Spectacles

I’ll start off this email by projecting out some praise and admiration I’ve gotten in the past

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Right about a year ago, I sent out an email with the subject line, “Send me your praise and admiration.” Best thing I ever did.

​​Here are a few of the lavishly praising and admiring responses I got to that email. First, from David Patrick, senior copywriter at Launch Potato:

“If John is behind anything, then I’m sure it’s going to be good. In fact, he may very well be the best thing to happen to America… at least when it comes to persuasion and influence! No, really!”

Second, from “The Eco-Copywriter,” Thomas Crouse, who went absolutely nuts and over the top in his flattery of me and the work I do:

“My inbox is bombarded with emails every day. But when I see one from John, I stop and read it.”

And finally, here’s one from Liza Schermann, the lead copywriter at Scandinavian Biolabs:

“John Bejakovic and persuasion. You can’t beat that. He made me like cats. Even though I used to hate them and they used to hate me. So he’s a great person to find out about a new product that’s about persuading stubborn prospects. Or cats.”

The reason I’m sharing such lavish praise and admiration with you is because I’m still reading a magic book I mentioned two weeks ago.

​​The book is called “Leading With Your Head: Psychological and Directional Keys to the Amplification of the Magic Effect.” It’s basically a guidebook for stage magicians about how to organize their tricks and their shows to maximize the magic, the fun, the show for the audience.

Here’s a relevant bit from Leading With Your Head:

“If we don’t draw attention to the magical occurrences, the effects may be weakened, or lost. The answer lies in analyzing your performance pieces to know when you need to direct attention to the magic. All other times you should be projecting out and relating to your audience, so they remember you.”

I hope that with all the projecting out and relating I’ve done so far, you will remember me tomorrow. Because now the time has come for me to draw your attention, and in fact direct it, to a bit of sales magic. Specifically, to my Most Valuable Postcard #2, which I am offering for the first and only time ever at a 50% launch discount, until 12 midnight PST tonight.

I started this launch two days ago with a message I got from copywriter Kay Hng Quek.

​​Kay went ahead and bought MVP #2 and wrote me about it yesterday. His message is below. Please read it carefully, particularly the parts about how MVP #2 “blew his mind” and how MVP #1 and MVP #2 are “probably the best $100” he has ever spent on marketing training:

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Read it immediately, and how you tied everything together at the end just blew my mind. Obviously this demands a second or third read. Obviously I will learn so much more from that.

Ngl, I would have loved MVP #3, but I’m grateful I got to read at least MVP #1 and #2. Probably the best $100 I’ve ever spent on marketing training…

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Again, the deadline to get Most Valuable Postcard #2 for 50% off the regular price is tonight at 12 midnight PST. But the only way to get this offer is to be on my email list before the deadline strikes. If you’d like to that, click here and fill out the form that appears.

66 1/2 minutes of getting your money’s worth

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At the start of the evening, the mustached gentlemen at the Boston Athletic Association held on to their top hats and leaned forward in their seats, their eyes wide open, all of them focused on the same point at the front of the room.

It’s not every day that you see a living man voluntarily handcuffed, wrapped in chains, placed inside a coffin, and then sealed inside like a corpse.

It was novel and dramatic.

But after a few minutes of intense staring at the unmoving coffin, the audience’s attention started to drift. The members of the athletic club began lighting up fine cigars, talking about sports, the news, and business, chuckling and chattering and catching up.

And then, 66 1/2 minutes after the show started, the coffin crashed open.

The living corpse inside sat up and then stood up, panting, sweat running down his temples, his hair in a mess, his frock coat rumpled. He held the handcuffs in one hand and the chains in the other — he was free.

The gentlemen in the audience broke into applause and cheers. Harry Houdini had done it again. Another amazing and improbable escape.

So far, so familiar. But here’s what gets me:

66 1/2 minutes of sitting and watching a coffin. Many of Houdini’s sold-out shows were like this. They were long — often many hours’ long — and for much of it there was nothing to see, because Houdini performed his handcuff and manacle and chain escapes in a closed cabinet or behind a curtain or inside a coffin.

66 1/2 minutes of nothing happening on stage. What was going on with the audience during all that time?

Was it just a pre-TikTok era, and were audiences happy to sit and zone out for an hour or three, like a cat staring at a blank wall?

Or did people just enjoy being close to danger and death, and was that palpable even if it couldn’t be seen?

I’m sure there was a bit of both to it.

But what gets me in the above story is how the gentlemen of the athletic club started lighting up cigars and having friendly chats about sports, business, and the news.

Maybe that was really what they had come for.

Maybe Houdini’s spectacular escape was really just an occasion to mark out the rest of the audience’s lives. Maybe it was just an excuse to get out of the house, to do what they like to do anyhow — which is to chat and chuckle and gossip — but to do it in a slightly novel and exciting setting.

There’s a good chance you aren’t sold on this point yet. That’s okay. I have more to say about it to try and persuade you. And if you do get persuaded, I have some novel and exciting advice for how to apply this to copywriting and marketing, even today, in the TikTok era, without engaging in daring feats that risk danger and death.

But more about that in a couple days’ time.

For today, I just have a very simple offer for you. It’s my little Kindle book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

​​I used to refer to this as my “10 Commandments book.” I’ll have to stop that since I’m working on a second 10 Commandments book, and I have to distinguish between the two.

Anyways, Commandment III from ties into what I’ll talk about in two days’ time. It’s also the easiest commandment of the lot in my book.

​​This Commandment III takes just 5 minutes to follow, but it can suck your reader all the way to the sale, without him realizing what happened. It was first unearthed during an exclusive, closed-door seminar, which cost almost $7,700 in today’s money.​​

In case you’re curious, the secret behind this and all the other A-list commandments in my book are behind the locked door below. The ticket to unlock the door is but $4.99. If you feel you’re ready, step right behind this curtain:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

One thing Bencivenga got right

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If you go on YouTube right now, you can see how magic is done at the very highest level — I mean really see it, the trick behind the trick.

Frankly, it will seem preposterous.

A few weeks ago, a friend (hi Marci) clued me into an old but mind-opening video. The video shows one of the greatest magicians of all time, Tony Slydini, performing his “paper balls over head” trick on the Dick Cavett Show.

The unique thing is that this trick is done so it’s completely transparent to the audience. The audience can see all parts of Slydini’s trick in action. And it doesn’t seem like any trick at all.

But there’s a volunteer on stage, who Slydini focuses on.

The volunteer is determined to spot how Slydini makes a bunch of paper balls disappear. And yet, as the crowd laughs louder and louder with each new disappearing paper ball — it’s so obvious to be stupid — the poor guy on stage can’t ever spot the trick.

The volunteer goes from smiling and confident and sure of his own eyes at the start of the trick, to walking off the stage just a few minutes later, staring at the ground and shaking his head a little. “WTF just happened?”

What happened is misdirection.

I’m reading a book about misdirection right now. It’s called Leading With Your Head. The book gives specifics about movement and position and cues for actual stage magicians. But at the heart of it all, the book tells you, misdirection is not distraction. It is focused attention.

Copywriters do misdirection, too. Well, not all copywriters. Copywriters at the very highest level.

For example, I’ve spotted misdirection multiple times in Gary Bencivenga’s “Job Interviews” ad. That ad came pretty late in Gary’s career, after he had been writing sales copy for several decades. I didn’t find any examples of misdirection in Gary’s earlier sales letters, even if they were successful. It seems it took a while for him to get it right.

And in case you’re wondering:

You won’t spot the misdirection by looking at Gary’s ad. That’s like being the guy on stage during the “paper balls over head” trick. The Great Bencivenga will focus your attention where he wants you to look, and you will miss his sleight of hand.

But you can see how Gary’s magic works if you can find the book Gary was selling through that interviews ad. This brings up an important point.

I enjoy watching magic, and I enjoy being fooled by magicians. I enjoy it so much that I don’t want to find out how the trick is done, not really. I won’t ever perform magic, so why ruin the show for myself?

Maybe you feel something similar about sales letters. That might sound preposterous, but it’s very possible.

When you read a sales letter like Gary’s interviews ad — you’re likely to be amazed, astounded, to wonder at the impossible promises he is making you, which somehow still seem credible.

How is he doing it? Could Gary’s promises really be real? It’s possible to enjoy racking your brain over this in a bit of pleasurable uncertainty, as you try to resolve the mysteries Gary is setting out before you.

But once you see the actual “secrets” behind Gary’s copywriting tricks, the illusion vanishes like a cloud of smoke. And gone along with it is that enjoyable sense of wonder, of possible impossibility.

The only reason you might want to ruin the show for yourself is that you yourself want to perform sales magic — writing actual copy, which focuses people’s attention where you want it to go, all the way down to the order form where they put in their credit card information, and the big red button that says, “Buy NOW.”

It’s your decision. Amazed spectator shaking his head in wonder… or sly and knowing performer, controlling attention and doing magic.

If you decide you want the second, you can find Gary’s copy misdirection revealed inside Copy Riddles, specifically rounds 2, 6, and 17. For that show, step right up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

How to become in-demand in your niche even if you have no contacts, portfolio, or good sense

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A long while ago, in the days when elephants still roamed the Earth, I came across the following question:

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Say I wanted my copywriting niche to be SaaS, but have no contacts or portfolio, what are the steps I’ll need to take to become in-demand for my niche?

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Here are the exact steps I would suggest:

Step 1: Go to Silicon Valley.

Step 2: Get in front of somebody famous in the startup space, like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel. ​​Get creative if you have to — stalk them at a coffee shop they are known to go to, pay to go to a conference where they will appear, or maybe just write them an email and ask if they will meet you because you’re such a big fan.

Step 3: Take a selfie of yourself next to the famous nerd in Step 2.

Step 4: Put that selfie up on your site, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on TikTok, on Tinder, along with an article like, “10 surprising copywriting lessons from my meeting with Marc Andreessen.”

Step 5: In your article, mention several times that you are a SaaS copywriter, and link to a “Free Consultation” page.

Step 6: Repeat Steps 1-5 with additional famous nerds, as needed.

Result: Almost instant status and authority, and very probably, serious demand for your services.

You might think I’m being flippant. But I’m being 100% serious.

Yesterday, I promised to tell you the big secret of peak status.

The thing is, you might not want to hear it. Or you might not want to believe it.

Because the secret is that status can be manufactured, and very quickly.

In the same way that quality is only a minor part of the influence that your content is likely to have, your resume is only a minor part of the the status you are likely to achieve. And all the other, more important stuff, can be accomplished in two weeks’ time, if you are willing to really hustle.

Maybe you get what I’m saying.

But maybe you feel exasperated. Maybe you are sure I am either 100% wrong. Or maybe you suspect I am right, but you just find it impossible to really hustle to create status for yourself.

In that case, my advice is not to hustle. Take it slowly. Better slowly than never.

My added advice is that, if you are a marketer or copywriter in search of status, then take a look at my Most Valuable Email.

Sure, MVE will show you a new way to create quality content, but that’s not why I recommend it. Instead, the real status-building value of MVE is that it can get you gradually more comfortable with all those content-adjacent status-building practices which really make the difference.

I imagine that sounds very vague and abstract. I can’t make it more specific without giving away the Most Valuable Email trick. If you’d like to find out what that trick is, and even start practicing it today, head on over here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

My 11-inch Stonehenge now for sale for $12.69

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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:

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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.

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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

The bigger point of the rising AI flood

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Yesterday, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote an email with the subject line, “John Bejakovic is wrong.”

​​Daniel’s email was about my email two days ago, in which I said that nobody really wants a newsletter.

I would like to respond to Daniel’s email, and I will. But a promise is a promise.

And yesterday I promised that today I would continue and finish my email from yesterday, and reveal the bigger point.

My smaller point was that there’s already a ton of fluff on the Internet, and it will only get worse now that anybody can write quickly, cheaply, and convincingly thanks to AI.

You can choose to take advantage of the current moment, which is what my email yesterday was about.

But there’s also the bigger point I promised you yesterday. It’s this.

Last month, over the course of two weeks, an estimated five billion people gathered in bars and on street corners all around the world, or squeezed in on the couch at home next to their friends and family, while watching opposing groups of 11 grown men desperately chasing a rubber ball around a grassy field.

The reason why billions of people engaged in this strange ritual is the same reason why I sent a physical postcard last year as part of my Most Valuable Postcard project.

Because it’s something real.

All those people around the world, hanging out with friends, tuning in to a live football game that everybody else is watching at exactly the same time, with the result still unknown and even uncertain — that’s real.

On a much smaller scale, so was my physical, handwritten postcard.

So that’s my bigger point for you.

The world will soon be flooded by AI-generated and AI-augmented content. This content will be warm, sweet, and inviting.

​​That means the flood will stay, and it will cover and absorb all the other warm, sweet, and inviting content that’s being created by the last generation of well-meaning human influencers and personality-based content marketers.

But islands in the flood will form, created by people who want some actual real experience of human connection to complement all the time spent being plugged into the solipsistic AI heaven.

So start thinking now, about how to create something real, and how to give that to people.

At least that’s my advice if you want influence and impact in the nearly developing future, or maybe just a better society to live in.

Anyways, I had a special, time-limited, free offer today for people who are subscribed to my email newsletter. You missed that, since you are not subscribed, but are only reading an archived version of this email.

In case you’d like to keep this from happening in the future, you can sign up to my email newsletter, and get my emails as they come out, in real time. To do so, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Mysterious showman’s unnatural advice

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For the past four days, I’ve been promoting my new coaching program, but maybe I should stop.

Days one and two produced a lot of response.

Day three produced less response.

Day four has so far produced no response.

It might turn out somebody will still respond to yesterday’s email. After all, I sent it out less than 12 hours ago.

Or it might turn out I’ve genuinely tapped out demand. Especially since I’ve been trying to disqualify people pretty hard in my copy.

Or it might just be that my audience is getting weary of my recent barrage of long, charged, promise-heavy emails.

In connection to that last possibility:

I want to share a tip with you from the mysterious Derren Brown.

Brown is a hypnotist and illusionist and mentalist who has spent a lot of time on stage performing to big crowds, and a lot of time on UK’s Channel 4, making mindbending TV specials for audiences of millions.

Writing once about his experience playing to crowds, Brown gave this advice:

The lesson I quickly learned, which goes against every natural instinct when you are on stage showing off to people, is that if they are losing interest and starting to cough, you must become quieter.

Let me test out Brown’s advice.

So no benefits of my coaching program today. No man-or-mouse copy. Not even any deadline countdown.

I will just quietly remind you that I will be offering a coaching program with a focus on email marketing, starting in January. In case that interests you, the first step is to get on my email list. Click here to do so. After that, we can talk in more detail.

How to stop whining and start marketing

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A few weeks ago, I read an interesting science paper titled, “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List.” It was written in 2014 by two computer science researchers out of New York University.

​​The paper only runs for 10 pages, and it only repeats one sentence, over and over, 862 times, in the title, in the subheads, in the body content, in the flow chart and the graph:

“Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List”

The back story is that the two researchers who wrote this paper, David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler, were getting constant pitches form predatory publishers.

These are pay-to-play, fake journals that are constantly spamming most academics with offers to get their papers reviewed and published for a fee.

(If you’re a marketer with a website, then it’s something like those spam-folder cold emails to get an app for your site or to “make you rank high on search engines on relevant keywords, please revert us.”)

Anyways, the point is this:

Many academics have the same annoying experience as Mazieres and Kohler, of getting spammed by predatory publishers.

But only Mazieres and Kohler did something about it.

​​And what exactly did they do?

They didn’t lobby Congress for aid and protection… they didn’t go on Facebook groups and complain about how annoying these predatory publishers are… they didn’t shake their heads and wring their hands while wasting time around the water cooler.

Instead, they turned their annoyance into a joke — and a marketing opportunity.

​​They wrote up this fake paper, and started sending it to every predatory publisher who contacted them.

Soon enough, the paper went viral. And it keeps going viral, every few years after the initial outbreak.
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I don’t know the numbers, but I suspect this fake paper (which has since been actually published in a predatory, pay-to-play journal) has been downloaded and read tens of thousands of times to date. That’s tens of thousands of times more than 99% of academic journals ever get read.

And get this:

Right under the authors’ names at the top of the paper, there’s the URL for Mail Avenger, a project the two authors were working on to combat email spam. Again, thanks to their viral fake paper, this project probably had a thousand times the exposure it would have had otherwise.

Are you starting to see the benefit of this? I think it’s obvious. So here’s my recipe for how to stop whining and start marketing:

1. Identify something you feel like whining about (even better if a large part of your audience feels the same)

2. Stop yourself from whining, and instead…

3. Turn your stifled whine into a show, a spectacle, a joke that others might appreciate as well

And if you’re fresh out of good ideas for shows, spectacles, and jokes, then do mimicry. It’s always funny.

​​If you need a second example of mimicry, beyond the “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List” science paper, then Google “Ross Manly copywriter.” And then read the dazzling sales page that appears in front of you.

But let me stop this serious stuff, and let me get light-hearted:

I have a mailing list. Specifically, a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to get on it, so you can then whine and demand that I take you off my fucking mailing list, then click here, fill out the form that appears, and you will hear from me later today.

The best possible contest you could ever run to create demand and sales for your products, without cheapening, but in fact while heightening the perceived value of your offer

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Today, I want to share with you a marketing technique so powerful, so daring, so all-around incredible that I wish I had the circumstances and the courage to implement it myself right now.

Alas, I do not. But perhaps you are luckier and braver than I am, and so perhaps you will profit. Let me set it up with this true story:

Before P.T. Barnum got into the circus business, he made his living promoting rare and unusual talents. One of these was Jenny Lind, a Swedish opera singer who had won great fame in Europe.

Barnum decided to bring Lind to America.

Only problem was, Americans didn’t care.

Barnum started a big newspaper publicity campaign to build up desire for Lind. Once newspaper-reading Americans started to be intrigued by the “Swedish Nightingale”, selling tickets became no problem. But Barnum didn’t stop there.

Once excitement to hear Lind sing had grown to fever pitch, Barnum organized a spectacular event, a contest. And that’s the marketing technique I want to tell you about.

Barnum started selling tickets to the first Jenny Lind concert by auction.

And of course, he didn’t stop there either.

Instead, he went to a certain Genin, a hat maker in New York, and advised him to bid whatever it took to win the first auctioned ticket. Secretly, he then went to a certain Dr. Brandreth, a maker of a patent medicine. He told the same to Brandreth, to bid whatever it took to win.

“The higher the price,” Barnum told both men separately, “the greater renown it will give you all over the country within twenty-four hours.”

Brandreth did not do as he was told. He only bid as high as $200 — a princely sum at the time, equivalent to $7,700 today. But he lost the first Jenny Lind ticket. He had this to say later:

“I had better have paid $5,000 than to have missed securing the first Jenny Lind ticket. Such a splendid chance for notoriety will never offer itself again.”

On the other hand, Genin did as Barnum told him to do. He kept bidding and got the ticket for $225. And instantly, he became a nationwide topic of interest.

People all around the country suddenly started asking, “Who is this Genin who paid such money for a ticket?”

Men started taking off their hats and checking the labels inside, hoping that they too might have a real Genin hat. A man in Iowa who did find himself in possession of a ragged and beat-up old “real Genin”, which wasn’t worth 2 cents, auctioned it off for more than $360 in today’s money.

And Genin in New York started selling 10,000 extra hats a year on the back of that initial $225 investment — and became a very rich man.

As for Barnum and Lind, well, as you can guess, their tour became a yuge success. Barnum toured the country with Lind for several years, making tens of millions of dollars (in today’s money) for both Lind and for himself. Eventually, Lind decided to return to Europe and Barnum took his energy and his talents to other pursuits.

So there you go.

A blueprint for the best possible contest you could ever run to create demand and sales for your products, without cheapening, but in fact while heightening the perceived value of your offer.

If you do ever implement this scheme and profit handsomely from it, don’t send me a free ticket to your show — that would be against the whole spirit of the thing. Just write me and say thank you, and I will pass on your thanks to P.T. Barnum.

By the way, I really hate to give this idea away. But, like I said, I have neither the circumstances nor the courage to implement it myself right now.

All I can do is tell you to sign up for my daily email newsletter.

It’s available today for free.

If, like Genin the hatter, you would like to pay a princely sum for it and in that way distinguish yourself, you will have to wait until I start charging for my emails.

On the other hand, if you simply want the entertainment and education inside my newsletter, you can get that opportunity here.

Copy Riddles rolls into town again

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“Advertising is like learning — a little is a dangerous thing”
— P.T. Barnum

And with that quote, I would like to announce that my Copy Riddles program has once again rolled into town and pitched its tents down by the old horse track.

If you have been on my list for a while and know what Copy Riddles is and you know you want in, then you can buy your ticket now, by following the link below.

If you have not been on my list for very long, or you don’t know what Copy Riddles is about, then grab your cotton candy and settle into your seat and get ready for a show.

Over the coming days, I will be advertising Copy Riddles heavily. With a spectacular show involving clowns, elephants, and burning rings of fire, I’ll be explaining what Copy Riddles is and why you might want to get it, and get it before 12 midnight PST this Sunday.

Because a little advertising is a dangerous thing. And as P.T. Barnum’s ghost can testify, I am very averse to danger.

If by chance you are ready to join Copy Riddles right now, or you’re just curious about it:

https://bejakovic.com/cr