ problems.

Or simply about your customer’s deep hidden desires, about his identity, and how your offer naturally reinforces that. ​​

If this is what you want to do, and you want to do it well, then you can learn to do it with my Copy Riddles program.

It teaches you to write copy by showing you how A-list copywriters have done it, starting with a dry source text, and ending with a sexy and sparkling sales letter that netted millions or tens of millions of dollars. Often, without the slightest shred of personality or relationship.

And yes, among the A-list copywriters that Copy Riddles looks at is Gary Bencivenga himself. ​​If you’d like to find out more, take a look at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Newsflash: Gary Bencivenga endorses the Copy Riddles approach

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I went for my morning walk just now, and I was listening to the Gary Bencivenga seminar on my headphones.

If you don’t know Gary, he is an A-list copywriter whose star shines brightest on the Copywriters Walk of Fame.

Gary’s sales letters mailed out tens of millions of times. They made him and his clients millions of dollars.

Before he retired, Gary was better at this than anyone.

An executive at Rodale Press, a big direct response publisher, said that Gary never lost a split-run test when going up against other top copywriters. An executive at Phillips publishing, another major direct response company, said that Gary had more winners than anybody else.

When Gary decided to retire, he put on a $5k/person farewell seminar where he shared all his best secrets. I’ve listened to the recordings of this seminar from beginning to end three times so far.

And yet, the following amazing story never managed to pierce that ball of lead that sits on my shoulders. Not until today.

Gary was talking about the first time he had to compete against the legendary copywriter Gene Schwartz, and try to beat a control that Gene had written for Rodale.

“I didn’t want to be overly influenced or depressed,” said Gary. So he didn’t look at Gene’s copy before starting his own.

After Gary finished his first draft, he decided to finally take a look at Gene’s stuff.

“I was so depressed,” Gary said. Gene’s copy was so much stronger.

But remember what that Rodale exec said? Gary never lost a split-run test for Rodale, not even against the great Gene Schwartz.

Here’s what Gary ended up doing:

I said, the only way I’m going to have a way of competing with Gene is if I figure out what he’s done to get these bullets.

​​So wherever his bullets came from, I would read the same page. I would learn from him just by mimicking what he had done.

So I said, “This bullet that he came up with came from chapter 3, page 4. What is the original source of this?”

And he taught me so much, just by studying his copy and by looking at the product itself.

I was able to beat him, but it was really his package too in a way, because I learned the technique.

Here’s a confession that’s not secret:

​​This approach to learning the technique of copywriting is what lies at the heart of my Copy Riddles program. I got the idea for that from another legendary copywriter, Gary Halbert.

And now, that same Copy Riddles approach has been endorsed by three big names — Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Ben Settle — all of whom have said publicly that this is the way they learned copywriting technique.

You can follow this approach yourself, right now, for free. Just like Gary did.

First, find a collection of winning sales letters written by a-list copywriters.

Second, get the product they were selling. You might have to stalk Amazon, eBay, used book sites, and online repositories.

Third, when you get both the sales letter and the out-of-print book in your possession, go bullet by bullet, and tease out how the A-list copywriter turned lead into gold.

Of course, you can also take a shortcut. You can take advantage of the fact that I’ve already done all this work for you, and that I’ve packaged it up in a fast, fun, mostly-done-for-you ride I’ve called Copy Riddles. To find out more about that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr-3/

Why aren’t people replying to my emails any more?

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My email yesterday, about a “roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer,” drew only a few lonely replies.

On average, I now get fewer replies to my daily emails than I did a year ago. Even though my list was much smaller then.

What’s the difference?

Maybe I’m just doing a poorer job writing these emails than I did a year ago. Maybe people are not enthused enough to hit reply as often.

Maybe the makeup of my list changed, and maybe my subscribers today are just less chatty.

Or, maybe, it’s fact that these days I end each email with a link, and an opportunity to buy some product from me.

In fact, my email yesterday did get a nice number of people to click through to my Copy Riddles sales page. So maybe some of the energy that my readers used to spend on replying is now getting spent on clicking, reading my sales letters, and buying from me.

The most life-changing idea I’ve been exposed to since I started learning about marketing came from Mark Ford.

Mark is an entrepreneur, direct marketer, and A-list copywriter who was one of the key people who made Agora the direct marketing behemoth it is today.

As you might know, much of what Agora does is sell secrets. Secrets to getting rich… secrets to getting free of pain… secrets about how to sell secrets.

And yet, here’s what Mark said once:

“There is an inverse relationship between the value of knowledge and what people are willing to pay for it. The most important things in life you’ve probably heard a hundred times before, but you’re not paying attention. When you’re in the right place and you hear it, you have that ‘aha’ moment and everything changes.”

I had heard the advice that you should sell in each email perhaps a million times, over the course of perhaps a million years.

I had seen it in practice in perhaps a million email newsletters.

I was even telling my own clients to do the same, and I witnessed the millions of dollars this simple advice could produce for them.

And yet, it never clicked in my own head. I didn’t sell in each of these email for the first, oh, three years of my newsletter.

For some reason, it clicked last year. Specifically, it clicked on May 29, 2022, after I read the opening to Dan Kennedy’s slapped-together guide to getting rich in 12 months, called The Phenomenon. Dan’s Rule #1 in that book says:

“There will always be an offer or offer(s).”

“Oh yeah…” I said to myself, putting my finger to the tip of my nose. “Why don’t I try that?”

So now, I will give you a link to the Copy Riddles sales page.

The Copy Riddles sales page spells out Gary Halbert’s advice for how to master the number one thing that, in his opinion, makes people buy from an ad.

The sales page goes on to tell you how to implement Gary’s advice yourself if you’ve got the time. It also tells you how Copy Riddles will do the legwork for you if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, or if you want to save yourself time.

The sales page then gives you testimonials from newbie copywriters, senior copywriters, heads of marketing agencies, entrepreneurs, and marketing consultants — all of whom thought Copy Riddles was great, and some of whom say it was the best copywriting course they have ever taken.

I’ve said all this before, in previous emails. But maybe you weren’t paying attention then. Maybe today it will click.

In any case, here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

One roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer

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This morning I found out that Active Campaign has this spreadsheet view of campaign results.

It allows you to sort and compare previous campaigns rather than just looking at the results for each campaign individually.

So I looked at the past three months of my emails. I was curious to see my most unsubscribed-from email over that time.

It turns out I sent this toxic email only last week. The subject line read, “The secret spider web of money and love opportunities.” It had more unsubscribers — both in actual number and as a percentage of the people who got the email — than the other 90+ emails I sent over that period.

Why was this email so reviled?

Maybe the subject line was too good, and it sucked in people who wouldn’t normally open.

Maybe the content was truly awful.

Maybe my unsubscribed readers didn’t like my tone. Maybe they felt I didn’t deliver on promise of love opportunities (all the unsubscribers were women, judging by names). Or maybe they just realized my list is not for them (several came from a classified ad I ran a few days prior).

So what’s my point?

I’m not sure. I don’t really have a smart conclusion to draw from this experiment.

Instead, let me share an interesting idea with you that I read in Jack Trout’s and Al Ries’s book Positioning:

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For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.

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Maybe I should take Ries & Trout’s advice. Let me try it right now:

If you want one roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer, then you can find that inside my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is based on an exercise devised by legendary copywriter Gary Halbert. Top marketers and copywriters, including Ben Settle and Parris Lampropoulos, have praised this exercise and said it’s how they got good at the craft and how they started writing winning ads and making lots of money.

If you’d like to find out what this exercise is, or even start practicing it yourself, click on the link below and start reading the page that opens up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Joy instead of failure, hope instead of humiliation

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For the past 14 months, ever since December 2021, I have been patiently going through Parallel Lives. That’s a heavy, dusty, four-volume e-book, equivalent to some 1,900 print pages, of biographies of famous Romans and Greeks.

I’ve been patiently going through Parallel Lives so I can bring you insights that have stood the test of time.

Take Lycurgus, the legendary lawgiver of Sparta. He did such a good job training his populace that they became bees, ready to sacrifice themselves fully for the collective good of the hive. And not only physically, by sacrificing their bodies.

Lycurgus got the Spartans to gladly sacrifice their honor and burn their egos, while being told to sit down and shut up.

Example: A noble Spartan named Paidaretus was rejected when he tried to join the Three Hundred, the Spartan royal guard of honour.

Paidaretus went away rejoicing. “Wow!” he said. “I am a good man, and yet the city has 300 men better than myself. What good fortune!”

You might say this anecdote shows the power of identity. It does that, but it shows something else also.

It also shows the power of a change of perspective.

Paidaretus did not just sacrifice his ego and his honor to the welfare of his city. He did not just do it willingly. He actually felt joy over it.

That’s the power of giving somebody a change of perspective. A different way of looking at the exact same situation. Failure becomes joy, humiliation is transformed into hope.

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, it’s to sell you something. Well, to give you a new perspective on gladly opening up your wallet.

Six days ago, I got a message from a marketer named Adrian Chann, who had recently bought my Copy Riddles program. Adrian wrote:

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I realized why your emails (and sales pages) are addicting: they are packed with a-ha moments. It’s more entertaining and enriching to read your emails then watching uninspiring Youtube videos marketers who rehash the same advice without any additional insight.

I’m a huge Ben Settle fan and open up nearly every single one of his emails, yet I ended up buying something from you rather than him (not that it is a competition). The a-ha moments you created are what got me to gladly open up my wallet!

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Maybe you got no a-ha moments from today’s email. Or maybe you did.

In any case, if you’d like to get Copy Riddles yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

I have not been paid to stuff this email full of “hyper”

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Disclaimer:

I did not receive an email last night around half past 10 from CIA special agent Dallin Carr. I have in fact never been in contact with special agent Carr or anybody else from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Furthermore, I have no plans to start writing a daily email newsletter on behalf of the CIA, either to be sent internally to CIA employees, or covertly, on behalf of the CIA but under my own name, to any hyper-sophisticated audience around the world.

And now on to business:

I am a big fan of the Brain Software podcast. In fact, it’s one of only two podcasts I listen to.

Brain Software is put out by hypnotists Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson. I listen to Mike and Chris because the topics they cover are often interesting to me personally and useful for the business of persuasion, manipulation, and influence.

But really, really, do I keep listening because Mike and Chris share interesting and useful content?

No. I keep listening because the two of them are fun, in fact hyper-fun, to listen to.

And because I like to kill fun, I decided a while ago to reverse-engineer what exactly it is that Mike and Chris are doing.

One thing I discovered is that they repeatedly use hyper-specific, absurd denials. They often open with a sequence of them, and they also pepper them in throughout their podcast episodes.

So if you too are looking to make your content more fun, add in some hyper-specific denials.

And no, special agent Carr did not tell me to tell you that, nor did anybody from the CIA promise me that I would get $15 each time I use the word “hyper” in this email.

Perhaps you found this whole thing fun and useful. In which case, go and listen to Mike and Chris, and try to reverse-engineer their podcast, like I’m trying to do.

But perhaps you did not find today’s email very fun or useful. In which case, consider that an argument against trying to reverse-engineer how other people communicate.

Instead, consider that an argument in favor of my Copy Riddles program. Because:

Copy Riddles teaches you to create intriguing, persuasive communication, and it doesn’t do it through reverse-engineering anything. Instead, it does it by looking at source material and the ways that source material was transformed by master communicators in order to make it more persuasive and intriguing.

You can find out more about that at the link below. Click, because it’s hyper-interesting:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

It’s not throat clearing, it’s persuasion magic

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Back in 2017, I signed up to Ben Settle’s $97/month Email Players newsletter. ​Only years later did I think to ask myself the $6,953 question:

​What did it?

​​What put me into that hypnotic trance and got me to finally pull out my credit card and pay Ben, after I’d read hundreds of previous Ben Settle emails, without taking action?

After spending an hour digging through my email archives, I found it.

​​It turned out to be an email in which Ben talked about a Dan Kennedy idea, using a bunch of Dan Kennedy examples and Dan Kennedy arguments.

Because that email ended up sucking me into Ben’s world and getting me to hand over an estimated $6,953 to Ben, I’ve studied it in detail. I’ve found many interesting things inside. Let me tell you about just one of them.

​​In spite of being a rehash of Dan Kennedy content, Ben’s email starts out like this:

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Recently, I made a special trip to my office to retrieve all my Dan Kennedy NO BS Marketing newsletters.

The first issue I ever got was the September 2002 issue (front page has a picture of a dwarf stuck in a airplane toilet…) I’d just started learning copywriting a handful of months earlier. And, I remember the “back page” of that particular issue having a profound effect on my mindset at the time — and has through all these years, as it’s kept me healthily paranoid and uncomfortable no matter how good things get.

I just re-read it, and everything he said was true then, and is even more true now.

What was that back page about, exactly?

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To the uninformed (as I was for many years), this opening might look like a classic example of throat clearing — of the rambling first two reels of “Lost Horizon” that should simply be burned.​​”Get to the action already!”

Of course, Ben isn’t simply rambling on or clearing his throat. He is performing a bit of persuasion magic. Specifically, he is setting the frame.

I won’t spell out what frame Ben is setting. I think it’s obvious enough.

I will just point out this setting the frame stuff applies equally to daily email as to any other communication you might be performing.

For example, here’s a frame, albeit a different frame from the one Ben was setting, in a sales bullet by A-list copywriter Jim Rutz:

* Incredible but legal: How you can easily pay Mom’s medical bills with her money and deduct them from your taxes. (page 77)

Once again, I believe the frame is obvious. But if you want a spelled-out explanation of that particular frame, you can find it in point 6 of round 20A of my Copy Riddles.

As I said yesterday, Copy Riddles might look to the uninitiated like it’s only about writing sales bullets.

But with a bit of thinking — or without it, and simply with a bit of practice — Copy Riddles is really an education in effective communication. ​​
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In case effective communicating is what yer after, you can find out more about Copy Riddles at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

How copywriters can create their own offers

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A few days ago, after promoting my Income At Will coaching program, I got a question from a long-time reader and customer, who works as a freelance copywriter:

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Can you create a program on creating offers as a copywriter?

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To tell you the ‘strewth, I had been thinking about just that. But it’s something I reserved only for people who are signed up to my email newsletter. If you’d like to join them, for free, so you don’t miss out on special offers I make only to my email subscribers, click here and sign up.

The secret spider web of money and love opportunities

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This morning, I woke up, stood up, blinked, stumbled to the living room, and reached, addict-like, for my laptop. I checked my email. The first email started with,

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Hi John!

Thanks for all your patience.

Now, let’s get you paid.

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That’s for some work I did at the end of last year. The money is finally arriving. Today of all days.

I say today of all days because today and the past few days, since the start of this month, strange things have been happening.

I made more no-deadline sales of my Most Valuable Email and Copy Riddles programs than I had since I created these offers.

I’ve had a surprising number of people replying to my emails with interesting comments.

I’ve had a new surge of email subscribers.

I’ve also spent more money on new courses and trainings than I had in the past two years’ total.

And all this has been happening while I’ve been keeping most of my attention on another project I have been working on, which I believe has the potential to be much bigger than this Bejakovic newsletter, and which I am looking at as real business, unlike this Bejakovic newsletter, which was and remains primarily a daily way to feed my curiosity and need for novelty and some kind of creative work.

You might wonder why I’m telling you this, or why you might possibly care.

A while ago, I wrote how I believe there’s a secret spider web. This spider web connects copywriting clients. There’s another spider web for money-making opportunities. There’s even one for women in your life, if women are what interests you.

And here’s what I’ve found, over and over in my life:

Once you start jumping up and down on one corner of that web, no matter how remote, it gets the attention of the other spiders, I mean clients, I mean women, or business partners, or customers, or people who owe you money. And if you keep jumping up and down, they will seek you out. Sooner or later.

It’s true the other way around also.

If things are not going as you like in your life, if nobody is seeking you out, if no pleasant coincidences are happening to you regularly, there’s a good chance that the spider web has grown silent and still.

You might think I’m just telling you to take action. In different ways. And to keep taking action, even if the action seems futile.

And yes, action is how you jump up and down the spider web, and how you set it vibrating.

But if you ask me, there’s value in having a story to tell yourself, or an image to keep in your head, or an analogy that you can believe in.

For me, I’ve found the image of jumping up and down spider web works much better than the rough command, “keep taking action.”

Maybe this image will work better for you as well.

And who knows. Maybe there really is a secret spider web, and maybe you really can make it vibrate.

And now, it’s time for me to do some jumping myself.

So if you’d like to spend some money as a way of getting your spider web vibrating, then take a look at my Copy Riddles program.

I’ve put a lot of work into this program, and I’m proud of what I’ve been able to create.

At the most basic level, Copy Riddles is about writing sexy sales bullets. But beyond that, Copy Riddles is really about the fundamentals of sales copywriting. But beyond that, Copy Riddles is really about the essence of effective communication, whether in a sales context or not.

Maybe those are grandiose claims. So let me bring it down to earth, and share what copywriter Liza Schermann wrote me after going through Copy Riddles:

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The entire course is an a-ha moment. Because you see these things from other copywriters or you read other copy, but you don’t see what’s behind it or why it’s working. Your course shows what happens behind the scenes. Why is this working… and why is this working in this specific case… and why it wouldn’t maybe work in another case.

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If you’d like to find out more or buy Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The core idea in this email is not new but that’s exactly the point

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As I sit down to write you this email, an old pop song, the Smiths’ How Soon is Now, is playing loudly in my head.

That’s because earlier this morning, I read about a new AI project, called Stable Attribution.

The point of Stable Attribution is to try to figure out which human-created images were used to train which AI-generated images.

The motivation, according to the Stable Attribution site, is that artists deserve to “be assigned credit when their works are used, and to be compensated for their work.”

That’s a waste of time, if you ask me, and a focus on totally the wrong thing.

A few days ago, a friend sent me an article about guitarist Johnny Marr.

Marr took a few different songs and sounds — most notably Bo Didley and a rap song called You’ve Gotta Believe – and co-opted them. The result was How Soon is Now, which became the most unique and enduring of Smiths’ songs.

Michael Jackson once ran into Darryl Hall in a recording studio. Jackson admitted that, years earlier, he had swiped the famous bass line for Billie Jean from Hall & Oates’s I Can’t Go For That.

Hall shrugged. He told Jackson that he himself had lifted that bass line from another song, and that it was “something we all do.”

Artists and songwriters co-opt and plagiarize all the time. It’s only in exceptional cases that we find out about it.

But this isn’t a newsletter about drawings or pop songs. It’s a newsletter about business, and marketing, and copywriting.

So let me tell you I once heard A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos on the David Garfinkel podcast.

Parris pointed out how a subhead from one of his million-dollar sales letters was the headline of an earlier control sales letter he didn’t write. That earlier headline worked, and Parris knew that. So he co-opted it, or if you like, plagiarized.

Marketer Dan Kennedy once talked about Bill Phillips, the body builder and fitness coach who built an info product empire.

Dan said Phillips is a pack rat who can pull out fitness ads and promos going back a hundred years. Knowing the history of his industry — and co-opting or plagiarizing it regularly — was a big part of the success Phillips had.

Even the core idea of my email today, of plagiarizing for long-term business success, isn’t new. I got it from James Altucher, who got it from Steven Pressfield. Who knows where Pressfield first heard it.

Fortunately, there is no Stable Attribution for human work. Nor should there be.

So my advice for you is to go back. Study what came before you, and what worked. Integrate it into your own work.

Give attribution if you like, or don’t.

Either way, it’s sure to make you more creative, and more successful at what you do.

And if your work happens to be copywriting, selling, or more broadly persuasive communication, then take a look at my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles will show you the work of some of the most successful copywriters in history, Parris Lampropoulos above among them. But not only that.

Copy Riddles will get you practicing the same, so you can co-opt the skills of these effective communicators and make them your own.

Maybe you’re curious about how that might work. If so, you can read more about Copy Riddles, and buy the program if you like, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/