Insight Marketing

I got a hot date tonight HONK

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Yeah, about my hot date… I’ll get to that in a second.

First, here’s a scene from the animated TV show The Simpsons. The scene illustrates a valuable/funny point about influence. But hold on.

I grew up watching The Simpsons. If you didn’t, that’s no problem. You don’t need to like The Simpsons or even to have ever seen a single episode to get what this scene is about, or to understand the underlying point.

Scene:

Moe the bartender is being interrogated by the police for shooting the local billionaire, Mr. Burns.

Moe is hooked up to a lie detector machine. He’s asked if he ever held a grudge against Mr. Burns. He answers no. But the lie detector machine HONKS to indicate he’s lying.

“All right,” Moe says. “Maybe I did. But I didn’t shoot him!” Sure enough, the lie detector machine DINGS to confirm Moe’s statement as true.

“Checks out,” says the cop. “Ok sir, you’re free to go.”

So far, so conventional. But then, Moe executes the following rapid-fire descent into humiliation, to the sounds of the lie detector machine:

“Good,” he says. “Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

“A date.” HONK

“Dinner with Fred.” HONK

“Dinner alone.” HONK

“Watching TV alone!” HONK

“All right!!!” Moe says. “I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue!” HONK

Moe hangs his head. “Sears catalogue.” DING

“Now would you unhook this already please! I don’t deserve this kind of shabby treatment!” HONK

That’s the end of the scene. Maybe you found it funny even in my transcript above. But if you didn’t, trust me that it’s funny in the original version.

The question is… why?

Is it just funny to find out Moe is a loser? That’s part of it. But would it have been as funny if the scene simply went:

“Good. Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

[Moe hangs head] “Actually, I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Sears catalogue.” DING

My contention is no. That wouldn’t be nearly as funny. Which brings me to the following valuable point that I promised you:

“We build interest by adding more: more movement, more color, more sound, more light, more people, more intensity, more concentration, more excitement. In short, anything whatever that the spectators regard as increasing will also increase their interest.”

That comes from a book about magic and showmanship. In other words, the above advice about adding more is how expert magicians build the audience’s interest.

But it works the same for comedy.

And in fact, it works the same for copywriting.

Stack a bunch of moderately interesting, or funny, or insightful stuff on top of each other… and the effect is multiplicative, not additive.

And with that punchline, we conclude today’s episode. DING

But if by any chance you want more simple tips on building interest and desire in your readers, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

When orcs were real

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Three years ago, I read a viral, trending article titled, “When Orcs Were Real.” And three years in, I’m still thinking about it.

The article starts like this:

All cultures have stories of creatures that are like humans but more beastly, frightening, strong, and cruel than us, and that live by night instead of day.

Gotta scare the kids with something, right?

The question is why this story in particular is scary.

According to the argument in that article, it’s because this story taps into some kind of genetic memory in us.

There was a time, says the article, when orcs were real.

The orcs were bigger than us. Stronger than us. More brutish than us. They were the night to our day.

We, the race of men, were at war with the orc.

For a long time, the orcs’ strength and size meant they were winning. In fact, the orcs came to a rusty scimitar’s distance of wiping out mankind.

But for reasons we can only guess at today, the tide shifted. Men started to win the battles with the orcs. And then we won the war and wiped them entirely, to the point where now they only exist in our nightmares and on our Netflix viewing history.

Now here’s the kicker. This isn’t just some kind of evolutionary psychology handwaving to explain scary bedtime stories.

The orcs were real, and this is backed by the latest archeology and genetics research.

There was in fact an orc race that lived in the shadows, alongside men, for tens of thousands of years.

From what we know of them by their remains, they were like us but bigger. According to their skeletons, they were packed with muscle, and were several times stronger than the strongest of us.

Based on the shapes of their throats and mouths, it seems they couldn’t speak the way we can, but they could communicate in grunts and snorts.

They had a snout-like nose, large teeth, powerful jaws. Going by the size of their eye sockets, they had enormous eyes, meaning they lived by night. Most probably, they were covered in thick fur.

From their dwelling places, we know these orcs were experts in the use of short- and long-range weapons. They fed mostly on raw meat. They were deadly even to the most deadly animals — mammoths, wolves, cave lions.

They were also cannibals. And along with eating their own filthy kind, they hunted and ate men.

Who were these monsters? Today, we know them as the Neanderthals.

When I read that article and I got to the part about the Neanderthals, I said, “Whoa! Never knew that! Or never thought about it that way!”

The little that I knew about Neanderthals before, and what I learned about them through this article, suddenly snapped together into a new consistent picture, which fit what I had experienced first hand — which was about 10 hours of Lord of the Rings movies and a few months’ of reading Tolkien books when I was a teenager.

“So that’s why it’s so intriguing and dramatic,” I thought to myself.

When Orcs Were Real is an example of what I call insightful writing.

​​The article produced that feeling of insight in me — and not only me. That’s why the article went viral online, getting hundreds of likes, reshares, comments, and even YouTube videos being made after it.

I had this article in mind when gave the Age of Insight presentation a little over a year ago.

In fact, call 2 of that training (there were three calls in total) was all about the how-to of writing for insight using the underlying technique that’s there in the Orcs Were Real article.

That technique is the same technique that you can find in the “American Parasite” video sales letter by Craig Clemens, which went so viral that Joe Rogan tweeted it, not realizing he’s pushing a 40-minute ad to his audience.

The same technique is also there in the End of America VSL, which brought in something like 500,000 new premium subscribers and doubled Stansberry Research’s revenue.

But let’s talk turkey.

Until tomorrow, specifically until Monday, March 4, 2024, at 12 midnight PST, I’m promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

​​High Impact Writing shows you how to write on LinkedIn in and Twitter to build an audience and grow your business.

As a free bonus to High Impact Writing, I’m also offering the recordings of Age of Insight.

​​Age of Insight shows you how to have something insightful-sounding to say when you do get on Twitter or LinkedIn.

High Impact Writing sells for $297 until tomorrow night. Age of Insight sold for $297 the one and only time I offered it before.

So you buy one, you get one free. But more importantly, with these two trainings together, you get influence skills and techniques that can change the trajectory of your life and your business for life.

For the full info on High Impact Writing:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Boring copy beats interesting copy

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Yesterday, I wrote about the value of being clear in email copy. I got a curious reply to that from a business owner who has been on my list for a while.

​​This business owner gave his personal experience with two email lists he’s on, by two marketers I will codename Jeremy and Gavin. My reader wrote about these two marketers:

===

Jeremy’s emails are interesting, full of personality, and always something going on.

Gavin’s emails are super simple, clear, and direct to the point. Almost boring.

If I had to choose a better writer, it would probably be Jeremy.

But I’ve bought about 4 products from Gavin over the past 6 months, and none from Jeremy.

I also tend to read all of Gavin’s emails, because I know they are going to be easy to read, while I often just save Jeremy’s emails for later and end up not reading them.

===

The point being:

If you write simply, clearly, and make a valuable point, you don’t need to be clever or impressive. You can even be boring. And you will still be effective.

That was why I created my Simple Money Emails training the way I did, and why I named it like I did.

Simple Money Emails shows you how to write simple emails, that make a clear point, and that lead to a sale.

I’ve used the approach inside this training to write emails that sold between $4k and $5k worth of products, every day, for years at a time.

If you’d like to do something similar:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

How to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every day

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A couple months ago, I wrote an email about a surprising passage in Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money.

The passage talked about the Wright brothers, and how they were publicly flying airplanes for four years before newspapers took any notice.

To which I got a reply from a reader, asking about another interesting anecdote from the same book:

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I’m curious if you could give some examples as to how you would segway the passage of the Bill Gates and Lakesides computer study program story in the chapter about “Luck and Risk” to make different points?

===

The topic of the actual Bill Gates story is irrelevant here. The point is simply this:

It might be a worthwhile exercise to sit down with an interesting story you come acrosss… write down different morals to squeeze out of that story… and sketch out how you would link that to what you sell.

But I’ve never done it, and I don’t plan on starting now.

Instead, what I do whenever I come across a story that I find surprising is just write it down, and have it sitting around for when it fits naturally into a point I want to make.

In my experience, this is the only way to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every single day.

Sometimes, surprising stories I’ve written down sit around for days, weeks, months, or years before I use them for something. And there are many surprising facts and stories and anecdotes I’ve written down and never used at all.

That’s ok.

Surprising facts and stories and anecdotes are free and plentiful. Millions of books are filled with them. Plus each day of your own life will provide a dozen new ones if you only keep your antennae up.

What’s not free or plentiful is your readers’ attention or ongoing interest.

And shoehorning a story to make a point that doesn’t really fit… or worse yet, pulling out a bland, predictable takeway from an otherwise good story, is a great way to lose readers’ interest today and to make it harder to get tomorrow.

I have more to say about the topic of keeping readers’ interest for the long term.

Specifically, I have a simple three-word question I use to guide all my emails, which you might also benefit from.

I’ve revealed this three-word question before, but perhaps you’ve missed it.

In case you would like to find out what it is, you can do that on the free training I will put on in a few days’ time.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

Zero-handclap unsubscriber yawns at my emails

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Another day, another unhappy unsubscriber firing a parting shot.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a few emails featuring messages that former readers leave on that default “what made you unsubscribe” screen.

Most people never write anything, but on rare occasion, I find funny f-yous. And since I’ve been featuring these messages in my emails, I’ve been getting them more often. Like the guy who unsubscribed a few days ago and wrote:

“Emails tend to be too long, clever, and polished. Not dangerous enough. Yawn”

I shrugged. It’s all true. All except the dangerous part.

My emails are exactly dangerous enough — for my own tastes. Because I write with myself in mind first and foremost. I write things that I would find interesting and valuable, and then do a final check to see whether this can potentially be interesting and valuable to others as well.

That means sometimes I have genuinely dangerous things to say. Most days I don’t, and I have no intention of forcing it to sound edgy or to entertain jaded readers.

I could and maybe should end this email right here. But I like to write long and polish up my emails, often with concrete examples.

So I went in search of this unsubscriber on the Internet. What kind of dangerous, unpolished, raw writing might he be into?

I was hoping I would find something I could set myself in opposition to, like a dull, stubborn turtle.

I typed his email address into Google and… up came his Medium blog. It’s been live for the past few months. It’s filled with listicles and how-to articles with headlines like:

“The Features-Advantages-Benefits Copywriting Formula”

“Core Principles Of Copywriting”

“The Four C’s Copywriting Formula”

Unsurprisingly, all these posts have zero engagement. No comments, not even any of those Medium handclaps, though from what I understand, the whole point of publishing on Medium rather than your own site is to get free readers to your content.

The fact is, this danger-seeking unsubscriber could benefit from my Simple Money Emails course.

Simple Money Emails doesn’t require writing long, and doesn’t require over-polishing. That’s entirely optional.

What’s not optional is creating interesting content that keeps people reading, engaging, and even buying, without heavy-handed teaching that doesn’t even get a stupid handclap on Medium.

What’s more, if you insist on hard teaching in your content, you can use the strategies I teach inside Simple Money Emails to liven up your boring listicles and how-to articles.

For more information, or to get the course, here’s the (beware) mildly dangerous sales page for Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more

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A few days ago, I got a question from a reader:

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Hi John,

What are the differences between “most valuable email” and simple money emails”? Thanks!

===

Now get ready for the big bland takeaway from this email, which will probably be as familiar to you as the taxes you have to pay:

Facts and figures rarely persuade, and often they don’t even inform.

For example, I could have replied to my reader’s question above by telling him the facts and figures of my two courses — the prices, the main promises, the intended audiences.

But that stuff is literally in the half page of deck copy on the sales pages for the two courses. This reader knows about those sales pages and clearly doesn’t want to read them, or maybe has even read them, but the facts and figures failed to mean much.

So what to do? Because this is hardly one reader asking about my specific courses. This is how most of us act and think and feel most of the time about most things.

Certainly, if you have customers or prospects, this is how most of them are. They will not read the well-researched facts and figures you send their way, or maybe they will even read, but those facts and figures won’t mean much.

One powerful strategy when facts and figures fail is to stop being so damn linear, logical, and thorough, and to instead make your point in an associative, intuitive, non-linear way.

In other words, instead of facts and figures, give people a metaphor. Let me give you an example:

I recently rewatched the first Matrix movie. To my mind, that movie is the richest source of powerful metaphors that’s come out in pop culture over the past 30 years (and longer, probably going back to the original Star Wars movie). It’s well worth rewatching from time to time so you have it close at hand when writing your marketing material.

But back to my reader’s question and the difference between Simple Money Emails and Most Valuable Email.

My best answer is that Simple Money Emails is like the kung fu, the use of semiautomatic weapons, the piloting of the fighter helicopter that Neo and Trinity and Morpheus can own in an instant with the push of a button thanks to their loading program.

These are powerful and practical skills, which look incredibly cool to the uninitiated, but which ultimately anybody can do and profit from very quickly — in the Matrix, to fight and destroy; with Simple Money Emails, to write quick and easy messages that make money and keep readers reading.

On the other hand, Most Valuable Email is like the little bald-headed monk-child at the Oracle’s house in the Matrix, the one who tells Neo that there is no spoon.

Really, at the core of MVE is a similarly simple but profound idea.

It’s not an idea that is meant for everyone, but only for a small group of pre-selected people.

However, if you can accept this idea and make it your own, you can start to bend reality — including both your readers’ reality, and your own.

This makes it so you ultimately don’t need to rely on the email copywriting equivalents of kung fu or semiautomatic weapons or even fighter helicopters, because the ultimate results happen simply via “inner work” of a sort, by just absorbing and repeating the mantra that there is no spoon.

Now, if you are interested in either of these two courses, I bet you still have questions even after this metaphor. But I imagine you might have a better sense which of the two courses is really right for you.

If you’re looking for practical, result-oriented, quickly acquired skills, then it will be Simple Money Emails.

If you’re looking for mastery and a long-term practice that will take you to places you cannot imagine yet, then it will be Most Valuable Email.

You can get your remaining questions answered on the sales pages for the two courses. In the slightly pompous words of Morpheus:
​​
“I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.”

The folly of “show don’t tell”

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I wrote yesterday about worldbuilding. Well, here’s an anecdote that built a world:

Some time in the 1960s, artist Norman Daly created a tall and narrow sculpture. Daly taught at Cornell University, and so he placed his sculpture, without any fanfare, in a faculty dining room.

Daly expected his tall and narrow sculpture would spark commentary. Provoke emotions. Engage viewers.

But the sculpture didn’t spark any commentary or provoke any emotions. As for engagement, it did prove to be mildly engaging:

Faculty members interpreted it as a hat rack and treated it as such. Hats hung, they didn’t give Daly’s sculpture another look.

It was then that Daly realized he has to create a whole lot of supporting documentation to make sure his art is interpreted as art.

Point being:​​

It’s popular to say, “Show, don’t tell.” But that’s profoundly foolish.

You have to tell ’em, and tell ’em again, and tell ’em still some more. At least if you are after a given outcome — provocation, status, sales — and if you’re not okay with spending time and effort to create something that can then be dismissed as a hat rack.

I said the story above built a world. And I ain’t foolin’.

The story above was one of a few formative experiences that led Daly to create a whole new, made-up, Iron-Age civilization, including physical objects, works of visual art, music, as well as volumes of scholarship, commentary, maps, and even art catalogues for the whole thing.

Daly exhibited all this in art museums. People came, flipped through the art catalogue, nodded at the curious artifacts, and walked away feeling enlightened about a milennia-old civilization that never existed.

If you want to find out more about Daly’s project, you can do so at the link below.

It can interesting on its own merits.

It can prove useful if you are after crafting your own worlds.

And if you read just the section describing the other formative experience that led Daly to do create all this, it might be valuable if you yourself write or create content.

In case you’re interested, here’s the link:

https://theconversation.com/50-years-ago-an-artist-convincingly-exhibited-a-fake-iron-age-civilization-with-invented-maps-music-and-artifacts-189026

Do you know the flip side of this famous historical anecdote?

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Everybody and his monkey knows the story of how, back in 1903, some smug realist at the New York Times wrote that heavier-than-air flight won’t be possible for another “one million to ten million years.”

And then, several weeks later, the Wright brothers took off and flew for the first time.

Like I say, you probably know that.

But what you might not know is the flip side of this story, how little anybody cared about that first flight, or the second flight, or the third, then or for years afterwards.

​​Here’s an excerpt from a book I just finished reading:

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Several years went by before the public grasped what the Wrights were doing; people were so convinced that flying was impossible that most of those who saw them flying at Dayton in 1905 decided that what they had seen must be some trick without significance — somewhat as most people today would regard a demonstration of, say, telepathy. It was not until May, 1908 — nearly four and a half years after the Wright’s first flight — that experienced reporters were sent to observe what they were doing, experienced editors gave full credence to these reporters’ excited dispatches, and the world at last woke up to the fact that human flight had been successfully accomplished.

===

That’s an interesting historical anecdote.

I had never heard it before.

It can be saved and used effectively in lots of different contexts. I would like to pass it on to you if you write and need lots of sticky messages to make your points more effectively.

I also want to clue you in to a resource that’s full of such sticky messages.

​​I already wrote about it in a recent email.

I’m talking about Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money. I finished reading it a few days ago. It’s where I got the passage above, even though Housel didn’t write it — he’s just citing yet another book in his own book.

The Psychology of Money was published just over three years ago. And yet, it has over 30,000 5-star reviews on Amazon.

That’s not because the advice in the book is so new or so inspiring (“Save more”).

Rather, Housel’s Psychology of Money is so popular because it’s so effectively written, using lots of historical illustrations and novel metaphors and personal stories.

If you want to see how to write a book that keeps selling itself based on its content alone, then The Psychology of Money is worth a skim, read, or even some careful reverse engineering. To get your own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/housel

The Day After 40 years later

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Today being November 20, 2023, it is the 40th anniversary of the airing of the most influential movie you have never heard of.

The movie is called The Day After. It aired on ABC on November 20, 1983.

A few unusual things about this movie:

1. It was direct to TV, and never shown in theaters

2. It was depressing

3. It helped prevent nuclear war

The plot in a nutshell follows several different people around Kansas City and small surrounding towns. They go about their idyllic Midwestern lives, while in the background the radio reports increasing tensions between the US and USSR over some dispute in East Germany.

People stop to listen to the news, but shrug it off and say it won’t come to anything.

That afternoon, they see ICBMs launched from underground missile silos around Kansas City. A short while later, several nuclear bombs are detonated over Kansas City itself.

What follows is “the day after”:

A few survivors huddle together among ruins and charred corpses, while their hair falls out and their skin peels off, the result of rotting from inside, courtesy of the high levels of radiation in the air.

Things go from bad to worse, and then the movie ends. ​​I told you it was depressing.

When The Day After aired on ABC, it was watched by over 100 million people. At the time, it was the most-watched TV movie in history.

Before The Day After was shown to the public, it was screened for President Ronald Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

After the movie finished, the generals sat there petrified, without saying anything.

​​After Reagan saw it, he supposedly said, “not on my watch.” In his memoirs, he drew a direct line between watching The Day After and signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with the USSR.

The incredible thing was that this piece of American Propaganda was so effective that it was shown in the Soviet Union as well.

​​The producers of the movie insisted the movie be shown in the USSR in its original form, without any changes or commentary. The Soviets agreed.

​​The Day After aired there in 1987. While it’s not known exactly how many millions watched it, it can be presumed that they all ended up depressed.

I’m telling you about this movie because it’s culturally and historically significant. But if you must have your persuasion and influence takeaway, then consider the most obvious and most powerful one.

Look at the impact on Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

​​Imagine them sitting in a darkened room, staring mutely at images of rubble where Kansas City used to stand, as the final message rolled across the screen:

“The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in a full-scale nuclear war. It is our hope that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert that fateful day.”

Was the stuff in this movie any kind of news to them?​​

If anybody should have known what nuclear war would really mean in terms of actual impact and human cost, you would think that top Army brass and the President of the United States would be it.

And maybe they did know, on an intellectual level. But didn’t really see it, didn’t really feel it.

It took a dramatic, visual presentation to get it into their heads, and to change their attitudes.

And maybe that’s why I had to tell you about this depressing movie from 40 years ago, instead of simply repeating, “We are wired for story” or “You gotta a paint a picture in people’s minds.”

That’s all for today.

If you’re curious, here’s the TV trailer for The Day After. It lasts all of a minute and 32 seconds. Watch it, shudder, and when you think of it in the future, think of what I told you today:

Conclusions from my “what’s fun and keeps charging your credit card” poll

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I read just now that Sam Altman of OpenAI announced that they are pausing ChatGPT-plus signups. Too many people want in and OpenAI cannot cope.

In other news, yesterday I asked what subscriptions you enjoy or even find fun. I got lots of replies. And that’s a problem.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but all the replies were very different and many clashed with each other.

I guess that’s no surprise, given that I was asking what’s enjoyable or even fun. That’s kind of like asking, “What’s some good music you heard in the past month?”

The replies I got were so all over the place that it’s got me reconsidering my point from yesterday.

Maybe in order to have a successful subscription that actually delivers value to people, you don’t need entertainment.

Maybe you simply need self-interest.

I mean, look at ChatGPT. It’s got all the fun of an MS-DOS terminal, and yet they have to turn people away from subscribing.

I’ll think more about this, and eventually I’ll let you know how it impacts my plans for my own subscription offer.

Meanwhile, here’s a non-subscription offer to appeal to your self-interest. It’s my most expensive course, also my most valuable course, and the most likely to pay for itself quickly, in fact within just 8 weeks, if you only follow the step-by-step instructions it gives you.

For more info, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/