Copywriting

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

by

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:

===

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

Will Simple Money Emails be available after I finish traipsing around the U.S.?

by

My travels around the U.S. continue. Today I left Palm Beach in Florida and arrived to charming and moss-covered Savannah, Georgia.

The next few days are supposed to be something like vacation for me — as vacation as it gets while having to deliver two weekly coaching programs, and writing one weekly newsletter and this daily newsletter.

Fortunately, I have a stockpile of interesting reader comments and questions to help me out with these daily emails. Yesterday, a reader and recent taker-upper of one of my offers wrote in to ask:

===

Idk if you remember me, but a few weeks ago I purchased Kieren Drew’s HIW through your affiliate link. Your age of insights videos came as a bonus offer.

Within three days I watched all the videos and went through the supplemental material. Now, I apply the FREE framework to all my content writing. It’s a game changer. Thank you for putting it out there.

But that’s not why I’m emailing you. I’m wondering if your simple money emails will be available in April?

You see, I’m on a budget and spent my monthly “education” budget on HIW. I’d love to buy your course, but I can only do so in April. If you’ll still be offering the course in April, I’d love to become a happy paying customer again.

===

The answer in short is yes, Simple Money Emails will be available in April, after I finish my trip across the US. It will also be available in May, and June, and onwards, just as it is available now.

I only ever ran a deadline-based promo around Simple Money Emails once, and that was for its launch last July.

​​I might create some kind of disappearing bonus for SME in the future — but as long-time readers might know, whenever I do offer a new bonus to an existing offer, I make it available to all previous buyers as well.

All that’s to say, if Simple Money Emails is not in your budget now, you will be able to get it later.

But if it is in your budget now, and you want to learn how to stamp out your own profitable and simple emails on demand, day after day if you so choose, even while traveling and not having a ton of time to work, then there’s no sense in waiting.

Simple Money Email will never be a better deal than it is today, and by getting it today, can apply it and profit from it sooner. For more info on SME:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

What’s the problem with retainers?

by

I woke up this morning to a bang.

I’ve been staying at my friend’s Adams-family-like mansion in the Bolton Hill area of Baltimore.

I have an entire floor of the house to myself.

It’s been great. Except each morning I’ve been here, I’ve been woken up in the same way.

Bang. Against my window. Then a few seconds later, another bang. On and on and on.

A robin – a strange, possibly idiot bird — keeps flying against the window all morning long. After it hits its head against the window, it flies to a nearby branch. It resets. And then it flies at the window again.

And like that until I wake up, get up, and leave the room so I don’t have to listen to him any more.

This week, in fact ever since I got to Baltimore, I’ve been promoting Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments from readers who have good things to say about Shiv, and who are happy to hear I’m working with him.

I’ve also gotten a few questions, including the following from Dr. Liza Schermann, formerly the Crazy Email Lady, now a full-time copywriter with an ecommerce brand. Liza wrote:

===

So cool you are now one of the coaches in Shiv’s programme!

I was actually considering his retainer coaching a few years ago because I figured that if I was going to quit my job at the time, it would have to be for a retainer or retainers. Which is pretty much what I ended up doing without him, only a couple of years (and a lot of sweat and blood) later.

Out of curiosity: what’s the problem with retainers? (If it’s public info.)

===

The answer to Liza’s question is really Shiv’s territory, and he goes into it in detail in his video in which he makes the case for the Performance Copywriter Method.

That said, here’s a few possible issues with retainers:

From the copywriter’s side, it’s typically a lot of work, for not all that much money…

​​It’s a lot of stress because the client could decide at any moment to sack you…

​It’s not too scalable because you can only have so many of these retainers before you run out of hours in the day…

​​Plus it’s hard to sell clients on the retainer agreement to start with.

On the other hand, from the client’s view, it feels like an ongoing expense and a need to find stuff for the copywriter to do to make it worth while. And that means they keep wondering whether they should keep it going or sack you before the next retainer payment.

I’m sure not all retainer deals end up like that. Liza has a retainer-like gig. And it’s going well for her.

At the same time, I’ve had a couple retainer-like deals myself. I could never make them work, so I can believe retainers do go bad often.

And yet, for many copywriters, retainers remain some kind of enchanted castle, a magical destination they keep hoping to reach.

Perhaps i could tie that up to that robin beating his head against my window each morning.

Or perhaps I can just tell you there is a legitimate new opportunity for copywriters, a way to make great money, in a scalable way, without the storm and stress of retainers.

It’s called the Performance Copywriter Method. If you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

My confessions as Shiv Shetti’s hot-seat coach

by

Last Dec, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote me an email asking if I wanted an intro to Shiv Shetti, who was looking for a new coach for his program.

I had no idea what being a coach inside somebody else’s program entailed, but I was willing to find out.

It turned out Shiv has a new program to coach copywriters, called Performance Copywriter Method.

Normally, I would not be interested. For the past year, I have been consciously working to move away from coaching, selling, or marketing to copywriters.

But this was something different.

Shiv was looking for a “hot seat coach.” Each week, I would have to give a different copywriter a strategy for a new email promotion. The copywriters were working with solid, successful clients, and were writing email promos for them on performance-only deals.

I told Shiv I am interested in this. So we agreed I’d start a 2-week trial period at the end of January.

In the meantime, I got to work preparing.

I bought Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror course, because Shiv was explicitly looking for someone who knew how to do promos in that style. I went through Campaign Conqueror twice.

Second, I went through Shiv’s trainings inside PCM. They talked about mindset… about Shiv’s system for finding these PCM clients… about writing promos themselves.

Third, I looked over previous hot seats that Shiv had delivered himself, all of which surprised me in how thoughtful and thorough they were.

Fourth, I joined the PCM Skool community, where I first started lurking and then contributing bit by bit.

Long story short:

I was impressed by Shiv’s program… impressed by the copywriters inside… impressed by Shiv and his team.

I guess they liked me as well, because my trial period came and went, and now we continue to work together.

My main job is, as I said, to take in a bunch of info each week, and come up with the strategy for a new email promo, much in the style of Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror. The strategy includes a promo offer, a theme, and email hooks.

For example, tomorrow I have call set up with an Australian copywriter who’s working with a music coach. He’s supposed to send emails over 5 days to promote the coach’s $2,800 offer to the coach’s list of 12,000 names.

I will prepare the strategy. I will go over it with the copywriter over Zoom. He will then go off and write the implement the strategy some time in April.

If all goes well, the client will make a bunch of money without doing any work. The copywriter will end up getting paid much more for those emails than he ever could if he were getting paid up front. And then next month, he and the client will do it all again, with a new offer and a new theme.

So far, I’ve done five or six of these hot seats, one per week. Most of the promos are set to run in the next few weeks, so I can’t report on any impressive wins yet. I imagine those will come.

The other part of my work as a hot seat coach is participate in the PCM Skool community, fielding questions every day.

Those tend to range from technical questions to client acquisition questions to copy and promo questions.

Fortunately, this community is nothing like r/copywriting or the various Facebook copy groups. The people inside are all normal, are all looking for results, are all actually working copywriters with solid copy chops.

All that’s to say, i continue to work with Shiv and his PCM community.

I can tell you from the inside that this program is 100% legit.

​​Not only is it well-designed and well-delivered, with care and effort, but the copywriters inside are getting these performance deals going with quality clients, and from what I’ve seen of the results so far, they are making bank.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about PCM below.

But before you go there, you might notice the curious fact that I am not in any way creating a promo out of this offer.

There’s no deadline.

There’s no disappearing offer, or a bonus, or a discount.

That’s because I don’t want to create any additional urgency about this, beyond what you might already feel as a copywriter dissatisfied or worried with the status quo.

But if you are dissatisfied or worried, and if you’re looking for a new way to work as a copywriter, then PCM is definitely worth a look. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Announcing: Exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters

by

Over the past two weeks, I’ve teased on a few occasions that I will tell you about and exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Today, I will finally tell you what this business opportunity is.

I will just tell you about it today, and I will then work to sell you on it tomorrow, Wednesday, and over the weeks and months to come.

This business opportunity is Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

Shiv, as you might know, was once the “retainer guy.”

He was very successful in coaching copywriters to land clients who would pay healthy monthly retainers.

Thanks in part to his success getting copywriters set up with retainer deals, Shiv realized in time that retainers are a raw deal both for copywriters and for clients.

To Shiv’s great credit, he didn’t ignore this reality. He was both honest and proactive about it. And so he figured out a new and different way for copywriters to work with clients.

That’s the Performance Copywriter Method.

The promise of PCM is that it’s a scalable way for copywriters to work with clients, make $20-$30k per month, while working just 4 hours a day.

Another way to look at PCM is as a coaching group or mastermind, which is led by three experienced coaches who guide things — me being of these three coaches.

You can find out more about PCM at the link below.

There’s no deadline to do so.

Joining PCM is a big decision, and it won’t be right for anyone.

That’s why I don’t want to create any urgency about this, fake or real, beyond telling you about this new way to work as a copywriter, which is likely to be entirely different from what you’re doing now.

Tomorrow, I will give you my inside view on PCM, and what exactly what I do as a coach inside it.

But if you’re intrigued by what you’ve heard so far, you can sign up to watch Shiv’s presentation about PCM below. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Is the daily email marketplace glutted?

by

I’m on the Amtrak from New York to Baltimore, sitting the wrong way, away from the direction of travel, bouncing up and down as trees and warehouses zoom by me. It’s not a great time to write a daily email.

​​Fortunately, a long-time reader fed me a good email prompt a few days ago. He wrote:

===

For a while now, I’ve been feeling like I’m inundated with emails from copywriters, marketers and direct marketing companies.

Until a few months ago, I took pleasure in reading everything.

Now I don’t anymore.

[…]

Lately, I enjoy reading newsletters about what is happening in the world, novels, history books, detective stories, and business history textbooks.

I hope this metamorphosis of mine is normal.

===

My reader’s message sums up the concept of the sophistication of the marketplace, as described by legendary marketer Gene Schwartz, in the experiences of one person.

A man will enter a specific marketplace. He will be new, interested, and engaged by just about everything there.

In time, he will become more selective, more skeptical, or even leave that specific marketplace altogether.

Is this a problem?

​​Is it a vote against ever starting a business in general?

​​Or is it a vote against starting a daily email newsletter right now?

Of course not.

The fact is, there are uncountably many humans alive on the planet right now. You only need a tiny number of them to be interested in what you are writing or selling right now to do very well for yourself and your business.

It’s much like a direct mail sales letter, which will typically only get a 2% response rate, even when mailed to a highly qualified list of prospects.

98 out of 100 targeted, pre-selected prospects won’t get the sales letter… or won’t bother to read it all the way to the order form… or won’t be persuaded to buy.

Only 2 out of 100 will actually respond and send in any money.

And yet many big fortunes over the past century have been built on those 2%.

The same applies to you today, with even more extreme numbers.

That said, it is undeniable that different formats – email newsletters as opposed to video courses as opposed to books — will attract different kinds of people, and in different mindsets and stages of sophistication.

In my experience, he more serious and successful people are, the more likely it is that they read books.

So if you do write a regular newsletter, it makes sense to adapt your best content, and turn it into a book. You will often reach great prospects who might be among the 98 out of 100 who would never read your newsletter, at least not today, before they really know you and trust you to have something worthwhile to say.

That was one of the motivations for my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters book.

​​That book was quick to write. And yet it’s one of the best thing I’ve ever done for my standing in the industry and for attracting quality readers to my newsletter — readers who might never have read otherwise.

For more info on this quick and yet worthwhile book:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Darkness at 1pm

by

It’s 1:34pm as I write this but it’s dark.

​​I’m inside a freezing Boeing 777 somewhere above the Atlantic ocean, flying from Barcelona to New York.

Lunch is over and now the crew has walked down the cabin, telling us to put the blinds down. I can only guess that this is an attempt to reduce future jet lag. Like kindergartners, it seems we passengers have to get our afternoon nap.

Lots of things happened to me on the way to the plane today.

And lots of things happened in my business over the past 24 hours.

I thought of different ways to try to fit the most important and interesting of these events into my email today.

Fortunately, I remembered all the student emails I’ve critiqued over the past few weeks as part of my little Write & Profit coaching program.

One thing I’ve been repeating often to the folks in that group is that they are trying to do too much in their emails… to say too much… that what they have is really two or three or even nine emails’ worth of content.

So let me stop myself and leave you with this advice for today:

If your email isn’t clicking, you are probably trying to say too much.

Now that I’ve told you that I’ll go back to sitting in the dark, or maybe I’ll take that kindergartner nap.

I want to be in shape for tomorrow so I can get to the last of the affiliate promotions I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future, and tell you about an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

When orcs were real

by

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

Jumbo PT Barnum writing tip from me to you

by

Many people like to start off their emails with categories and abstractions. They say stuff like…

This past Thursday night, I hosted the weekly Write & Profit coaching call. Around 7:15pm Barcelona time, I was in the middle of copywriting feedback to a business owner, Jeff, on an email he wrote. His email started by saying:

“I have heard many stories of…”

Whoa there. That word many is a trigger. It triggered me to think of a passage from Joe Vitale’s book about P.T. Barnum, There’s A Customer Born Every Minute.

In chapter 8 of that book, Joe sums up 17 copywriting lessons to be drawn from Barnum’s massively effective advertising. Lesson #10 is “Say Jumbo.” Joe explains:

===

Whenever you write something vague, such as, “they say,” or “later on,” or “many,” train yourself to stop and rewrite those phrases into something more concrete, such as “Mark Weisser said…” or “Saturday at noon” or “seven people agreed.” Don’t say “dog” when you can say “collie.” Don’t say “elephant” when you can say “Jumbo.” Don’t say you have a “midget” on display when you can have “General Tom Thumb.”

===

In completely unrelated news, my promotion of Newsletter XP is nearing its climax.

Newsletter XP is an expensive and valuable course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter. It’s put on by Alex Lieberman and Tyler Denk, the founders of Morning Brew and Beehiiv, respectively.

I’ve managed to claw out a $200 discount for you from the usual price that Newsletter XP sells for. That discount is good until tomorrow night, Monday Feb 26, at 12 midnight PST. If you’d like to take advantage of this, here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Boring copy beats interesting copy

by

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