Bullets

Introducing the world’s slowest copywriter

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No, not me, though I am a worthy contender. The honor goes to:

“Mel Martin was the world’s slowest copywriter. It would take him three to four months to write a direct mail package. He could get stuck for a month on a letter opening.”

That’s from a sales letter written by Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist.” Lawrence’s wrote that sales letter a couple months ago, to sell a collection of ads that Mel Martin had written back in the 1970s and 80s.

Who cares about old ads from decades past? Well, people who care about making sales via writing today. Because, as Lawrence says:

“Mel Martin, the ‘father of fascinations,’ almost singlehandedly catapulted Boardroom Reports to $125 million through the power of his pen and captivating copywriting fascinations.”

When I recommended Lawrence’s collection of Mel Martin ads a couple months ago to my list, more than 150 people ended up buying.

If you were one of those people, and if you had a chance to look over some of Mel Martin’s ads in the meantime, I wonder what you thought?

If you’re anything like me, you might look at Martin’s bullets and think, “Pff, I can do the same. So simple, so basic. Just promises and how-to’s.”

Except, there was clearly something magical and mysterious going on during those months that Mel Martin was agonizing over his copy. That’s why his sales letters pulled in millions of dollars year after year, and that’s why he beat out all competing copywriters he was pitted against.

Maybe you can see the skill and thought in Mel Martin’s finished work.

But if you cannot, then there’s the Copy Riddles approach.

Don’t just look at the finished product… but look at the starting material as well. Try to write your own bullets based on that starting material… and then compare what you did to what Mel Martin did.

In fact, that’s what the first couple of rounds of Copy Riddles are all about — trying to sell the same products as Mel Martin, and comparing your bullets to his.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

I’m running a special event today to promote Copy Riddles, which I’m calling the White Tuesday event. It ends later tonight at 12pm PST. The core of the offer for this event is Copy Riddles, plus there are three time-limited free bonuses, which total $2,300 in real-world value:

1. White Tuesday Storytelling Bundle

2. Make The Lights Come On

3. $2k Advertorial Consult

… along with the White Tuesday payment plan, which allows you to get started with Copy Riddles for just $97 today.

To find out the full details of this White Tuesday event while it’s still live:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-white-tuesday-copy-riddles-event

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too. To find out what they are and how to claim them, take a look at the page above and act before the deadline.

How I write sexy bullets without writing

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Last month, I ran a promo for a couple of days to sell my Most Valuable Email course. Part the offer for that event was a bonus called Shangri-La Disappearing Secrets.

I teased some of those disappearing secrets in my emails with a few sales bullets…

… and thanks to those bullets, I made a buncha sales of MVE during that Shangri-La event. I also got people commenting on the bullets themselves. Here’s a sample:

#1. “Those are some sexy bullets.”

#2. “But although I’ve considered buying your MVE before, I was reading your bullets and thinking I need to buy your bullets course cause you were reeling me in with those.”

… and the winner of the “Odd Place To Go” prize:

#3. “Damn. These are some sexy bullets man! Soo sexy in fact they can even make even a gay copywriter straight. (I’m not gay but these bullets are just 🔥🔥🔥)”

I’ll tell you the secret of my sexy, sexual-orientation-flipping bullets:

I didn’t write any of them.

Well, I didn’t write any of them for that Shangri-La promo. Instead, they all came from previous emails that I had written months or years earlier.

I simply took the sexiest one or two sentences from those old emails, stitched them together, and those turned them into bullets that could make a covid skeptic vax up (I’m trying to keep a joke running here).

It goes the other way too. In fact, I feel there’s a 1-to-1 correspondence between sales bullets and sales emails.

When I first launched my Copy Riddles program, one successful marketer took me to task for not using any bullets in my emails that were selling a course about bullets.

My response was that a sales email is effectively a sales bullet, just expanded and adapted for the medium of email marketing.

So if you want to write sexy emails, my advice is to learn to write sexy bullets… and then simply fluff up those bullets from 50-80 words to 300-word emails, with a bit of personal context or a little story.

And if you don’t yet know how to write sexy bullets, or you simply want to write sexier emails, so sexy that virtue signalers will lobby to have them cancelled (give me a break, I’m trying), then consider my Copy Riddles program, and consider it now.

Because I’m running a special White Tuesday event right now to promote Copy Riddles right. My time-limited, special White Tuesday offer is Copy Riddles at the core, plus three time-limited free bonuses, which total $2,300 in real-world value:

1. White Tuesday Storytelling Bundle

2. Make The Lights Come On

3. $2k Advertorial Consult

… along with the White Tuesday payment plan, which allows you to get started with Copy Riddles for just $97 today.

To find out the full details of this White Tuesday event while it’s still live:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-white-tuesday-copy-riddles-event/

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too. To find out what they are and how to claim them, take a look at the page above.

Your FREE Copy Riddle

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My Copy Riddles program is based on a simple idea:

1. Take a look at a bit of dry, factual text

2. Write a sexy, intriguing fascination or headline to sell your reader on that text

3. Compare what you wrote to what an A-list copywriter wrote to sell that same bit of boring text, in a sales letter that brought in hundreds of thousands of sales and millions of dollars

Would you like to try this right now? If so, here’s your free Copy Riddle:

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Auto Dealer Rip-Off

Car-purchase padding: A prep fee of $100 or more (whatever the dealership thinks it can get away with). The cost of preparing your car for delivery is already included in the manufacturer’s sticker price.

Source: Consumer Guide To Successful Car Shopping by Peter Sessler, TAB Books, Blue Ridge Summit, PA.

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If you’d like to get better writing sales copy, follow the steps above. I mean, follow steps 1 and 2:

Read the text above carefully… then do your best to write a sexy, intriguing headline or fascination to sell a reader on that text.

And if you want to also follow step 3 — if you want to see how an A-list copywriter spun this dry and boring text into something fascinating that went out to millions of people, and convinced many of them to send in cash or check or credit card info as a result — you can find that inside a guide called “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Specifically, you can find it on page 26, right under the sub-headline that reads, “Over 2 million copies sold… and no wonder!”

(Hey, I promised you a free Copy Riddle. I said nothing about a free answer to the Copy Riddle.)

The good news is, while “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes” normally sells for $97, it is now available to you for the next few hours, because you happen to be a reader of this newsletter, for only $7.

You can read the full story about this offer on the page I’ve linked to below.

Final word about “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes”:

I’m not an affiliate for this offer. I don’t get paid whether you buy it or not. I can tell you I did buy this offer myself, for my own purposes, several weeks ago, before I ever had any plans on promoting it to you.

If you’d like to grab it also, before the price shoots up 13-fold in just a few short hours:

​https://bejakovic.com/fascinations​

For people who could write great sales letter leads, hooks, and angles (today!)

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… if only they could fight their way through the maze of copywriting books, courses, frameworks, templates, customer research, contradictory advice, newsletters and blogs and posts by experts, gurus, and charlatans…

I’d like to present a merciful guide to leads, hooks, and angles that actually pull, based on the strength of the copy alone, called:

“How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes”

The backstory behind this guide:

Well actually, you can read the backstory below.

In brief, it involves the mystery copywriter who built up a $125-million company… a personalized gift in the mail, which brought back a thank-you note and a check for $2,000… and an offer that normally sells for $97, but which is available to you for the next two days, because you happen to be a reader of this newsletter, for only $7.

A warning about the following page:

It’s a sales page.

A warning about that warning:

Don’t dismiss the following page just because it’s a sales page. It’s well-worth reading, whether you decide to buy the offer or not.

That’s because this sales page is both interesting, at least if you have any interest in copywriting and direct marketing… and because it’s valuable, if you write copy or hope to ever write copy, for your own business or for clients, and you want to have that copy produce results.

A final word about the following page and the offer that’s on it:

I’m not an affiliate for this offer. I don’t get paid whether you buy it or not. I can tell you i did buy this offer myself, for my own purposes, several weeks ago, before I ever had any plans on promoting it to you.

And the reason I’m promoting it to you now, without getting paid, is because I think it’s both interesting and valauble, just like the following page, which is live for the next 48 hours and ticking:

https://bejakovic.com/fascinations

Great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts

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At the start of this year, I got a message from Matt Cascarino. Matt is the chief creative officer at FARM, a marketing agency that’s had among its clients the American Cancer Society, the SPCA, New Era (the company that makes Major League Baseball’s official caps), and Kelley Blue Book.

Matt had been going through my Copy Riddles program. And he wrote to say:

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Hey, John…

Bluntly, Copy Riddles is kicking my ass. But in a good way.

Despite my bullets missing the mark in the first nine rounds, I’m learning a ton and referring back to the material to craft sneaky-good bullets for my own communications.

It wasn’t until Round 10B that things began to click. See my three bullets below and the A-listers’ efforts after that. I laid an egg by overthinking #3, but I’m pretty happy with my first two.

===

Below this message, Matt had pasted three of his sales bullets that he had written recently.

I took a look.

His bullets were great. Whatever he was doing to learn how to write bullets — hmm, I wonder what that could be — it was working.

For a while now, I’ve been beating on my tin pot and saying to anyone who would listen that sales bullets are the essence of effective sales copy. I’ve also been saying that bullets are as relevant today as they were when Gary Halbert and John Carlton wrote entire sales letters that were really just a pileup of sexy, bizarre, fascinating bullets.

But you might be skeptical when I promote the idea of learning to write bullets, since I sell a program on writing great bullets.

Fortunately, just yesterday (thanks to Thom Benny) I came upon a relevant passage from a well-known guy in this field, Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy. Eddie wrote:

“If you can write great bullets, you can also write great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts.”

So there you go. Learn to write great bullets, and most other copywriting skills simply fall out as a side-effect.

As for how to write great bullets:

Copy Riddles is in all immodesty the best program to learn to write great sales bullets.

That’s not because I created Copy Riddles.

It’s because Copy Riddles doesn’t just tell you stuff.

Instead, Copy Riddles can do to you what it did to Matt. Get you practicing in a safe and controlled environment… correct you when you are not doing well enough… and within a matter of a few weeks, have you writing bullets that Halbert himself would be proud of.

For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Announcing: Copy Riddles Lite

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Starting today, and ending this Thursday, I am offering something I’m calling Copy Riddles Lite.

Before I tell you the what of Copy Riddles Lite, let me tell you the why:

I realize that $997 — the price of Copy Riddles — is a big investment. Even if you have the money, it can be an obstacle. And if you don’t have the money, then it’s a real obstacle.

So my goal is twofold. First, to show you the Copy Riddles way, so you can experience it yourself, and see for yourself that Copy Riddles is a worthwhile investment, if you have any ambition of owning high-level copywriting skills.

Goal two is that Copy Riddles Lite is supremely valuable as a standalone training. If you cannot afford the full Copy Riddles course, or you can afford it but you decide for some unfathomable reason that you do not want it, then Copy Riddles Lite has value on its own, and much more than what I am charging.

Now we get to the what:

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in the full Copy Riddles program.

I specifically chose a round that comes early in the full Copy Riddles program, on a copywriting topic that most people know of… but very few do well.

The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what an A-list copywriter wrote starting with the same prompt.

In the first part of the round, I also give you my analysis of the fine points of how A-list copywriters do their magic.

In the second part, I show you this aspect of copywriting in real practice, in real live ads, headlines, body copy, emails, content.

Two more things inside Copy Riddles live:

The full Copy Riddles program also includes 3 bonus lessons. I included one of those bonus lessons in Copy Riddles Lite as well.

The full Copy Riddles program also includes references to some of the best places I’ve found for the A-list sales letters and the source material they were selling. I’ve included that in Copy Riddles Lite as well.

So if after going through Copy Riddles Lite, you don’t wanna pay me for the full Copy Riddles program, and you want to cobble it together yourself, you can.

I only want to sell you the full Copy Riddles if 1) you experience the value in Copy Riddles Lite and you want more and 2) you value your time and my expertise enough to pay me the remainder, rather than attempt to replicate it yourself.

And now for the price:

Copy Riddles Lite contains a little less than 10% of the total content of the full Copy Riddles program, so I’ve priced it at a little less than 10% of the total price.

You can get Copy Riddles Lite for $97 today, tomorrow, or on Thursday.

If you go through and decide you want the full Copy Riddles program, I also include a coupon code, good for a limited time, for the full value of Copy Riddles Live to apply to the full Copy Riddles program.

I’m launching this offer today on a whim. I will close it this Thursday, Feb 1, at 8:31pm CET.

​​I have no idea if I will ever open it again. I may or I may not. That’s not just a bluff. If you’ve been on my list a while, you’ll know I have had plenty of one-off offers, never to be repeated, for reasons of my own.

All that’s to say, if you’re interested, you can buy Copy Riddles Lite below. The link will take you to a bare order form, and no sales page. If that don’t deter you:

https://bejakovic.com/crl

AI expert tells you how to learn copywriting

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I’m preparing for the live presentation I’m supposed to give at The Copywriter Club London event on Wednesday.

My flight is tomorrow, and then Wednesday afternoon I’m supposed to perform.

While I’m not yet at full-blown levels of panic, there is still a lot more I would like to do to prepare. I hope that with preparation I can minimize the shock and horror and chance of humiliation when I actually do get up in front of people and talk on Wednesday.

All that’s to say, don’t expect any involved Bejako Baggins emails today. I have to keep today’s email short and to the point.

So let me pull out a bit of credibility I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks.

This bit of credibility comes from Steve Raju, who has transformed himself over the past year from your run-of-the-mill genius into a high-paid corporate AI whisperer.

Though it’s worth noting that, previous to this new AI career, Steve was a direct response copywriter. He even taught copywriting, both on his own trainings and inside Stefan Georgi’s thing.

Anyways, in the middle of a characteristically charming email a few weeks ago, Steve got serious for a moment to give some advice to those who want to learn copywriting:

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Write every day. I never knew a single writer who got better about writing, without umm… writing. Write headlines, leads and closes. Write emails. Write ads. Launch your own offers. Learn what works. And of all the things to learn to write well, learn to write bullets. Best person to learn from? John Bejakovic and his Copy Riddles course. The best course of them all. I’m really not joking.

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I am also not joking when I say that, during the few minutes it’s taken me to put together this email, a wave of nausea has washed over me, caused I suppose by that impending presentation in London.
​
So if you don’t mind, I’ll go now and pull my hair a bit and then get back to work on that presentation.

Meanwhile, if you would like to learn to write bullets, so you can learn to write better copy in general, and who knows, maybe even better presentations, then here’s what Steve calls the best course of them all:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

How Edward Bernays manipulated me, and how he might do it again

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I once wrote an email with the subject line, “How I manipulated you, and how I might do it again.”

​​That email was all about the strategic use of inflammatory words — like “manipulated” — to get people reading stuff they might not read otherwise.

Well, Edward Bernays manipulated me, and I guess he manipulated millions of other people, too.

Right now, I’m reading Bernays’s book Propaganda. It’s been in print for the past 100 years, and it’s still discussed today, though I suspect few people who discuss it have ever read it.

Why do people know and discuss Propaganda? Because of that title. Propaganda. It’s like manipulated. On the one hand repulsive, on the other hand fascinating.

Imagine that Bernays had titled his book Public Relations — which is really what his book is about. Would we be talking about it today, much less reading it?

The answer is no. The proof is that Bernays did in fact write a book called Public Relations. Result?

Propaganda: 2,700+ reviews on Amazon
Public Relations: 74 reviews on Amazon — and I bet most of those only came via Bernays’s Propaganda fame

All that’s to say, hooks matter. And unless you hook someone right away, then all the other thousands of words you might have written won’t matter much.

But you knew that. It’s the oldest bit of advice traded around the copywriting bonfire.

What you might not know is how to write a great hook. How to make it sensational and inflammatory — propaganda for the rest of what you have to say.

About that. As Daniel Throssell wrote recently:

​The skill of coming up with a great hook, and the skill of making it sensational, are almost exactly the same as a tiny, mechanical, supposedly “niche” copywriting skill you probably do not yet possess.

​​But it’s a skill you can find out more about, and even acquire quickly, via the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

What 44 percent of all Russian mystics wish you knew about the easiest way to bring them to an explosive death every time! (It’s news to a lot of marketers… see inside)

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The man was was not easy to kill. A mystic, prophet, and natural-born hypnotist who appeared at the court of the last Russian czar, and who, in just a short while, gained enormous influence:

Grigori Rasputin.

After a few years of growing nonsense at the court — nonsense caused by Rasputin’s influence — a faction of the Russian royal family had had enough. They schemed and plotted, and decided in secret to have Rasputin killed.

So on December 30, 1916, Rasputin was served poisoned wine and pastries laced with potassium cyanide. He swallowed glass after glass of the wine and wolfed down the pastries.

He groaned a little, but it wasn’t enough to kill the hearty Russian peasant.

Prince Felix Yusupov then emerged from behind a curtain and shot Rasputin with a pistol. More groaning but the beast still seemed to live.

So Rasputin was then stabbed repeatedly, and eventually dragged to the icy Neva river and drowned there. This finally did the job.

Of course, most people don’t put up so much resistance. I believe even one cyanide-laced chocolate chip cookie would be enough to do me in. But for more resistant, stubborn souls, other options exist.

I bring up the grisly story of Rasputin’s death because I’m about to make an inelegant comparison.

For the next few days, I will be promoting my Copy Riddles course. Copy Riddles teaches you copywriting, or really, effective communication, via the mechanism of teaching you sales bullets.

The reason sales bullets are so good for learning copywriting is that they have to pack an entire sales presentation in just a sentence or two. If you happen to write in the most competitive, sophisticated, stubborn, and resistant markets, this produces miracles/monsters of persuasion such as this:

“What 44 percent of all women wish you knew about the easiest way to bring her to an explosive climax every time! (It’s news to a lot of men… see pages 89-93.)”

That’s a bullet by A-list copywriter John Carlton. Carlton wrote this and dozens of bullets like it to promote a boring book about sexual health for direct response publisher Rodale, whose main business was selling how-to guides about tomato gardening.

Result? from Carlton’s files:

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I had to fight tooth and nail to get this piece mailed. At one point I was screaming at upper level veeps. I wish someone had taken a video of that meeting: there’s all these honchos sitting around the conference table, stunned, and there’s my voice hollering from the little speakerphone. (I never travel to client meetings, and have never met any of these people face-to-face.) Priceless.

It took me nearly a month to convince them to mail the piece as I wrote it. I caused such a fuss that I was actually blacklisted — until the results came in. I slaughtered the control. In fact, I’d hit a nerve in the public, and this piece mailed for over 5 years, despite frequent attempts by other top writers to knock it off. Ka-ching.

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Maybe you have no stomach for screaming at your clients or customers, or for writing explosive sales copy that slaughters the control in the easiest way possible every time. That’s fine. Not everybody is competing on the national stage, like Carlton was, or against other top writers.

On more modest stages, it’s enough to reach for just one or two of Carlton’s deadly persuasion weapons — instead of doing the equivalent of poisoning, shooting, stabbing, and then drowning your poor reader.

I told you it’s an inelegant analogy. But what to do — we’re talking about bullets. And as marketer Ken McCarthy put it once, bullets wound.

In any case, if you want access to the entire secret closet of persuasion poisons, knives, pistols, blunderbusses, mace, shuriken, anvils-on-a-frayed-rope, halberds, and brass knuckles, so you can choose a persuasion weapon or two for your particular purpose, here’s where to go:

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/