Business Ideas

The quantum theory of sitcom or blowing your readers’ minds

by

Two weeks ago, I wrote an email all about my futile, morning-long search for a quote about Larry David and how he ran the writers for “Seinfeld” like a team of huskies pulling a sled.

It turns out my search wasn’t entirely futile. I did come across the following interesting bit by Larry Charles.

Charles used to be the supervising producer on “Seinfeld.” In a New Yorker article, he remembered the exact moment, during the development of season three, when he was talking to Larry David and when things clicked:

===

We went, “What if the book that was overdue was in the homeless guy’s car? And the homeless guy was the gym teacher that had done the wedgie? And what if, when they return the book, Kramer has a relationship with the librarian?”

Suddenly it’s like — why not? It’s like, boom boom boom, an epiphany — quantum theory of sitcom! It was, like, nobody’s doing this! Usually, there’s the A story, the B story — no, let’s have five stories! And all the characters’ stories intersect in some sort of weirdly organic way, and you just see what happens. It was like — oh my God. It was like finding the cure for cancer.

===

Last November, I put together a live training about creating an a-ha moment in your reader’s brain or brains.

I did a lot of research and a lot of thinking to prepare for that training.

One thing I realized is how there’s 98% overlap, perhaps 98.2%, between creating an a-ha moment and creating a ha-ha moment.

The difference mainly comes down to context, tone, the kind of setting you find yourself in.

On the other hand, the structure, techniques, necessary ingredients, and resulting effects are all the same between a-ha and ha-ha, insight and comedy.

So maybe it’s worth looking at Charles’s quote above in more detail, at least if you want to blow your readers’ minds.

Notice what it doesn’t say:

* There’s nothing about character development

* There’s nothing about carefully crafted language

* There really nothing about the substance of the thing, rather only about the form, the structure

Maybe you find all this kind of abstract.

Maybe you’d like some more concrete stories and examples to illustrate how to take the quantum theory of sitcom above, and use it to blow people’s minds.

If that’s what you’d like, I’ve put together a course about it, called Most Valuable Email. It tells you one way, which has worked very well for me, to take Charles’s idea above and apply it to writing daily emails.

Most Valuable Email also gives you 51 concrete examples of the most successful, influential, and insightful emails that use the Most Valuable Email trick.

It’s very possible you’ve decided Most Valuable Email isn’t for you. That’s fine. Otherwise, you can find more information here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The most radical division it is possible to make in the marketing world today

by

There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the lives of all marketers in the present moment.

There is no doubt this fact forms the most radical division it is possible to make in the marketing world today. It splits marketers into two classes of creatures: winners and losers.

I will tell you this fact. Or rather, I will illustrate it.

Yesterday, YouTube served me up a video. The video was blurry and showed a three-piece rock band. They were at some sort of daytime festival. They stood on a tiny stage with flower pots in the front and an American flag pinned to the back wall.

The band members were middle-aged. They all wore matching outfits — black dress pants and shimmering gold sport coats. They started to play a ZZ Top cover and—

The drummer. Something was clearly wrong with him.

He was grimacing. He was flailing his head. He was wrapping his arms around his head before striking the drums. He was doing the robot. He was drumming with one hand. He was doing a kind of imbecile tiny drumming.

If Chris Farley had learned to play the drums before he died of a speedball overdose, this is what it would have looked like.

This video has 51 million views on YouTube right now.

​​​A tiny stage with flowerpots in the front. Shimmering gold sport coats. A ZZ Top cover.

51 million views.

So here’s the fact of utmost importance:

If you prefer not to exaggerate, you must remain silent.

Such is the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.

It is, furthermore, entirely new in the history of our modern civilization. Never, in the course of its development, has anything similar happened. Never have there been other periods of history in which exaggeration has come to govern more directly than in our own.

I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This is most natural.

Many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes’ thought to this complex matter. And yet they believe that they have a right to an opinion on the issue. It merely confirms the theorem.

These readers feel themselves complete and intellectually perfect. They have hermetically closed off their minds to new ideas and decided to settle down definitely amid old mental furniture.

​​How to reach such people — except through exaggeration?

The only question that remains is how to best adapt to the present moment. How to exaggerate in the most effective way possible.

I may be mistaken, but the present writer, when he puts is fingers to the keyboard to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, believes this most effective way is called Copy Riddles.

Copy Riddles brings together the greatest collection of copywriting talent ever assembled inside one program. These master persuaders are ready to reveal their secrets to you, to prepare you for the present reality, and to take you outside of yourself for a moment.

​​To start your transmigration:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Do your customers really want a relationship with you?

by

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:
​​
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/

One roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer

by

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:

===

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.

===

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/

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

by

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:

===

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?

===

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. ​​
​​
In case effective communicating is what yer after, you can find out more about Copy Riddles at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

“Do you know who I am???”

by

Today I have another valuable story for you about personal positioning.

So let me take you back to 2007, when Jerry Seinfeld went on Larry King Live, and when green-colored sparks started flying.

For reference:

Larry King hosted a massively popular live interview show on CNN, which ran from 1985 to 2010. Over a million people tuned in each night.

King had a habit of friendly and conversational interviews. He did over 50,000 of them — fifty thousand. He never did any research or prep.

For more reference:

Jerry Seinfeld is a comedian. He was the biggest television star of 1990s, thanks to his hit sitcom Seinfeld, which wrapped up in 1998.

Larry: You gave it up [the show]. They didn’t cancel you, you canceled them?
​
Seinfeld: [pauses, then shakes his head for a split second] You’re not aware of this?

​Larry: I’m asking you.

​Seinfeld: You think I got cancelled? You’re under the impression I got cancelled?

​Larry: Have I hurt you Jerry?

​Seinfeld: I thought this was pretty well documented. [Looking around] Is this still CNN?

​Larry: Don’t most shows go down a little?

​Seinfeld: Most people do also. When I went off the air, it was the number one show in television. Larry, do you know who I am???

​Larry: Jewish guy, Brooklyn.

​Seinfeld: 75 million viewers!

Theories online say this exchange was all a joke, a good gag between pals.

I don’t think so. I think if you look, you can tell Jerry is first stunned and then annoyed at Larry King’s uninformed questions.

​​”Do you know who I am???” was a genuine, irritated, ego-led outburst.

​​And yet, it didn’t sound arrogant or repulsive in the actual live interview.

That’s because it was delivered with a smile, and with a bit of exasperation in Seinfeld’s voice. This was the stage persona Seinfeld had practiced over thousands of standup appearances and thousands of hours of shooting Seinfeld episodes.

I did a bit of research on how the mass mind reacted to this video. Some of the top comments read like this:

“i feel like seinfelds a real cunt irl.”

“He’s a classic narcissist. He is undoubtedly profoundly insecure about himself.”

“i loved Seinfeld. but i find Jerry very uncharismatic. he comes off as a douche sometimes.”

I don’t know whether Jerry Seinfeld is a narcissist or a cunt in real life. I do find it very possible.

Still, I love watching Seinfeld. And I personally like Jerry — at least the Jerry on the TV show.

So that’s my point for you for today.

If you want personal positioning that can win you an audience of millions, then you won’t do better than what I call “perfect neighbor positioning.”

Think Jerry Seinfeld. A smile, a bit of self-deprecating exasperation. But that’s just the start.

It’s worth studying Jerry Seinfeld, and fellow 90s sitcom stars like Ellen DeGeneres, Tim Allen, Jennifer Aniston, to see how they got to appear so likable, even if they’re not likable in real life.

I’ll write more about this. As I mentioned in earlier emails, I am working, slowly but shakily, on a little book about personal positioning.

In the meantime, I’d like to remind you of my Most Valuable Email training. It’s not about personal positioning, but—

If you write about persuasion or marketing, it can show you how to make your emails fun and even likable — without you investing your personality in the email at all. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The positioning you want if you live and die by your expertise

by

“Looks like you just about cleaned everybody out, fella. You haven’t lost a hand since you got the deal. What’s your secret of your success?”

“Prayer.”

Let’s see if you recognize this magical Hollywood scene, and if you can spot the influence and positioning lesson within.

The scene in set in a Wild West saloon. Some cowboys are playing blackjack. One cowboy has been winning. ​​Too much.

“You’re a hell of a card player,” says one of the other cowboys. “I know, cause I’m a hell of a card player. And I can’t even spot how you’re cheating.”

All the other cowboys push away from the table in a hurry. The accusing card player stands up. His hand is hovering at his hip, next to his gun.

“The money stays,” the accuser says. “And you go.”

I’ll continue the scene in a sec. I would just like to point out this is also likely to be how your prospects size up you and your business. “The money stays,” they say. “And you go.”

Moving on:

Suddenly, a new figure enters the scene.

This new guy is friendly and cheery. He goes over to the possibly cheating card player, who’s still seated. The new guy tries to pull the possible cheater out of the saloon before a gunfight goes down. But the guy won’t budge.

“I wasn’t cheating,” he says. “If he invites us to stay, then we’ll go.”

So now there’s this tense three-way standoff.

The accusing cowboy, standing and ready to draw his gun. The possibly cheating cowboy, still seated and looking cool and a little sad. And the third guy, cheery and helpful, trying to negotiate between the two of them.

“What would you think about maybe asking us to stick around?” the cheery guy says to the accusing cowboy. “You don’t have to mean it or nothing, just ask us—” But he gets shoved out of the way.

The cheery guy sighs and hangs his head. He turns to the seated, possibly cheating cowboy and says, “I can’t help you, Sundance.”

Suddenly the accuser, who was ready to draw his gun a second before, opens his eyes wide. Then he starts blinking.

“I didn’t know you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheating. If I draw on you, you’ll kill me.”

Sundance finally stands up from the table. “There’s that possibility,” he says.

But nobody dies in this scene, because, against all odds, the accusing cowboy decides to invite Sundance and his partner, Butch, to stick around.

“Thanks, but we gotta get going,” says Butch. So the two friends collect the money off the table, take a last sip of whisky, and head on out the door.

This magical scene, as you may have guessed, comes from Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, which won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1969. It’s one of my favorite films.

As for the influence and positioning lesson — well, I’ll leave you to think about that.

It’s particularly worth thinking about if you make a living via your expertise, your undeniable skill, in a world filled with other with other cowboys who might be faster draws than you are.

Because here’s what doesn’t happen in the scene above. There’s no demonstration of skill. No guns being drawn. There’s not even any bluster or talk of how fast anybody is. There’s just the mention of a name — Sundance.

I’ll write more about that one day soon.

Meanwhile if this topic interests you, take a look at my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. Not just for the content inside.

But for the fact that, out of tens of thousands of people who have worked as copywriters over the past century, there are just 10 that I thought worthy to highlight in this book.

How did they get to have that status and influence?

Well, you can get an idea of that by seeing how I talk about them in the book. To get that at an atrociously high price:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

My 11-inch Stonehenge now for sale for $12.69

by

The similarities are uncanny:

On the one hand, you have the members of Spinal Tap, the hard rock bank, standing on stage, cowls over their heads, smoke billowing around them, eerie lighting from underneath.

​​They are supposed to be druids. As a mysterious guitar riff plays, a reproduction of one of the Stonehenge pillars is lowered onto the stage.

The pillar was meant to be monumental — 11 feet high. Except, due to a typo in the blueprint, the pillar is only 11 inches high. It’s lowered onto the stage, and is below the knees of guitar player Nigel Tufnel.

And similarly, this morning:

You have me, cowl over my head, lit up eerily from underneath, laughing a villainous laugh, going into my Kindle publishing account and raising the price of my 10 Commandments ebook from $4.99 to $200 — as high as Amazon will let me.

“What a spectacle,” I exclaim in triumph. “The whole Internet will soon be talking about me and my $200 40-page Kindle ebook.”

And then, a few minutes later, I go on Amazon to see my 11-inch Stonehenge lowered onto the stage:

Digital List Price: $200.00
Kindle Price: $12.69
Save: $187.31 (94%)

It turns out that, even if you set a ridiculously high price for your Kindle ebook, Amazon won’t actually honor that. They will sell your book for what they like, not for what you like.

I guess there are many lessons to draw from this.

But for today, I just want to say this is a fitting example of the chasm between spectacle conceived and spectacle delivered.

Lots of business owners think their marketing stunts are groundbreaking, terrific, sure to go viral among prospects and non-prospects alike.

The reality is an increase in price from $4.99 to $12.69.

Oh well. It’s just an opportunity to learn something and try again, with some new sensation. Because what else is there?

I’ll leave you with the following story from the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins, after he first tried and failed to make it as a marketer in Chicago:

===

That night after dinner I paced the streets. I tried to analyze myself. I had made a great success in Grand Rapids; I was making a fizzle here. What were the reasons? What was there I did in the old field which I could apply to Swift & Company’s problems?

At midnight, on Indiana Avenue, I thought of an idea.

===

Hopkins realized that in Grand Rapids, he had created sensations. So his new idea was to create the largest cake in the world to advertise Cotosuet, a margarine sold by Swift & Company.

Result?

105,000 visitors to see the world’s largest cake… thousands of new Cotosuet buyers… and the start of a very long, very successful, and very influential advertising career for Claude Hopkins.

That’s a valuable Claude Hopkins lesson. But not as valuable, in my opinion, as the Claude Hopkins lesson I write about in Commandment VI of my 10 Commandments book.

You can find that, along with a generous discount that Amazon has decided to provide for you, on the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

“Pharma Bro in contempt”: Everything going to plan

by

I’m signed up for the Federal Trade Commission newsletter, because I like to get news of marketing scams, pyramid schemes, and other skulduggery that can be useful for business. So a few days ago, I got a press release with the unlikely but highly satisfying headline:

“FTC Asks Federal Court to Hold ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli in Contempt”

You probably know Shkreli. He’s a young guy who caused mass outrage a few years back. He bought a pharma company that sold a lifesaving drug, and then raised the price of that drug 55x, from $13.50 to $750 per pill.

Shkreli then schemed to suppress competition, to make sure desperate patients were forced to pay the new 55x price for his drug.

When this became international news, Shkreli smirked at cameras, and said the one mistake he made was that he didn’t raise the price even higher.

“Why are people coming after you?” asked one interviewer.

“It might have something to do with me being very handsome,” Shkreli answered with a smile.

People were fuming.

“Martini Shkreli,” said one irritated TV announcer, doing what he does best: looking like a real slappable prick.”

So the FTC headline is very clever and very fitting. The new news, by the way, is not that Shkreli is now officially contemptible — which is what the headline makes you think, and which is what most people feel — but that he disobeyed court orders, and is therefore himself “in contempt of court.”

Whatever. Point is:

Maybe Shkreli is a natural-born “slappable prick.” Or maybe it’s an act he’s putting on for reasons of his own.

Either way, I think Shkreli’s behavior is worth studying — and even emulating.

“Whoa whoa hold on there,” I hear you saying. “John, you don’t want to go down that road! There are many better ways to get attention than to become contemptible. It’s not worth it!”

No doubt. And I’m not actually planning on getting into the pharma business, or doing anything to taunt the FTC, or playing around with people’s lives.

But that doesn’t change the fact that specific strategies Shkreli is using — whether instinctively or consciously — can be very valuable if you run a completely above-board, highly moral, or even noble business.

That’s something I will write more about in a future book on positioning, which I’m working on now.

But to twist the advice of James Altucher:

“The best way to promote your next book? Get people to read your current book.”

And so let me remind you of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

​​Get it now if you want, because tomorrow I will be raising the price of this baby to $200 for the ebook and $250 for the paperback — the highest prices Amazon will me allow me to charge. You can watch the price increase at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Be grateful you read my newsletter

by

This past weekend I finished removing the free bonuses from my Copy Riddles program. I sent out an email to previous buyers to tell them 1) they will continue to get access to bonuses and 2) when I flesh out those bonuses into paid courses, they will be automatically upgraded to those new courses.

To which I got a response from a Copy Riddles member:

===

Thanks for the update, John. You’ve been treating us OG buyers very well and fairly, and I think you deserve a bit of appreciation!

===

I really do. I really do deserve a bit of appreciation.

I’m telling you I deserve appreciation for two reasons. One is that it’s self-serving — I’m a good guy, and others say so about me. I treat my customers well and fairly, and you should keep that in mind the next time I make an offer.

There’s a second reason also:

If you run any kind of business, chances are you’re doing good stuff that you’re not getting credit for.

That means you’re shirking your duties really. As “guru to the gurus” Rich Schefren likes to say, marketing is teaching prospects to value your offer.

The thing is, valuing stuff at what it’s worth is not something we humans are good at. If you want proof of that, go on Amazon, and look at the thousands of gratitude journals for sale, and the hundreds of inspirational guides telling you how important gratitude is, and how you should practice it regularly.

None of that would be necessary if appreciation came easy to humans.

Oh well. that just means you have to do the work for your prospect, and teach him to appreciate what you do.

So be grateful you read my newsletter. Because I always make a point to share something valuable and interesting, usually something you can take and apply right away, if you only think for a second or two.

Now on to my interesting and valuable offer. It’s my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters book.

The fact is, I could take the content of this book, change absolutely nothing except the format, and sell it as a $100 course instead of $5 Kindle book.

Or I could take that same content, deliver it over in a series of 5 Zoom calls, and charge $500 for it.

And people would pay, and they would get great value from it.

And yet, you can get all this value for just $5.

Perhaps you can guess my reasons why. And if not, that’s a topic for another interesting and valuable email.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read my 10 Commandments book, you’re shirking your duties as a marketer. Here’s where you can fix that:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments