Copywriting

Marcus Aurelius, not Marcus Mansonius

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Came the following question after I revealed my 2022 reading list yesterday:

What did you think of Roadside Picnic?

I’ll answer, but only because the underlying idea is so valuable, or at least has been so to me.

Roadside Picnic a scifi novel written by two Soviet guys in 1971. I read it because it was the inspiration for the movie Stalker, which is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Both Stalker and the original Roadside Picnic talk about The Zone, a mysterious place that obeys its own dangerous and strange rules, and that grants you your ultimate wish if you can make it to the heart of the place.

Earlier this year, I planned to create a guide to the business side of copywriting called Copy Zone, using The Zone as an organizing conceit.

I knew all I needed about The Zone from the movie, but I decided to read the book because— well, because that’s the super valuable core idea:

If you find somebody whose writing or film or stand up comedy you like and respect, then follow any allusions they make or references they use.

​​If they talk about a book or science paper or inspirational talk that was influential to them, look it up and read it, watch it, listen to it while you wait for your waffles to toast.

More generally, go to the original source, or as close to it as you can stand.

You can call this basic principle, Marcus Aurelius, not Marcus Mansonius.

Mark Manson became a big star a few years ago when he wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

He then had to write an article, Why I Am Not a Stoic, in response to many people who accused him of simply taking ideas from stoic philosophers and regurgitating them as a light summer read, complete with a curse word in the title.

Mark Manson’s fun and easy and accessible book is good for Manson. But it’s not good for you, or it’s not good enough for you. At least the way I look at it.

​​I am personally not interested in stoicism. But if I were, I would go and read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and not The Subtle Art of Using “Fuck” in Your Title.

The way I see it, there’s value in sources that are old, difficult, or unpopular. You can even call it easy value.

Rather than having to come up with a shocking hot take on the exact same news that millions or billions of other people are discussing right this afternoon, you can get a new perspective, by digging into something that was written a few decades, a few centuries, or even a few millennia in the past.

Maybe you don’t agree with me. That’s fine.

But maybe you suspect I’m on to something. In that case, you might want to get on my email list. Partly to read the articles I write, and partly to keep an eye out for references and allusions I use, so you can look up these original sources yourself, and get a valuable new perspective that few other people around you have.

In case you’re interested, click here to sign up.

Magic words

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A few days ago, I read a fascinating story by Yassine Meskhout, a public defender in some unnamed U.S. state.

Being a public defender is a dull job, says Meskhout. Mostly, you are defending people who are clearly guilty, and there’s nothing you can do.

Meskhout story was of one such defendant. This guy was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He was caught driving drunk, and not for the first time. He was then released on bail. As part of his probation, he had to wear a tracking ankle bracelet.

And then, the following hapened. From Meskhout’s article:

“The ankle bracelet company sends me an update a few days later. My client had visited their office, informed them that he intended to flee the country because he was scared of jail, then underscored his statement with a flourish by taking out a knife and cutting off the ankle bracelet in front of them.”

The bracelet guy had panicked. He immediately changed his mind about leaving the country. ​​But it didn’t matter.

After this dramatic breaking of his probation conditions, it was highly likely this guy would get sent back to jail. And that’s not the worst part.

If he went back to jail, he would then be deported and never let back into the U.S. even though the rest of his family — his mother, wife, and children — were all there.

During the probation hearing, Meskhout made his best appeal. It didn’t work.

The judge decided the drunk driver would be sent back to jail. Case closed.

The defendant sat there without understanding. His mother started bawling in the background.

Meskhout stood up from his desk, his brain whirring. And right before the hourglass emptied down to the last grain, he blurted out these 11 magic words:

“Is there anything else the court would like to review to reconsider?”

The judge looked up from her glasses. She paused for moment. She flipped through the case file for a second. And she said:

“All right. Mr. Meskhout, I’ll go ahead and give him an opportunity. Since you have asked.”

In other words:

The defendant would not have to spend 180 days in jail. He would not be deported.

​​In an instant, his life went from being perfectly dark to being perfectly clear. The mother started bawling again, but this time from happiness.

Now put aside the question of the craziness of how the justice system operates, or who it decides to free and who to put through the meat mincer.

Instead, simply focus on the impact those 11 magic words had.

11 words, put together in the right way at the right moment, which absolutely changed the course of somebody’s life, in spite of overwhelming odds to the contrary.

That’s something to remember when you yourself are making offers or crafting appeals.

But let me take my own advice.

I’ve been promoting my Copy Riddles program for the past 7 days. After today, I won’t be promoting it for a while.

In case you haven’t bought Copy Riddles yet, let me ask you:

Is there anything else you would like to review to reconsider?

Like I say on the sales page, if you have any questions or doubts whether Copy Riddles is right for you, then write me and ask.

I don’t have a money-back guarantee. What I do have is a pretty stellar record of satisfied customers who have bought this program. I’d like to keep it that way.

So if you are on the fence, then write me and ask. I will answer your questions honestly, because I would rather not have you buy than buy and be disappointed.

And if you need a bit more of a push, I can tell you that round 14 of Copy Riddles is all about magic words.

Sprinkle these words into your appeals and offers to instantly boost response, without doing anything else.

You might know some of these words. But a few are sure to be a surprise. Perhaps a valuable surprise. In case you’d like to review this one more time:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Chameleon positioning

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If you are ever looking for political influence in a new country, or maybe just a new copywriting client, then the following might be valuable:

A few months ago, I wrote about Alkibiades, an Athenian politician and general who was the ancient world’s Donald Trump.

Alkibiades once cut off his own dog’s tail. The people of Athens were shocked and outraged at the cruelty. “Good,” said Alkibiades. “At least they aren’t talking about the really bad stuff I’ve done.”

Alkibiades switched allegiances several times. First he served Athens. Then Sparta. Then the Persian empire. Then back to Athens.

He did this 1) because he always became hated wherever he stayed for a while and 2) because he had an uncanny ability to become loved wherever he decided to move.

How?

How did Alkbiades, who was hated, envied, and despised wherever he stayed, become quickly loved wherever he moved?

Simple. He turned chameleon.

When Alkibiades moved from luxurious Athens to spartan Sparta, he dropped his personal chef, threw away his perfumes, and packed up his fancy clothes.

Instead, he started bathing in cold water, gnawing on dry Spartan bread, and forcing down the infamous Spartan black broth.

Pretty soon, the Spartans, who had initially been suspicious of Alkibiades and his allegiances, started to wonder that this man could ever have lived in decadent Athens, because he was so clearly a true Spartan at heart.

So there you go. Like I promised. The key to political influence in a new country — or to new client work, if that’s the kind of thing you’re after.

Perhaps you see exactly how to apply the story of Alkibiades to getting new client work. Perhaps you don’t.

In that case, you can look inside my Copywriting Portfolio Secrets, where I lay out and expand on this idea of chameleon positioning, and apply it to the hunt for new clients.

Chameleon positioning is how I won some of my longest-running, most profitable copywriting jobs — and I didn’t even have to become hated anywhere along the way.

But you might hate me for this:

Pretty soon, I will pull both of the free bonuses I currently offer with Copy Riddles, put a bow around them, and turn them into paid products.

For now though, you can still get both bonuses — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and Storytelling For Sales — for free.

​​You can get them for free if you get Copy Riddles, which, in case you are not overflowing with client work, is something you might want anyhow. As Vasilis Apostolou, formerly a senior copywriter at Agora, wrote after going through Copy Riddles:

I wish I had John’s bullet course when I was starting out. It would have saved me tons of frustration… and shaved months off my learning curve.

To save yourself some frustration, shave months off your learning curve, and find out how to win yourself new client work:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Are your emails too long? A litmus test

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A tale of two long emails:

A few days ago, I recorded a breakdown of a Ben Settle email that got me to subscribe to Ben’s $97/month Email Players newsletter.

That email is long, very long, almost 1,700 words.

I use that email as a reminder to myself whenever I worry my own emails are getting too long. The fact is, if you have the right message-to-prospect fit, you get your reader in a hypnotic trance, and length becomes an asset, not a liability.

Then this morning, I did a copy critique of an email that’s also long, and clocks in at almost 1,100 words.

This second email is interesting and insightful. It makes a bunch of convincing sales arguments. At the end of it, I want to actually take up the offer the email is making.

And yet, part of my critique was that this email is probably too long. Even though it’s interesting. Even though all its parts are necessary. Even though it is actually shorter than Ben Settle’s email.

​​Still, this second email just feels too long.

Why? What’s the difference?

It’s not the writing, the formatting, or even the design.

The difference is that Ben Settle wrote his very long email for his own list and his own business.

On the other hand, the quite long email I critiqued this morning was from a freelance copywriter, working for a client.

​​That’s the real litmus test for whether your emails are too long. If you like, I will explain.

The reality is you have two sales to make as a freelance copywriter. One is to your client’s market or audience — the sale you probably think you’re getting paid for.

But you have another sale to make. And that’s to the client himself.

If the client doesn’t like your copy, he will nag you to change it. Or he will neuter it himself. Or he just won’t run it.

But wait, it gets worse.

You might count on your powers of persuasion to make your client see the light. To convince him to try out your long email as-is, without changing a word.

And you might succeed. But there’s a good chance that your long email will get less response, not more, compared to a shorter email.

For example, the email I critiqued is trying to get people to sign up to a free webinar. There’s a fair chance that a much shorter email, which just hypes up the urgency and scarcity and repeats the phrase “hot new opportunity” a few dozen times will actually pull more webinar signups.

So why would you ever want to send longer emails, with three pages of story and argument and proof?

Well, I told you already. Because those are the emails that select the right people. That get those people not just to click or opt in, but to buy from you. That get those people not just to buy from you, once and at $37, but to spend thousands of dollars with you over a period of years. The way that Ben Settle email did with me.

Unless you have a very, very sophisticated client, those are not things that your email copy will ever be judged on.

Instead, you’re much more likely to be judged on the client’s gut feeling or some shortsighted metric. “I don’t know, it’s kind of long, isn’t it? The other email we tried is much shorter. And it got more clicks to the optin page.”

I’m telling you all this because today is the last day I’ll be promoting my coaching program for a while.

Over the past seven days promoting this coaching program, I realized there are two categories of people who make a good fit:

1. People with their own quality list and their own quality offers, whether products or services

2. Copywriters who have near total control of a client’s email list, and who also have some sort of rev-share deal on the money coming in from that list

If you fit either of those categories, and if you want my help and guidance in making more money from the lists under your command, then as a first step, get on my email list. After that, we can talk in more detail.

And if you’re a freelance copywriter, but you don’t fit either category above, then my advice is to work towards getting into one or the other or both of those categories.

And not only because it would make you a good candidate for my coaching program.

But also, because those two categories are the only place where you will be truly be judged on your results and your copywriting abilities, rather than on how well you can divine and cater to your client’s whims.

Plus, the two categories above are where the real money is. Or where there’s the potential for real money. At least in my experience — and I’ve been in both categories.

Story of coaching with Dan Ferrari continued

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Yesterday, I promised to share with you how I paid off 6 months of very expensive coaching in less than 60 days.

The story is this:

Back in 2019, I’d been working with an ecommerce company for about a year, writing their entire sales funnels, including advertorials and Facebook and YouTube ads.

At the height of it, we were making 2,000 sales every day to entirely cold traffic.

And then the next day, it was time to make 2,000 new sales to entirely cold traffic.

Meanwhile, the previous buyers’ data went off to some cold storage facility in a bunker at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Over and over, I proposed to the ecomm guys to start sending emails to these previous buyers. “It’s free money,” I kept saying. “Let me do it. I’ll do all the work. Just pay me a part of the money I’ll make for you.”

I did this maybe five times over the course of the year we had been working together. Each time, the ecomm guys had some excuse, and they said no. The reality was they were simply making way too much money on the front end, and they didn’t feel like bothering with the setup.

In the meantime, I joined Dan Ferrari’s coaching group.

I also realized that, even though I was getting paid $150/hr to write “horror advertorials” for dog toothbrushes and strapless bras, there was not any opportunity here to reach the next level as a copywriter. And frankly, I was bored with writing advertorials day in and day out.

I decided it was time to cut off the relationship with the ecommerce company, and in that way, to force myself to look for better clients.

“What about writing emails for them on a rev-share basis?” Dan asked me.

“I tried selling them that,” I said. “Each time, they dragged their feet and eventually said no. They obviously don’t want to do it. I’m done with them.”

“Sure,” said Dan. “But try it one last time.”

So I did.

Because one pact I made with myself during this very expensive coaching with Dan was to do whatever he said — even if it seemed futile, even if it felt repulsive, even if I knew better.

So one last time, I made the rev-share email pitch to the ecomm guys. And whaddya know. They finally agreed, for whatever reason.

A few days later, I started writing and sending emails to one of their buyer lists, made up of 40k+ people.

It wasn’t an immediate win. But within a month, I figured out what worked.

And then, the ecomm guys opened up a second 40k+ buyer list for me to mail. And that’s when the money really started rolling in, both for the ecomm guys, and also for me.

Like I said yesterday, this new source of income paid off 6 months of Dan Ferrari’s coaching in under 60 days.

That was not the only bump in income and opportunity that I got from Dan’s coaching. There were others, where he had a much more direct and involved role. But though valuable, those other opportunities don’t compare to the money I made as a result of this simple piece of advice. “Sure. But try it one last time.”

I wanna highlight two things:

You might say that Dan’s contribution was trivial in this case. Maybe so.

But without his trivial piece of advice, I’m 100% sure I would have ended that ecomm relationship early, and I would today be out a large sum of money, and a large amount of experience with email marketing at a very high level.

You might also say the stars had to align for Dan’s comment to have the impact it did.

I mean, how many businesses making 2,000 sales a day are dumb enough to never try to sell another thing to previous customers? It’s easy to make money in that situation.

Again, maybe so. But many businesses, even successful businesses, have marketing cracks like this. But often they can’t see or can’t fill those cracks themselves, and it takes somebody from the outside to force a change.

The same is true of people.

If you’re smart, like Dan is, then you set yourself up to coach people who have a lot of the pieces in place already. People who just need an outside perspective on plugging up cracks, or a push at the right time in the right direction for those existing pieces to click and fuse together.

Because getting somebody from 0 to 1 can be impossibly hard work.

Getting somebody from 1 to 10 might be less hard but isn’t much more rewarding.

But if somebody already has a half-dozen 17’s in hand… then you don’t need to show them how to go from 17 to 30. You don’t even have to show them how to add up their half-dozen 17’s to make 102.

You just have to show them something like the “multiplication trick”, and suddenly, their half-dozen 17’s click and fuse and are suddenly worth over 2 million.

I hope I didn’t lose you with that mathematical analogy. Because it’s time for my pitch, and I’d like your full attention.

As I wrote two days ago, I’m starting my own coaching program. The focus is entirely on email marketing. How to send more emails. How to make those emails more interesting. How to sell more, and at higher prices, using email.

If this is something that interests you, and if you suspect you have a lot of the pieces in place already, then I’d like to talk to you. As the first step, you will have to be on my email list. Click here to sign up.

The price took my breath away

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Back in 2019, I had been talking to Dan Ferrari about joining his coaching program. Dan and I exchanged some emails. We got on the phone to talk — I asked him a dozen questions I had prepared in advance, and he patiently answered.

At the end of the call, I told Dan I’m in. Even though we still hadn’t talked price.

Dan then sent me an email with a PayPal link, and the actual per-month cost of his coaching.

I still remember exactly where I was in the city when I took out my phone and saw Dan’s email. Like I said, the price took my breath away.

I expected the coaching to be expensive. But not this expensive. I won’t say exactly how expensive it turned out to be. I’ll just say it was as high as my total income on many months at the time.

Still, I had some savings. I figured as long as I had some money in the bank, I was willing to give it a go. So I took a deep breath, PayPaled Dan the money, and the coaching started.

Months passed. Dan delivered on his end. He gave me feedback on my copy. He made introductions to potential high-level clients. He showed me some A-list secrets.

And yet, it wasn’t paying off. I was burning through my savings. And I still wasn’t making that filthy lucre that I was hoping for.

Six months into the coaching, I told Dan that I didn’t want to keep going. I felt I didn’t have enough high-level copy projects for him to critique. I didn’t have any promising new leads who might change that. And I was getting very nervous because my savings had all but evaporated.

So I quit.

And then, the very next month, I had my biggest-ever month as a copywriter. I made about double what I had made on my best month to that point.

The month after that even bigger.

The month after that, bigger still.

And it kept going.

In just the first two months after I quit Dan’s coaching, the extra money I made paid for all the coaching I had gotten from Dan.

Over the next year or so, I made more money than I had made in the previous five years total.

My work and and skill and dedication where an undeniable part of that jump in income. But so were a few things I can directly trace to Dan and his coaching program.

I’d like to tell you the biggest one of those. It was a throwaway piece of advice I got from Dan around month four in the coaching program. But today’s email is getting long, so I will tell you that tomorrow, in case you are interested.

For now, let me restate my offer from yesterday:

I’m starting up a coaching program, focused specifically on email marketing.

You might think I told you the above story to encourage you to jump in, price be damned, because it will end up paying for itself somehow.

That’s not it at all.

Yes, my goal is for this coaching program to pay for itself for the right person.

But I am not nearly as willing to gamble with other people’s money as I am with my own. And since this is the first time I am offering coaching like this, I want to kick it off on a positive note, with people who have the best chance to make this coaching pay for itself, and soon, rather than in seven or eight months.

If you think that might be you, then my first requirement is that you join my email newsletter. Click here and sign up. That done, we can talk.

AI wants you to take its job

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Yesterday, the waning gibbous moon in Leo opposed Saturn in Aquarius. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that a half dozen marketers all independently and yet simultaneously decided to send emails with their thoughts about AI and what it means for copywriters.

But in spite of the AI barrage yesterday, the most interesting thing I’ve read about AI for copywriters came not from a marketer, but a guy named Sam Kriss.

​​Last week, Kriss published a long article, putting ChatGPT into a surprising historical context, and making the claim that AI writing is getting worse rather than better.

Worse, because earlier versions of GPT were weird, sometimes useless, but sometimes new and wonderful.

Meanwhile, the most recent version of GPT has simply gotten very good at approximating the current state of writing on the Internet, which is bad and getting worse — clickbait and fluff, optimized for skimming, for nodding along, for other AI like search engines and front-page algorithms. Kriss makes a prediction:

If you write the keyword-laden babble for Emily’s Scrummy Kitchen, or monetised blog posts angling for answerboxes, or bludgeon-headed political takes that go viral every weekday, or flatly competent student essays, or little inspirational poems in lowercase, or absolutely anything to do with cryptocurrency — if your writing can be done by a machine because it is already machinelike — then ChatGPT will take your job. If you do screenplays for Netflix, it may have already done so.

At this point, the standard email marketing formula calls for saying something hopeful, about how there’s still time to up your skills and build the right relationship with your audience, so you can insulate yourself from the coming AI purges.

But I won’t follow the standard formula. In part, because I’d just be helping the AI obsolete me sooner.

In part, because rather than hopeful, I feel mostly curious. I feel we’re on the verge of a big moment, not just for copywriters, but as a society. I’m curious what what that moment will look like, and what’s waiting on the other end of it.

And now, even though I probably haven’t done a good job preparing you for it emotionally, I’m still going to tempt you with an offer. That’s one part of the standard email marketing formula I’m not willing to forgo.

So here goes:​​

Maybe you yourself are curious why exactly I found the Sam Kriss article so interesting, and why I decided to share a quote from it with you.

Really, I told you above. But maybe you want it spelled out a little more clearly, or maybe you want some more examples.

If you do, or if you want to write things that get shared on your behalf, by actual humans, then the secret is here, in Chapter 8:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Business advice I wish somebody had given me seven years ago

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Last year, while writing the sales page for my Copy Riddles program, there came a time in the copy when I had to talk about myself.

I shifted in my seat, coughed a little, and shrugged my shoulders.

“What exactly would you like to know?” I said to the blinking cursor. “I’ve been working as a copywriter for several years now. Each year, it’s been getting better and better. And that’s pretty much it.”

If I ever had a copywriting client tell me something like this, I would get angry. ​​​”Tell me some specific accomplishments,” I would say. “Something soundbite-worthy. You don’t have to have saved the sea cows. It just has to sound good.”

In the end, on that Copy Riddles sales page, I managed to weasel my way out without saying anything about myself — the course is not really about my authority, after all.

I’m not trying to sell you Copy Riddles right here. I’m just trying to share a bit of advice that I wish somebody had shared with me seven years ago, or really, any time before this year. The advice is this:

1. Start a new Google Doc right now

2. Name it “[your last name] – status”

3. Whenever anything even remotely impressive happens to you business-wise, add it to this document right away

And that’s it. But maybe an example will help.

This entire week, I’ve been promoting my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

And it’s been working. The book has sold a few extra copies each day.

As a result, it’s been climbing from its usual place on the Amazon best seller lists. It peaked at one point yesterday, while being ranked higher than both Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters and Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing.

So this is what I added yesterday to my “BEJ status” document:

“My 10 commandments book has been ranked higher among Amazon bestsellers than Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters and Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing.”

You might think this is cheap. You might think it’s transparent. You might think it’s shady.

To which, all I can do is shift in my seat, cough a little, and shrug my shoulders.

The fact is, you might not think you have any accomplishments. But if you make sure you write down every even marginally status-building thing that happens to you, pretty soon you will have a whole encyclopedia of little soundbites that you can feed to clients and customers and prospects.

And who knows, when you look over your growing collection of marginal accomplishments, maybe you will even start to impress yourself.

As for me, I’m gonna keep promoting my 10 Commandments book for a couple more days. Because yesterday, a long-time reader and customer named Gregory wrote me to say:

Okay. I finally bought it. This email got through to me. Not sure why since you’ve mentioned it so many times but there you have it…
Thanks John!

Looking forward to digging into it this week.

Maybe there is still some untapped demand in my list.

And who knows. With your help, maybe I can reach new heights on the Amazon bestseller list — for example, selling better than that clown Malcolm Gladwell, with his stupid Tipping Point. At least for an hour.

In case you wanna help me get there:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How to get access to the most elite opportunities and most exclusive clubs

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In case you’re the type who wants access to the most elite opportunities and most exclusive clubs, here’s an instructive story:

Carter Burwell is an American film composer. He has scored dozens of big-budget Hollywood movies, including The Big Lebowski, Being John Malkovich, No Country For Old Men, and Twilight.

But Burwell is not just a film composer. He has has a very colorful history.

Even before the age of 20, Burwell was already a trained animator, a would-be rock star, a factory worker, a would-be architect, and a self-taught computer programmer.

And then one day, after seeing a help-wanted ad in the New York Times, Burwell got hired as chief computer scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, working for Nobel prize winner James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA.

How did Burwell get inside this elite and exclusive club? From an article about Burwell I just read:

“Burwell wrote a jokey letter in which he said that, although he had none of the required skills, he would cost less to employ than someone with a Ph.D. would. Surprisingly, the letter got him the job, and he spent two years as the chief computer scientist on a protein-cataloguing project funded by a grant from the Muscular Dystrophy Association.”

My point is not to write jokey application letters or cold emails.

It’s certainly not to compete on being cheaper than other options.

My point is simply to be immensely lucky, the way Burwell obviously is.

And in case you’re shocked and possibly outraged by that point, then let me rephrase it in a more how-to way:

Figure out how to weigh the odds so heavily in your favor… that you can be sure you’ve won, long before the coin has been tossed in the air.

That’s an idea from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

It’s a bit of personal philosophy that Parris practices. It’s how he keeps getting access to the most elite copywriting opportunities, and working with the most exclusive clients.

Maybe you want some examples of what this means in practice.

You can find those in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters, specifically chapter two, which is all about Parris’s “stack the odds” idea above. That chapter also ties in nicely to the Carter Burwell story above. Si te interesa:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Don’t write emails like this

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Do you start your emails with a question?

Do you try to identify with your reader, or get him to identify with you, by waffling on about his life, or worse, about the type of person you think he is?

Do you guess at your reader’s problems, but because you’re not really sure what those are, do you frame your guesses as questions to buy yourself some wiggle room?

If you’re anything like the several people I know who write vague and fluffy email copy that fails to draw readers in, it may be because you’re not saying anything hard and clear at the start of your email, and instead you engage in watery attempts at empathy.

Ok enough of that. Everything I’ve just done in the four sentences above — don’t do it. Especially at the start of your email.

Last night, I sat down and finally finished a batch of email copy critiques that had been lingering on my todo list.

There were lots of good ideas in each email.

But there was one recurring problem I saw. Maybe it was my fault, because I’ve been encouraging people to write about “symptoms” their audience is experiencing.

What I got instead was a cloud of throat clearing at the start, disguised as empathy copy.

The fact is, writing is not talking.

People will forgive a lot of when they look you in the face and hear your voice.

They will not forgive nearly as much when they are sitting alone on their couch with their phone in hand, with the TV on in front of them, with the next-door neighbor’s dog barking, with their own stomach growling. They won’t forgive:

– Abstraction that really doesn’t say much
– Aimless repetition
– A 2-3 min period to “warm up”
– Groping in the dark in the hope of finding something to say
– “Vibing”

Don’t do any of that. Especially at the start of your email.

Instead, say something hard and clear.

If you want examples of what hard and clear looks like, look inside my 10 Commandments book. Not among any of the actual A-list commandments. But in the way I start each chapter, which is really just an expanded email. As a reader named Tom wrote me:

I’ve been reading a lot of books around copywriting; but as a jumping off point, 10 Commandments was the best I’ve read so far.. So many good pointers on techniques to use and people to pay attention to.

But on a deeper level, your writing is exceptional. The first two books I started on were by Olgivy and Makepeace, but I was looking for something to bridge the gap in to the current era, as I couldn’t imagine myself ever actually engaging with their copy as a prospect.

I really appreciated how up-front, engaging, but still subtly very technical your style is. I’m planning to try to reverse engineer exactly what do, because I couldn’t put 10 Commandments down, and by the time your dropped the first CTA, there was no choice.

So…

Would you like to stop fluffing around? Are you sometimes stumped for a non-vague way to start your emails? Do you—

Ok, enough, once again.

For examples of hard and clear ways to start your message:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments