Insight Marketing

Free sample: Why you are not “bombarded with information”

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Yesterday, I started reading a book called Metaphorically Selling. It looks promising, but…

The first chapter is all about the NEED for metaphor in sales and marketing. Here’s the gist:

“There is nowhere you can turn to escape the barrage of pitches vying for your attention and your disposable income. Twenty five hundred bids for our attention bombard us daily, from the television, the radio, the newspaper, the …”

How many times have you heard the same “bombarded with information” argument? I guess each marketing book, course, and seminar has to make it at the start, like a doctor putting a stethoscope around his neck to look professional.

I can tell you this:

This argument didn’t make me nod my head in agreement. Instead, it made me think of a talk that copywriter Richard Armstrong gave at AWAI bootcamp. Richard said:

“Nowadays it makes no more sense to say we are bombarded with information than it would be to say that a fish is bombarded with water. No, a fish is swimming in water. He’s living in water. He’s breathing water. To a very large extent, he’s actually made of water. And so it is with human beings and information.”

I probably heard Richard’s talk 3-4 years ago (it’s up on YouTube). I only listened to it once.

And yet, this one idea, that we are like fish swimming in an ocean of information, has stuck with me ever since. It pops up in my mind whenever I hear the cliche claim about being “bombarded by information.”

And if you take a moment to think about what I just said, you will find a recipe for messages that stick with your prospect for years… that pop up in his mind regularly… and that he shares with others, like I just did with you.

But if you don’t want to take the time to figure out the recipe, don’t worry. I’ll write more about it in a book I’m putting together. You can consider the above a free sample of that.

Anyways, the reason I watched Richard’s talk is because I read his own free sample book. And I was so impressed.

Richard is what you might call an A-list copywriter. His free sample book is a collection of his most successful and interesting ads. Along with his funny commentary.

And the best part? Richard’s free sample book is completely different from everything else out there.

Perhaps you don’t believe me. Or perhaps you’re curious. In either case, if you’re the type of person who wants to check things out for yourself, you can take a look at the link below.

But before you go, in case you’d like to take a daily swim in the ocean current that is my email newsletter, you can do that here.

And here’s the link to Richard’s free sample book:

https://www.freesamplebook.com/

The analogy jackpot

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For the past few days, I’ve been staying in a horrific neighborhood at the edge of town. It’s a mess of oversized private houses, thoroughfares, cars, fast food restaurants, shopping malls, and construction.

Now I’m in Europe at the moment, so this is not identical to your typical American suburb.

But if you don’t like the suburbs where you live, and you either prefer the country or the urban center, then perhaps you will agree with me that the outskirts of town are the worst.

I bring this up because yesterday, I read an article with the title, The Growth Ponzi Scheme. It was written by a guy who is lobbying against suburbs and for something he calls “Strong Towns.”

I’m sure he’s got his own inner reasons why he doesn’t like the suburbs. But his argument in the article is that the suburbs are a typical Ponzi scheme.

They were created with the promise of economic growth.

But the cost of maintaining the suburb (roads, electrical grid, etc.) is much more than the taxes and economic growth that come out.

So the only way to maintain the illusion of growth is to dump still more money into building out the suburbs today, which will require still more money dumped in tomorrow.

In other words, it’s a typical Ponzi scheme. And all of us become suckers when this scam finally comes crashing down.

I found this argument exciting for my own personal reasons.

It felt right enough. Plus it’s such a simple and clear idea to hold in my head. And it’s new! I couldn’t wait to share it with you.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

Calling the suburbs a Ponzi scheme is an analogy.

If people haven’t heard an analogy before… if the details fit well enough… and if the overall feel is right… then the result is what marketer Travis Sago calls a braingasm (a breakthrough analogy in its own right).

My point is that persuading by analogy is super powerful. And it doesn’t even have to be “true.”

Yeah, I’m sure the “Strong Towns” guy did his research. I’m sure he’s got numbers to back up his analogy.

Even so, he’s cherry picking just a few details of a very complex situation for his own purposes.

Somebody else, with a different agenda, might give a different analogy instead. He might say that suburbs are like the brick house built by the smartest of the three little pigs.

He might say it’s smart to invest in solid, spacious, and yet connected infrastructure, even if its value is not yet obvious.

But when the Big Bad Wolf of the next pandemic comes knocking at the door… we will see where our friends from Straw City and Backwoods Country come running to.

Whatever. I just made that up. Perhaps you found it convincing. Perhaps not.

No worries in that case. Because that’s my takeaway for you.

Persuading by analogy is like a slot machine. It’s cheap to play a game. In fact, you can mint your own coin with just a bit of thinking.

Of course, the odds of winning any given game are small. But if you keep at it long enough, you will win. And the payout can be huge. A jackpot.

Final point:

If you want to watch me play the analogy slot machine a few more times, you can do that here.

A simple way to deal with reactance on the sales page

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A few weeks ago, I was walking through a little park at exactly 11:21am.

I know it was exactly 11:21am because I saw an unusual scene, so I checked the time and wrote it down.

Three local drunks were sitting at a table in the shade. Two empty beer bottles and two empty brandy bottles were in front of each of them.

And now came the time to get the next round.

One of the drunks got up, started collecting the empty bottles, and grumbled, “I’m the oldest one here! And I have to go?” And he did. But he kept mumbling to himself about the injustice of it all.

So at 11:21am, these guys were already four drinks in, and getting a fifth and eighth.

That was the unusual part.

But the elder drunk’s reaction was very usual. “I don’t want to! Why should I?” That’s something we all say every day in some form.

Psychologists call this reactance. It’s as fundamental a human instinct as breathing or wanting to sit when we see a chair.

Reactance says that when we have barriers erected against us, when we lose a freedom, when we’re commanded or manipulated into doing something, we rebel. Fire rises up from our bellies.

If we have no other option, like when the stupid boss tells us to do something, we do what we’re told grudgingly.

But when we have a choice, like on the sales page, we cross our arms, dig our heels in, and say defiantly, “No! I don’t want to! What are you gonna do about it?”

The good news is that there are lots of things you can do to get around reactance in sales talk and sales copy.

I recently wrote about a pretty standard one, which is the reason why. Because people don’t really want control… they want the feeling of control. And sometimes, a reason why is all that’s needed to give them that feeling.

“You gotta get the next round today… because Jerry got it yesterday… and I will get it tomorrow.”

That can work.

But there are other, and much more powerful ways to deal with reactance. In fact, I’m writing a book about one of them now. And if you want to hear more about it, well, you will find it in future issues of my email newsletter.

The truth about bad breath

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Once upon a time, the mighty Persian king Darab took a wife from Greece.

Her name was Nahid.

Nahid was beautiful and the daughter of the king of Greece, Filqus.

One night, while Darab and Nahid lay in the same bed, Nahid turned towards Darab and exhaled in her sleep.

“My God,” said Darab to himself, “the stench!”

The next day, Darab asked his court physicians to see what could be done about his wife’s bad breath.

They gave her an herb, sekander. It fixed Nahid’s halitosis.

But it was too late. Darab’s fire for Nahid had cooled. So he shipped her back to Greece to her father, even though she was already well pregnant.

Filqus, Nahid’s father, was embarrassed by the whole situation. And rather than admit his daughter had been rejected by the king of Persia, he thought it sounded better to simply claim that he, Filqus, had gotten his daughter pregnant.

Nahid eventually gave birth to a baby boy. She gave him the name Sekander, I guess to remind her of her shame and lost love.

When Filqus died, Sekander became king of Greece. He put together an army, invaded Persia, conquered all who opposed him, and wound up on the Persian throne, which was really his by right, since he was the secret son of the Persian king.

If you’re wondering what the hell you just read, it’s how the Persians, back in the 10th century, told the story of Alexander the Great.

I’m sharing this with you for two reasons:

1. Because it shows the lengths of unlogic we will go to to protect our pride and ego.

2. Because contrary to what you might have heard, modern advertising did not invent bad breath.

What it did do however, is make people sensitive to the idea they themselves have bad breath… and the consequences this could have.

So starting in the 1920s, women were told that nobody would want them if they were hali-toxic (“Often a bridesmaid… never a bride”).

And men were told that bad breath would get them canned (“Employers prefer fastidious people… halitoxics not wanted”).

Meanwhile, the sales of Listerine mouthwash kept going up and up and up. In 1921, when Listerine was promoted mainly to dentists, sales stood at $100k per year. In 1927, after ads warning of halitosis had blanketed the country, $4 million worth of Listerine was sold. That’s equivalent to about $62 million in today’s money.

So my point for you is:

Much good advertising works like this.

It’s not enough to only speak to the very few who are aware of their problem and looking for a solution.

Entire vast, untapped markets are out there, full of potential prospects… people who aren’t aware of the problem, or what that problem really means for them.

Speaking of which:

Are you plagued by uncertainty and doubt? It might be because of work trouble. Specifically, a lack of new marketing and copywriting ideas you can implement every day. Clients and customers prefer marketers with new ideas… bores not wanted. In case you’d like a fix for that serious problem, here’s where to go.

The power of the fake diagnosis

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“Please spit in the cup,” the nurse said. “And now we take the test strip and wait a few seconds. Oh… you see how the color changed? I’m afraid that means you’re positive for TAA deficiency.”

Back in 1988, a bunch of undergrads at Williams College got tested for Thioamine Acetylase (TAA) deficiency.

TAA is a pancreatic enzyme, the undergrads were told. People who don’t have enough of it can experience mild but irritating pancreatic disorders.

Turns out TAA doesn’t really exist. The point of the charade was to see how the undergrads would react to the fake diagnosis. Because next they were given a questionnaire.

The questionnaire had a list of common symptoms of TAA deficiency (“headache, diarrhea, backache, …”).

It also had a list of common risk factors contributing to TAA deficiency (“taking aspirin or Tylenol, getting less than seven hours of sleep, skipping a meal, …”).

Perhaps you can see where this is going:

The deficiency group of students noticed 50% more symptoms in their life… and 20% more risk factors … than the control group did. (The control was people who didn’t have the test strip change color.)

But as I said, in reality, both groups had the same levels of TAA coursing through their bodies — zero.

The authors of this study call this “confirmatory search.”

It’s the underlying mechanism by which our brains get infected by medical student syndrome… personality tests… and horoscopes.

We look for proof, we ignore disproof.

My point is there is power inside these made-up diseases, syndromes, and categories. Even when they don’t explain anything. And even when people who get a diagnosis are not given any way out.

So imagine what would happen if you actually diagnose a real and troubling condition for people… point out the symptoms and risk factors so they can convince themselves… and then give them a solution that can fix it.

It might make you immune to empty lobby syndrome… for the rest of your life.

If that’s something you currently suffer from, and if you experience the anxiety and lack of cash flow it brings, I have a solution for you. It’s the ideas and suggestions I share inside my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

The hidden religion of persuasion

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“Well… I need to tell you all something. And it’s the most important thing I could ever say to you. In a little while, you’ll know for certain that I’m putting my very life on the line, and the safety of my family, by sharing this with you. So I hope that buys me at least a few minutes of your precious time.”

So starts out the video by one Altiyan Childs.

Childs was the 2010 winner of Australian X Factor. He came back to relevance last month because he released a YouTube video, lasting five (5) hours, which was shot in what looks to be his bedroom.

In the video, Childs exposes the hidden religion that all stars, celebrities, and people in power belong to, and are bound by an oath never to reveal.

How does Childs know?

Because he himself belonged. But he is now publicly renouncing this evil religion (he found another religion, Christianity, following a near-death car crash) and warning the rest of the world of the danger we’re all in.

The video got about a million views on YouTube in the first few weeks while it was still up.

That’s actually not a crazy number. I saw a similar video, with a similar expose, featuring a similar level of celebrity, pop up last year and get almost 20 million views in a few months’ time.

And I guess even this 20 million is peanuts to the overall popularity of the belief that some kind of evil cabal controls world affairs.

I think there are many marketing and persuasion lessons that can be sucked out of that need and out of Altiyan Childs’s video. Today I just want to focus on one.

Because what really underlies the popularity of such beliefs? Here’s my own secret revelation:

Such beliefs put our messy lives into an order-creating context.

Take a bunch of seemingly random and unconnected facts… draw surprising connections between them… and then place them inside of a bigger frame that gives the whole picture a simple and clear meaning…

… and this creates the feeling of insight.

And this feeling, as I’ve written before, might just be the most powerful and secret persuasion tool that the powers that be don’t want you to know about.

My point is that if you take those three steps outlined above, you can sell not only Christianity… but you can also sell supplements, coaching programs, and financial newsletters.

That’s a big claim.

And I can’t blame you if you’re still skeptical.

All I can say is, I’m putting my very life on the line to dig in further to bring you the full facts on this.

Once the facts are revealed, you will be able to see the truth and make up your own mind.

In the meantime, I hope this buys me a few email opens of your precious attention. You can sign up for my newsletter here. Because I will be back with this topic soon, assuming that the powers that be don’t get to me first.

Superior solution, inferior marketing results?

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Direct marketing is counterintuitive. For me even the basics don’t come easy, so I have to use all kinds of metaphors to trick myself and avoid making stupid mistakes.

Otherwise, I end writing copy that seems perfect to me — but that makes as much of a splash as a feather floating down a well.

So here’s one metaphor that helps me and might help you, too. Let me illustrate it with a scene from this morning:

The apartment I’ve been staying in for the past few days is cold. This morning, I got cold while working there for an hour. Then I went out for a walk.

My body was tense and alert and guarded. Cold.

Outside, the sun was shining. And whenever I walked into a patch of sunlight somewhere, my body relaxed and my scowl changed into something like a smile. Warm.

But then I’d step back into the cold shadow next to a building or a bunch of trees. Each time, my body tensed up again and the scowl came back.

And so on. Over and over. Warm sunlight leading to a moment of openness and hope. Cold shadow again, making me closed and guarded.

My point is:

This is the same thing that’s going on with your prospects right now.

And if your marketing or copy is not getting all the results it’s capable of, it’s because you’re taking the focus off your prospects and their problems.

It’s a mistake that’s easy to make.

You try to get people to believe your message. You try to show them how you’re better and how you’re an expert and how you deliver results. How your solution is superior and solves the problems they have.

But people can’t hear you.

Because they’re shivering in the shadow, looking for a bit of warmth. The problem is you’re shifting the focus off them too soon, and onto some external thing.

People say they want a solution to their problem, but they really don’t. Not for a long, long time.

What they want is to be understood, to be validated, and to get an understanding themselves of why they’re in this mess to begin with.

That’s the warm sunshine that gets people’s body temperature up.

So keep the focus on them.

And only when they get so sweaty and uncomfortable that they can’t take any more hot sunlight… do you provide the cool shadow of a leafy tree and say, “Here, here’s what you need. And can I interest you in an ice-cold lemonade as well?”

Well, can I?

Because if you want more ideas on how to improve your marketing results, I write a daily email newsletter on that topic. You can sign up for it here.

Why you’re not getting anything done

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“What do you want me to say?” I snapped.

My mom gave me a call yesterday. “What’s your plan for today?” she asked.

“I’m trying to work,” I said, “but I’m not being very productive.”

That was a mistake. Because it was really an invitation for my mom to ask me the worst possible question:

“Why do you think that is?”

I’ve written before about Tony Robbins. I’ve learned a lot from the guy. Perhaps the most valuable thing was the power of asking the right questions.

It really works.

By asking myself the right questions, I’ve made my way out of seemingly impossible situations, by doing less and by having more fun than I would ever have believed possible.

And vice versa.

By asking the wrong questions, I just agitate and muddle the mess I am already in. It starts to feel hopeless.

“Why do I think I’m not being productive? Let’s see… because I’m lazy? Because I’m frustrated with the project I’m working on? Because I feel the deadline looming… because I worry that I will miss it… and because I’m not strong enough to control my own brain, so this is turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy? What do you want me to say?”

Well. I didn’t say most of that stuff. But I was thinking it, while biting my lip. So I told my mom I would talk to her later, and I got back to staring at my half-complete, frustrating project, head in hands, wondering where it all went wrong.

Because asking WHY primes your brain to focus on failure and shortcomings. And while that might sound smart, it’s actually a bad way to spend your energy, and unlikely to do anything to move you forward. So don’t do it if you’re trying to be productive.

BUT!

Focusing on WHY is a great thing to get your prospect to do. Particularly if you have a new answer to that question.

As I’ve written before, a new answer to “WHY do I always fail” can allow you to “get one up” on jaded, hostile prospects who think they are too smart to fall for your marketing. And if you do it right, you can even become a star in your niche.

I won’t lay out the whole case for you here. That’s because I’ve written about this topic in detail already. You can find it as Commandment VII of my short book, The 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters. In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Tom Cleveland continues his productive NYT snooping

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How do veterans of #vanlife feel about all the newbies? Can you make a statement about your gender, when there’s no one there to watch you? And is that “maskne” on your face, or is it plain old acne?

In case you want answers to any of these questions, head on over to the New York Times website. As I write, these stories are all up on the home page.

A guy named Tom Cleveland has been snooping on the Times. I wrote about him a few weeks ago. Through his snooping, he discovered how the NYT makes its headlines more dramatic through A/B testing.

Now Cleveland has put out a part two to his research. It’s about which stories linger on the Times digital front page. And the breakdown is this:

News: 46.6%
Opinion: 22.2%
Feature: 31.1%

“Categories and numbers, huh?” Let me translate what I think this means.

“News” you’re probably familiar with. “U.S. Adds 916,000 Jobs in Sign of Surging Labor Market.” No thrills there.

“Opinion” is a little more fluid. It includes hard-hitting editorial such as “The unsettling power of Easter” (also on the NYT front page right now) as well as the “If a gender falls in the forest” piece above.

And then there’s “Features.” This is apparently an industry term for pure fluff — your typical #vanlife and maskne pieces.

So adding up Opinion and Feature, we get that the NY Times shows this type of content 54.3% of the time on its front page. In other words, this is most of what they show — because it’s most of what people want to see.

Please believe me:

This is not my ant-sized attack on the elephant that is the New York Times. Instead, I just want to point out that people always want human-interest stuff, first and foremost.

If you’re in the business of feeding people whatever, just to sell subscriptions and ads, they you might as well stick to fluff or tabloid content.

On the other hand, perhaps you have an important message to share with the world. But you worry that your topic puts people to sleep. Or gives them a headache.

Don’t worry. It’s an easy problem to fix. Just wrap your dry, complex topic in a thick human-interest sandwich. People will happily devour it, all the way to the end. ​​Here’s an example from an email I wrote last year:

“It’s a story of family betrayal… of breakthrough ideas, conceived in prison… of a small group of desperate visionaries who took an almost occult science… and combined it with a strange, untested new technology… to create the foundations of an industry worth over a quarter trillion dollars.”

Do you know what that paragraph was about? It’s about dry, technical topic. Namely, direct marketing, told through the colorful characters who dun it — Claude Hopkins, Gary Halbert, Ken McCarthy. And if you want to know how that story developed, you might like to sign up to my very human-friendly email newsletter.

Persuasive vemödalen

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I’m staying in a beautiful coast town these days so I just went for a walk along the shore. The sun was shining, the trees were doing their thing, and the sea, a few cliffs below where I was walking, was shuffling restlessly from side to side. I got tempted — for just a moment — to take out my phone and take a picture.

“But what’s the point?” I told myself.

Because I realized a long time ago that the only time I think to take a picture is when I come across a scene that looks like pictures I’ve seen before.

“Gee, this looks just like a postcard. Better create another postcard myself!”

If you love to take pictures with your phone, my point is not to razz on you. Instead, I just want to point out, in case you feel like I feel — that so much photography is repetitive and redundant — that there’s a word for this.

The word was coined in 2014 by a guy named John Koenig. ​Koenig called this vague intuition many of us have probably had — he called it vemödalen.

​​So now, when you and I talk to our friends, we can call this feeling by its name and we can communicate it to others. We have a handle on it, and it’s much more real in our minds. (Well, it would be, if we could only remember the word vemödalen and know how to pronounce it.)

Before you start thinking I’m getting sentimental, let me turn things around to hard-core direct marketing. Specifically, something marketer Travis Sago shared once in a podcast, about how he does email marketing:

What’s different and what I found works really well and takes a lot of lifting off the writing is bringing out what symptoms do they have, what symptoms are they seeing or feeling or hearing in their life? What is he saying? What’s happening in their life and starting out with the symptoms.

[…]

I’ll have to admit, some days I’m just brain dead and I’ll just go with the problem. But it’s way more powerful to go with the symptom.

What Travis doesn’t say in this quote is that when he talks about a symptom, he will often focus on a “new” symptom. Not new in the sense that it just popped up… but new in the sense that nobody else has talked about it, and even his prospect might not have a conscious awareness of it.

​​Even better if you can give it a name. Kind of like vemödalen. That’s what Travis does — and he manages to convert something like 25% of his list over time.

But speaking of unnamed symptoms:

Do you know that feeling when you’re nearing the end of a novel, and you start to feel a bittersweet angst, knowing that the characters you’ve made friends with over the past weeks will disappear from your life? I checked, and it’s called lithatonophobia.

The good news is, you never need to feel lithatonophobia at the end of one of my blog posts. Because I write a new email each day with new marketing and copywriting content. And if you’d like to keep that in your life, here’s where you can join my newsletter.