Leads

How copywriters can avoid ham-handed segues that get them eaten alive

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Here’s one of the greatest (and for copywriters, most instructive) scenes in Hollywood history:

“Now then, tell me,” says the doctor behind the glass. “What did Miggs say to you? Multiple Miggs in the next cell. He hissed at you. What did he say?”

The young FBI agent on the other side of the glass adjusts a bit in her chair. “He said, ‘I can smell your cunt.'”

“I see,” the doctor says with a slow blink. “I myself cannot.”

That’s from the first meeting of Dr. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter and FBI agent Clarice Starling, in The Silence of the Lambs.

Hannibal Lecter is a genius psychiatrist who happens to be a serial killer. ​​

Clarice is a young FBI trainee. She’s been sent to get Lecter’s help on a case of serial murders.

In those first few moments of the meeting, Clarice does lots of things right:

She makes a damaging admission (“I’m a student”). She flatters Lecter (“Maybe you can decide whether I’m qualified to learn from you”). She makes the embarrassing admission about Miggs. And she shows interest in the drawings of Florence on the walls of Lecter’s cell.

“All that detail just from memory, sir?” she asks.

“Memory, Agent Starling, is all I have instead of a view.”

So far, so good. And then comes the rupture:

“Well,” says Clarice with a nervous smile, “perhaps you’d care to lend us your view on this questionnaire, sir.”

Lecter tilts his head and smiles. Like he’s talking to a 3-year-old girl who just fell and scraped her knees.

“Oh no no no no no,” he says. “You were doing fine. You had been courteous and receptive to courtesy. You had established trust with the embarrassing truth about Miggs. And now this ham-handed segue into your questionnaire. Ts-ts-ts… it won’t do.”

And that’s exactly what can happen to you, and what will happen, unless you take care.

Because your prospect reads your value-laden content or watches your entertaining video. And then comes the pitch.

“Oh no no no no no,” your prospect says with a sympathetic tilt of the head. “It won’t do.”

If you don’t believe that that’s how it is, then let me make a damaging admission of my own.

A while back, an A-list copywriter sent out an email.

I’d been on his list for years, but he never ever emailed anything.

And here he was, writing, and with an interesting personal story. He got me sucked in.

And then, with a ham-handed segue, he switched to an offer for a course he was selling.

I’ll tell you this. I wasn’t as cool and courteous as Hannibal above. I might have cursed at my laptop. And that’s even though I make my living doing the same thing as this guy… and though I should be immune to being pitched.

So my point for you is this:

Indirect selling works. But you have to be better than Clarice was in that opening scene.

Your indirect lead is not just about building a bit of relationship, good will, and rapport.

In the indirect-selling bait, before you get to the switch, you have to do something critically important.

What exactly?

You can find out about that inside my Most Valuable Email training. Because the above email is an email that uses my Most Valuable Email trick.

If you want an explanation of how and where this email uses the Most Valuable Email trick, you can find that in the Most Valuable Email Swipes, which is something I give you along with the core training of the course. Look up #10 in that swipe file, and you will see the trick in action. Plus as a benefit, you will learn how to avoid ham-handed segues that get you eaten alive.

To get it now:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The real heroes are dead

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“As a soldier, Rick Rescorla served in Vietnam, where he earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and also a Purple Heart. When he returned home, Rescorla landed a job as Head of Security for Morgan Stanley. And as you’ll soon see, in many ways, he was the best investment Morgan Stanley ever made.”

I’ve gotten interested in writing financial copy. So as the first step, I started watching financial promos while I eat lunch.

I got going yesterday, with a Stansberry VSL. The hook is the story of a U.S. Army vet named Rick Rescorla… who, the VSL tells you, could end up having an “enormous impact on you, your family, your money, your savings and investments.” And then it leads to the bit about Morgan Stanley and its best investment ever.

“This story sounds familiar,” I said.

“An Army vet… going to work on Wall Street… as Head of Security… where did I read this before?”

I typed a few words into Google. And yep, there it was. First result.

For many decades, the recommended bathroom reading material for copywriters was The National Enquirer. At least so claimed Gene Schwartz, who said:

“That’s why I say that the required medium for you is all the junk magazines in the United States. I would go out tomorrow and get a subscription to The National Enquirer and read every single word in it. That’s your audience. There are your headlines. There are your people and their feelings.”

But the Rick Rescorla story didn’t come from the National Enquirer. So I’d like to give you a different magazine recommendation as new required reading.

I’m talking about The New Yorker.

It’s a snob magazine. If you’re writing sales copy, it’s unlikely to reflect your audience or their feelings.

And yet I recommend it.

Because the New Yorker and its writers manage to dig up obscure stories… find the fascinating implications… and create drama through substance rather than form.

Stansberry’s Rick Rescorla hook came from The New Yorker.

And it’s not the only one.

If you’ve been reading my emails for a while, you know I’ve written about Dan Ferrari’s Genesis sales letter. It tripled response over the control and sold out the entire stock of Green Valley’s telomere supplement.

Dan’s sales letter kicked off with a snapshot. A secret meeting of Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley millionaires… gathered in a Malibu Beach cliffside mansion… to listen to a Nobel-winning scientist reveal her breakthrough research on doing away with death and old age.

That story was true. And it also came from The New Yorker.

“All right Bejako,” I hear you saying. “You almost have me convinced. Two examples is good. But where’s your third example? Don’t know you all copywriting proof comes in threes?”

You got me. I only have the two examples above to give you.

If that’s enough of a pattern for you to work with, then start scanning The New Yorker and checking if some of their stories could be used for your hooks.

And maybe you will be my third example one day… or maybe I will be, because it’s what I’ll start doing.

In any case, if you’d like to read why Rick Rescorla was the best investment Morgan Stanley ever made, follow the link below.

But before you go, consider signing up for my email newsletter, which serves you up with a daily idea or recommendation for improving your marketing or copywriting.

And now, here’s the tight, fascinating, and moving New Yorker article about Rick Rescorla:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/02/11/the-real-heroes-are-dead

Conflict produced this legendary ad — do you know it?

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“We’ve spent a fortune,” screamed the red-faced exec, “but this damn thing still won’t sell! What the hell am I paying you people for?

The gray suits around the table hung their heads.

The time was 1911.

The executives at Colliers Publishing had heard an incredible idea. It came from Harvard University President Charles Eliot.

Eliot said any man could get a world-class education in 15 minutes a day, just by reading a few books. All the books could fit onto a 5-foot shelf.

So the Collier’s people asked Eliot which books exactly… and Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf was born.

Collier’s ran ads in their own magazine to get leads for the Five Foot Shelf. The ads talked about the joy and satisfaction of owning and reading great books. They featured the Harvard coat of arms.

​​And yet the damn thing wouldn’t sell. It looked hopeless. But it turned around, by accident.

Advertising man Bruce Barton had to fill some empty advertising space. So he flipped open one of Dr. Eliot’s great books and landed on a picture of Marie Antoinette in a rickety peasant cart. He ripped the picture out. And he scribbled the headline above it:

“This is Marie Antoinette riding to her death. Have you ever read her tragic story?”

According to Barton, Marie Antoinette outpulled the old “joy and satisfaction” ads 8-to-1. She kept running successfully for years, and helped sell hundreds of thousands of copies of the Five Foot Bookshelf.

This shows the power of a dramatic snapshot. This is a great way to start your sales letters, advertorials, and even emails.

Of course, that’s not the only good thing Barton’s ad has going for it.

The whole thing is full of copywriting and marketing tricks which worked in 1921… and continue to work in 2021. It might be worth taking a look and seeing how many you can spot.

And if you’d like to do that, I’ve tracked down a copy of Bruce Barton’s original Marie Antoinette ad for you. You can find it below. And if you’d like more occasional trips down 1911 marketing lane, you can sign up for my email newsletter here.

It was a bright cold day in April…

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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

I frowned. I bared my teeth. Two hours had passed since I sat down to write.

But I still hadn’t finished the email. All I had was a bunch of research and half-starts.

How much more time would I waste? Suddenly, ice water ran down my back. The deadline, I thought. It’s so soon.

Now I’ll be honest with you:

Writer’s block is not something I ever suffer from.

But I do suffer from writer’s fiddling… writer’s lack of focus… and writer’s doubt, which turns into writer’s backtracking.

I’ve found a few ways to manage these writer’s conditions. They don’t always work.

But thanks to a reader named Lester, I’ve now found a new way also. It works for writer’s block, too.

The technique comes from a marketing guy called Roy Williams. Williams gives it to you in three easy steps:

1. Randomly force upon yourself a dramatic opening statement BEFORE you know what you’re going to write about. [My tip: Google “weird opening sentences in books” and take the first result that comes up.]

2. Look for the defining characteristic of that statement.

3. Think about what you want to sell. Use the defining characteristic of the statement as the angle of approach into your body copy.

That’s it? Yep. I tried it. It works.

But here’s the thing that really gets me:

Williams performs this act on stage. He asks for a bunch of strange or shocking opening sentences. Then he brings a bunch of business owners up. He asks them what they would like to sell more of. And then he uses the process above to come up with cool ads for those business owners, right on the spot.

People think it’s magic. They even accuse Williams of planting stooges in the audience to set up the act.

But then Williams explains how to do this trick. It’s just what I told you above. It’s something anybody can do. But Williams says, nobody ever does it.

That’s the thing that really struck me. Because it reminded me of something I read early on in my marketing education. Fortunately, it came so early that it actually made an impact. Here’s the intro to it:

I’ll tell you something: This issue of my newsletter is going to make a lot of my readers very uncomfortable. Why? Simply because I know the difference between winners and losers and, in this issue, I’m going to put the choice right dead square in your face. I’m going to give you an extraordinarily simple set of instructions and, if you do what I say, your chances of becoming extremely prosperous are going to be magnified by a factor of at least 1,000!

But most of you are not going to follow these simple instructions. I know that already from past experience. And I even know already the reasons you’re going to give for not doing what I suggest. These are the same reasons everybody (including me) nearly always gives for not doing something which will make our lives better.

Does that make you frown or bare your teeth? Well, if you’d like to read more, and find out how to 1000x your chances of becoming extremely prosperous, before the clocks strike thirteen, here’s the rest of that thing:

https://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/aslz_winners_losers.htm

(And if you want to subscribe to issues of my own newsletter, for free, you can do that here.)

This 9-figure copywriter just made the sales letter discovery of a lifetime…

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Dear friend,

Normally, I don’t write about these kinds of off-limits “insider strategies” of rich and famous copywriters.

But these aren’t normal times…

And the discovery that came out of this top-secret research…

Is simply too important, and has too much money-making potential, to be ignored.

Now in the rest of this email, I’m going to be sharing exactly what this discovery is…

The science behind why it works…

And how you can begin using it TODAY to write killer copy, to make yourself more sales in less time.

Also, in just a few moments from now…

I’ll show you how a tiny mistake in your sales letter lead could be costing you 80% of your sales…

Plus you will discover the “super fun” tactic one elite copywriter, whose sales will soon hit the billion-dollar mark, has found to make his prospects keep reading… and ultimately BUY.

***

All right. Let me emerge from modeling the lead of Stefan Georgi’s Gluco Secure sales letter. (And yes, Stefan is the 9-figure copywriter I referenced in the subject line.)

I’ve been writing my own sales letter lately, to promote the official launch of my bullets course. And in the top-secret research for that, I discovered the following:

Stefan Georgi says one of the biggest jumps he made as a copywriter came by mastering bullets.

“They make great headlines,” says Stefan, “plus they are super fun to write.” But that’s not all.

Stefan says that many copywriters forget to fascinate in the lead of their sales letter.

​​The lead. You know — the part that determines 80% of your overall sales.

​​Stefan doesn’t like the chance that he’s going to lose 80% of his readers right up front. So he adds camouflaged bullets at the end of his leads. (Like I did right before those asterisks above.)

​​​​These lead bullets are a kind of sales insurance to intrigue readers and pull them deeper into your copy. ​Stefan explains:

“Because even if my lead is a bit off, or if my big idea isn’t hitting as hard as I thought it would, throwing in those intriguing bullets at the end drastically increases the chances of the prospect sticking with me. And, the longer they stick with me, the more invested they become, and the more likely they are to ultimately buy.”

“Ultimately buy.”

Ultimately, I don’t have anything to offer you to buy today. But I will soon.

It will be my bullets course. That’s where, if you like, you can learn how to write A-list bullets that go at the end of your sales letter lead… or in your headline… or anywhere else you want to get your reader’s attention and interest.

But not today. Today, if you want to read Stefan’s thoughts on bullets, or discover the other big mistakes he sees in sales letter leads, here’s where to go:

https://www.stefanpaulgeorgi.com/blog/big-lead-mistake-5-forgetting-to-fascinate/

My unflattering email critique to my earlier self

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[I gave myself a harsh email critique recently. It’s for an email I wrote exactly two years ago, which gets a “C” at best. If you want to see why, here’s the original email in bold, along with my comments in brackets:]

SUBJECT: The email that broke the camel’s back

[I’ve found that “play on a popular phrase” rarely works as a subject line, at least to my personal newsletter list. So I would say, force yourself to come up with 10 new subject lines, and use the best of those. But if you insist on the subject line above, then make it more specific and intriguing. Something like, “The sticky sweet email that broke this camel’s back.”]

A while back, I subscribed to the Farnam Street email newsletter.

I’d seen a headline in the New York Times about Shane Parrish, the guy who writes Farnam Street. The headline read:

“How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter”

Interesting.

So I subscribed, without knowing too much about what the content I would be getting.

[Only people who really love you will read past this opening. Everybody else will leave. As James Altucher says, you have to bleed in the first line. Options:

– “How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter.” Lead off with this and then explain what it’s all about.

– “And that’s when I unsubscribed.” Lead off with the end of the story (below) and then work your way back to explain how it all went wrong.

– Make it into a metaphor. “I only dated the Farnam Street newsletter for a few weeks. In that short time, we had several nasty fights…”]

The first email arrived with a ton of links to important, helpful articles on the Farnam Street blog. I scanned through, but I didn’t read anything.

A second email hit me a few days later, with more helpful content.

Then a third.

And a fourth.

There was nothing wrong with any of these emails. And the content was apparently good — after all, Shane Parrish got a feature written about him in the New York Times.

But none of it clicked with me. It was too earnest, too virtuous, too positive.

[Ideally, make this section more concrete. Give examples of specific emails, and make each example funny or stupid. If you can’t do that for any reason… then make this section shorter. Your copy should never be both abstract and long, which is what’s happening here.]

Finally, I got an email with the headline “Introducing your new favorite holiday tradition” (it was around Christmastime).

I opened it up. It was about a “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” to exchange books and then spend the evening reading them together with friends and family.

That’s when I unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no beef with Farnam Street or their email newsletter. I personally didn’t find the content interesting. On the other hand, a lot of other people obviously get a lot out of the same emails that I unsubscribed from.

[This is a missed opportunity to be a bit funny. You can make fun of the Icelanders and their nerdy tradition… of Shane Parrish and his virtue signalling… or of yourself and your cold Grinch heart, two sizes too small.]

I only bring up my experience with Farnam Street emails to illustrate a point:

It wasn’t that last email that made me unsubscribe.

That was just the straw, or the email, that broke the camel’s back.

All the previous emails had already primed me to open up the “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” email and say to myself, “Oh, hell no.”

This is something to remember in case you do a lot of email marketing.

It’s very hard to assign blame (or praise) to an individual email.

Odds are, it’s the entire email sequence that’s driving readers away — or winning them over.

[This point is worthwhile. But it could be developed further. An easy way to do this would be with another, positive example. “I was on Ben Settle’s list in two separate bursts, for 3 years in total, before I subscribed to his paid newsletter. The last email I read before I subscribed had the subject, “The Myth of Security”… but you can be sure it wasn’t that email alone that made me subscribe. It was those 3 years of cumulative reading.”]

Of course, there are things (unvirtuous and unearnest things) you can do to stack things in your favor early on in the relationship, while you still have your reader’s attention and good will.

If you’d like to find out what some of those unvirtuous ways are, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info or to sign up to get a free copy (once it’s out), here’s where to go:

[A couple of points to wrap this up for you and for myself both:

1. Even though this email is weak from a copywriting standpoint, that’s ok. Sometimes these daily emails come out a little undercooked, other times they are dry and flavorless. But the more you write, the more of them turn out fine.

But even if not, so what? A weak daily email still has value. It strengthens your relationship with your list… it cements the central idea in your mind… and it can form fodder for your future emails, two years down the line. So keep writing, or if you haven’t started yet, then start.

2. When you tease something at the end of your email, make sure you write down what you had in mind for the payoff. I’d like to know now what info I was teasing back then… but two years later, I have no idea any more. Time to head over to Farnam Street and see what advice Shane has about improving my failing memory.]

How to fake exciting discovery stories

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Tony Robbins once shared a stage with a knight’s suit of armor.

At one point during his talk, Tony got close to the knight. Terrible static appeared on his mic. When he walked away, the static stopped.

The next time Tony got close to the knight, terrible static shot up again. He stepped away. The static stopped.

The third time it was about to happen, people in the audience started shouting. “Don’t get close to the knight!”

It turned out later than an ambulance in the neighborhood was somehow messing with Tony’s sound equipment. Once the ambulance left, the sound problems disappeared. It wasn’t the knight at all.

The human brain needs causation like a hot dog needs mustard. “Terrible sound! What’s behind it? It must be the knight!”

This works really well much of the time.

Sometimes it goes wrong, like in the Tony Robbins story above.

And in rare cases of clever persuasion… it can be used to lead people by the nose. For example:

During a webinar last year, Parris Lampropoulos analyzed a sales letter. It was written by his most successful copy cub.

The lead starts off with a true story of a 104-year-old scientist who won the Nobel Prize for her discoveries related to brain stuff.

The gist was this old lady saying, “I feel sharper now than when I was 20!”

The sales letter goes on to talk about the woman’s discoveries… and how the supplement for sale ties into her amazing research.

Now rewind.

Did you catch that?

It’s the same trick as with the knight above, at least for my hypergullible brain.

Because when I read this sales letter, my brain concluded, “Oh, she feels sharper because of her brain stuff discoveries. And this supplement is a way for me to tap into that, and get back what little I had when I was 20.”

But the sales letter doesn’t say that anywhere. The quaint old lady could have been feeling great because of her genetics… or because of her daily regimen of drinking beet juice. We just don’t know.

What we do know is that, when you’re writing copy, it’s best to have a genuine breakthrough coupled with an exciting discovery story.

But if you don’t have that… you can cheat. Just roll your breakthrough onto the stage… and then bring out an exciting story that’s not really about this discovery. Put them next to each other. Your prospect’s brain will do the rest.

Now rewind.

Did you catch that?

This whole article was a way of eliminating people who aren’t interested in persuasion or copywriting. Since you made it to the bottom, maybe this stuff interests you. In that case, you might like to sign up for my email newsletter.

How to avoid disappointing readers and burning yourself with “secrets”

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If you go on Amazon right now and look at the top 15 bestsellers in the Internet Marketing category, you will see a curious thing:

6 of those 15 books have a title of the form “[Topic] Secrets.” So there’s Traffic Secrets, YouTube Secrets, Instagram Secrets, plus three others.

Obviously, “secret” is a powerful word in direct marketing. It goes back to Robert Collier at least, who published a book called The Secret of the Ages back in 1926.

In the decades since, you had Gary Halbert with his sequence of “amazing secret” ads… Boardroom’s collection of “secrets” books… and today, Agora’s newest imprint in the IM space, which has a newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.

Like I said, secrets obviously sell. Then and now.

And yet, I’m writing this email to warn you about “secrets.”

For one thing, “secrets” can make you sound like everybody else. 6 out of 15, remember?

For another, “secrets” might attract the wrong kinds of buyers. They might also put the right kinds of buyers into the wrong frame of mind.

For a third thing, and most important, relying on words like “secrets” can allow you to coast instead of coming up with better content. For example, here are some of the secrets from one of those Amazon best-sellers:

“Secret #1: What is copywriting?”
“Secret #13: It’s all about them — never about you”
“Secret #31: Polish your sales copy”

I don’t know how chipper you would have to be to avoid getting down in the mouth when this treasure chest of secrets is opened up.

But what’s the problem? The book is a best-seller, right?

In my experience, being on an Amazon best-seller list doesn’t mean much. But even if this book were a legit best seller, putting out generic content and calling it a secret leaves you wide open to competition. Your only defense is this thin mist of curiosity, which can dissipate in a moment.

Maybe I’m digging myself into a moralizing hole. So let me finish up by telling you what I tell myself, because it might resonate:

Put in a bit of extra work to come up with unique content and a unique perspective. Once you’ve got that, if it warrants being called a “secret,” then sear that on its rump and let it run.

But odds are, once you’ve done that bit of extra work, you’ll come up with a better, more interesting title or headline for your content. Maybe you’ll even start a new naming trend. One which half a dozen Amazon best-sellers will copy for years to come.

By the way, I’ve also got a daily email newsletter. It’s called John Bejakovic’s Newsletter of Secrets. You don’t have to sign up. But if you want to read all the secrets inside, here’s where to go.

Major anti-aging breakthrough = great new lead?

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In one of these posts last September, I talked about a new piece anti-aging research. It was something I’d read about in a blog post by Josh Mitteldorf.

Josh’s post described a new study performed at UCLA. Scientists there reversed the epigenetic aging clock — also known as the “death clock.” It was a limited study, but very encouraging.

Well today, Josh Mitteldorf has a new article. It covers something much bigger and more exciting.

A second team of scientists changed a bunch of old rats into younger rats. How much younger? From rat age 80 to rat age 20. And they did it by using just four injections, containing stuff from younger rats’ blood.

Josh Mitteldorf, who is a very smart and measured guy, says this is a major breakthrough that could scale to humans. He’s staking his reputation on it.

If this bubbling spring does turn out to be the fountain of youth, it’s gonna have big consequences. But either way, it’s likely to have some little consequences, too. Such as for example, being a great lead for a direct marketing promotion.

Maybe you think I’m grasping at straws. So let me refer to the current control for Genesis, Green Valley’s telomere supplement. That promo was written by Stefan Georgi and came out last September. It’s still running. And it uses the “death clock” research as its hook.

In other words, this anti-aging research is worth keeping an eye on. So if you want to read Josh Mitteldorf’s post, for yourself or for your copywriting, here’s the link:

https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/05/11/age-reduction-breakthrough/