Copywriting

I made $1,100 so I decided to spend $6,000 more

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Two weeks ago, I was talking to copywriter Vasilis Apostolou, and he told me of a direct marketing conference that’s happening in May in Poland.

The conference is small but features some people I very much respect, foremost among them A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos and marketer Matt Bacak.

I asked Vasilis how much it costs to get in. He told me. I groaned.

$3,000 just for the ticket. And then there’s travel, a place to stay, plus 3-4 days lost from work.

This past Thursday, I got on a podcast-like interview with Jen Adams from the Professional Writers Alliance. Last December, I wrote some articles for PWA about my 10 Commandments book, and I got paid $1k for those articles. I got paid an extra $100 for this podcast-like appearance.

​​Getting paid $1,100 is a nice way to do self-promotion – but it’s not enough.

Last summer, I paid $1,200 for the Dig This Zoom calls. I found out about the PWA writing opportunity through the Discord channel for people who bought those Dig calls. So far, I’ve made back $1,100 of that $1,200 via this PWA thing. That means I still have $100 to make up somewhere.

I’ve written before how I have made back all the money I’ve paid for specific copywriting and marketing education.

​​Tens of thousands on coaching with Dan Ferrari… thousands on newsletters and books with Ben Settle… $297 for the Parris Lampropoulos webinars back in 2019. That last one, by the way, is my most winning investment. When I add up all the extra money I can directly trace back to Parris’s training, I estimate it to have been about a 300x return.

The thing is, all those returns turned out to be unconscious, after-the-fact, well-would-you-look-at-that results.

​​But I’ve since told myself not to make this into a matter of coincidence or luck. I’ve since made it a matter of attitude. I now put in thought and effort to make sure any investment, regardless of how small or large, has to eventually pay for itself.

That’s an outcome that’s impossible to control if you are buying stocks or bonds or race horses. But it’s quite possible to control if you are buying education, opportunities, or connections.

I will see what happens once those PWA articles get published and once interview goes live. Maybe one of those PWA people will join my list, buy something from me, and pay me that missing $100. Unless I can track $100 of extra sales to that, I will have to think what else I can do to make those Dig Zoom calls pay for themselves.

Likewise with that Poland conference. ​I decided to go. I budgeted $6k total for it — actual groan-inducing cost plus opportunity cost.

​​In other words, I will have to figure out a way to make the event pay me at least $6k. And I set myself the goal to have it happen within the first seven days after conference ends. I’m a little nervous about achieving that, but to me that signals that it’s possible.

So now I have three calls-to-action for you:

1. If you are planning to be there in Poland in May, let me know and we can make a point of meeting there and talking.

2. If you somehow already got on my list via PWA, hit reply and let me know. I’m curious to hear what you’re up to and why you decided to join. And if you’re thinking of writing a book like my 10 Commandments book, I might be able to give you some inspiration or advice.

3. If neither of the above applies to you, then my final offer is my Copy Riddles program. It costs $400. If you do decide to buy it, I encourage you to think of how you can make this investment directly and trackably pay for itself, and then some.

You might wonder if that’s really possible.

​​It is.

​​So today, instead of pointing you to the Copy Riddles sales page, let me point you to an email I wrote last year about a Copy Riddles member named Nathan, who doubled his income as an in-house copywriter, and who credits Copy Riddles for a chunk of that increase. ​​In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/how-to-bombard-copywriting-clients-with-extra-value-at-no-extra-effort/

Going where no one has gone before?

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I have this unfortunate flaw in that I wake up every day, thanks to some internal alarm clock, which always rings earlier than I want.

Today it was 6am. I sat around in the dark for a while and then, at around 7, I went out for my morning walk.

At 7am on a Saturday in Barcelona, two worlds overlap.

I walked down the street, turned a corner, and saw a flash of naked ass. A girl was pulling up her leather pants, on the curb next to a small tree and some recycling containers. I guess she had just peed. Her friend stood guard but was facing in the wrong direction, away from where I and a few other people were coming and witnessing the shame. Pants up, the two oblivious girls staggered off drunkenly towards home.

That world, of people who hadn’t yet gone to bed by 7am, is one world.

I kept walking and the beach opened up before me. And the second world, the world of early-rising people, was already busy at work there.

A woman was holding her dog on a leash and yelling at her other dog to stop fooling around because it was time to go home. Two boys were kicking around a ball in the sand. And in the water, thanks to the large and rolling waves — not a common sight in Barcelona — there were some surfers.

Maybe you’re wondering whether there will be any hard “point” to today’s email. The point is this:

Down by the concrete pier that juts out into the Mediterranean, there was a clump of maybe a half dozen surfers. They were all bunched up. The waves were steady there and every 30 or so seconds, one of the surfers would catch a wave.

Meanwhile, further away from the pier, there was another surfer by himself. Every few minutes a small wave crested where he was waiting. The surfer would make an effort at catching it, but it was too small. As far as I saw, he never caught a wave, but he made a show at it.

And then further still, in the middle of the beach, there was yet another solitary surfer. He was bobbing up and down as the sea swelled underneath him. But he didn’t even have a wave to pretend to catch.

I think my point is clear, but if not:

It’s good to be different and distinct. It helps people make up their minds quickly about you. But if you rely on natural forces for motion — waves, money, desire — then you want to put yourself in a place where those things are moving.

It might seem clever and easy to go where nobody else has thought to go. Maybe you will get lucky. More likely, you will just bob around stubbornly in the cold water, while others, just a few feet away from you, have all the fun.

That’s most of my motivational message for you for today. And then there’s still the following promotional material:

My offer for you today is my Copy Riddles program. As I have said before, this program is really about going where the waves are:

– It’s about a proven way to write winning copy that’s been endorsed by A-list copywriters like Gary Halbert, Parris Lampropoulos, and Gary Bencivenga

– It features a bunch of examples from sales letters written to perennial markets, including finance, health, and personal development

– It gets you working alongside some of the top copywriters of all time who, whether by instinct or by design, knew how to tap into human desire where it was flowing

If any of that moves you:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

What 44 percent of all Russian mystics wish you knew about the easiest way to bring them to an explosive death every time! (It’s news to a lot of marketers… see inside)

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The man was was not easy to kill. A mystic, prophet, and natural-born hypnotist who appeared at the court of the last Russian czar, and who, in just a short while, gained enormous influence:

Grigori Rasputin.

After a few years of growing nonsense at the court — nonsense caused by Rasputin’s influence — a faction of the Russian royal family had had enough. They schemed and plotted, and decided in secret to have Rasputin killed.

So on December 30, 1916, Rasputin was served poisoned wine and pastries laced with potassium cyanide. He swallowed glass after glass of the wine and wolfed down the pastries.

He groaned a little, but it wasn’t enough to kill the hearty Russian peasant.

Prince Felix Yusupov then emerged from behind a curtain and shot Rasputin with a pistol. More groaning but the beast still seemed to live.

So Rasputin was then stabbed repeatedly, and eventually dragged to the icy Neva river and drowned there. This finally did the job.

Of course, most people don’t put up so much resistance. I believe even one cyanide-laced chocolate chip cookie would be enough to do me in. But for more resistant, stubborn souls, other options exist.

I bring up the grisly story of Rasputin’s death because I’m about to make an inelegant comparison.

For the next few days, I will be promoting my Copy Riddles course. Copy Riddles teaches you copywriting, or really, effective communication, via the mechanism of teaching you sales bullets.

The reason sales bullets are so good for learning copywriting is that they have to pack an entire sales presentation in just a sentence or two. If you happen to write in the most competitive, sophisticated, stubborn, and resistant markets, this produces miracles/monsters of persuasion such as this:

“What 44 percent of all women wish you knew about the easiest way to bring her to an explosive climax every time! (It’s news to a lot of men… see pages 89-93.)”

That’s a bullet by A-list copywriter John Carlton. Carlton wrote this and dozens of bullets like it to promote a boring book about sexual health for direct response publisher Rodale, whose main business was selling how-to guides about tomato gardening.

Result? from Carlton’s files:

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I had to fight tooth and nail to get this piece mailed. At one point I was screaming at upper level veeps. I wish someone had taken a video of that meeting: there’s all these honchos sitting around the conference table, stunned, and there’s my voice hollering from the little speakerphone. (I never travel to client meetings, and have never met any of these people face-to-face.) Priceless.

It took me nearly a month to convince them to mail the piece as I wrote it. I caused such a fuss that I was actually blacklisted — until the results came in. I slaughtered the control. In fact, I’d hit a nerve in the public, and this piece mailed for over 5 years, despite frequent attempts by other top writers to knock it off. Ka-ching.

===

Maybe you have no stomach for screaming at your clients or customers, or for writing explosive sales copy that slaughters the control in the easiest way possible every time. That’s fine. Not everybody is competing on the national stage, like Carlton was, or against other top writers.

On more modest stages, it’s enough to reach for just one or two of Carlton’s deadly persuasion weapons — instead of doing the equivalent of poisoning, shooting, stabbing, and then drowning your poor reader.

I told you it’s an inelegant analogy. But what to do — we’re talking about bullets. And as marketer Ken McCarthy put it once, bullets wound.

In any case, if you want access to the entire secret closet of persuasion poisons, knives, pistols, blunderbusses, mace, shuriken, anvils-on-a-frayed-rope, halberds, and brass knuckles, so you can choose a persuasion weapon or two for your particular purpose, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

My Most Valuable Email trick leaks out all over the Internet

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This year, I set myself the task to do something “paid” each month to grow this newsletter, as well as something “free” — something I don’t have to pay for, except in my time, thought, and effort.

The free thing for February was writing up a guest newsletter issue for the Formats Unpacked people. Formats Unpacked is a Substack newsletter that looks at the underlying structure of interesting podcasts, newsletters, YouTube Channels, computer games, pop songs, subscription boxes, physical puzzles.

The format of Formats Unpacked itself is to briefly describe the format of the thing under examination, and then then to focus on “the magic that makes it special.”

I decided to unpack the format of the Brain Software podcast, by hypnotists Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson. I’ve written about Brain Software many times in this newsletter, because it’s one of only two podcasts that I listen to regularly.

The format of Brain Software is a cross between Car Talk, absurd late-night sketch TV, and a standup show.

But while writing that Formats Unpacked analysis, I realized that the magic that makes Brain Software special might just be that Mike and Chris use what I call the Most Valuable Email trick.

So maybe I should call it the Most Valuable Podcast trick.

Or maybe the Most Valuable YouTube Channel trick.

Or maybe the Most Valuable Book trick.

Because over just the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the MVE trick in action in Brain Software (hypnosis podcast), in a top YouTube channel about learning Spanish (Español con Juan), and in a cult book about negotiation (Jim Camp’s Start With No).

And then there’s a message I got a few days ago, from career coach Tom Grundy. Tom knows the Most Valuable Email trick, and he had this to say:

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Hi John,

I bought MVE a couple of weeks back – despite your warning a few months ago that it might not be best suited! And I love it.

I can see lots of ways to use the trick in my career advice/personal development emails. Mainly related to Topic 4 (positioning/attitude) but also general “life advice” (e.g. “there’s no such thing as perfection”) and self-promotion/self-marketing (some overlaps with direct marketing). I’m sure there’s other ways I could use the trick too which I haven’t figured out yet.

Looking forward to the second Book Club call. I’m a big magic fan so I was excited to see the book choice for round 2.

===

The warning Tom is referring to is right there on top of the MVE sales page:

“If you are NOT primarily a marketer or copywriter, or you do not write about those topics, then I advise you NOT to buy this training. The Most Valuable Email trick will not work for all niches, markets, or topics.”

I stand by that — even though the MVE trick can be used effectively to write about hypnosis, language learning, negotiation, and like Tom says above, personal development and career advice.

But maybe you are a daredevil. Maybe you don’t heed any warnings, including mine. ​In that case, I can’t stop you from buying Most Valuable Email and even profiting from it. To find out more about MVE:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

How to make your content eternally interesting even if it’s not very “good”

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During my 11 years living in Budapest, Hungary, I walked up and down Nagymező street perhaps a thousand times. Each time, I looked up at the Robert Capa museum and I told myself, “I should really go there.”

As you might know, Robert Capa was one of the most famous and influential photographers of the 20th century. What you might not know is that the man’s real name was Endre Friedmann, and he was Hungarian – hence the museum on Nagymező utca.

I did eventually make it to that museum, and I did eventually find out some curious Robert Capa facts. They might be useful to you if you write or take photos or build elaborate Lego creations.

​​For example:

Capa published his first photo as a freelance journalist in 1932. The photo showed Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky giving a speech in Copenhagen.

The photo is a little blurry and Trotsky’s hand is in front of his face. But there is an undeniable energy in the shot — you can almost hear the dogmatic and impassioned Marxist on stage.

Capa really made his name a few years later, in 1936. His photograph of a loyalist soldier during the Spanish civil war, falling after being shot, has become one of the most famous photos of the 20th century.

During World War II, Capa took pictures of the Allied landing in Normandy, and he took photos of the liberation of Paris.

After WWII, Capa hung out with and photographed famous and celebrated artists — Henri Matisse, John Steinbeck, Alfred Hitchcock.

There’s a photo from the summer of 1948 that Capa took, which shows an old man grinning as he holds a baby on the beach. It could be any old photo of any old grandpa with his grandson — except that old man is Pablo Picasso, and the grandson is actually Picasso’s son, Claude.

The point is this:

Capa made a point of going to out-of-the-way places, meeting important and influential people, being at the right spot at the right moment. Many of his photographs are not technically great or even very good. But they are inherently interesting — even today, almost a hundred years later — because of their content.

The past few days I’ve been promoting my Insight Exposed training. That training talks about the tools to capture snapshots, and the process for developing those snapshots into something valuable.

But what’s the content of those snapshots? If the content is plain, familiar, or uninteresting in itself, you will have to work hard to turn those snapshots into something interesting and insightful.

On the other hand, if you make a point of going to out-of-the-way places, meeting important and influential people, being at the right spot at the right moment, you won’t have to be technically great or even very good. Your work will be inherently interesting because of the content. So I talk all about that in the final section of Insight Exposed.

Insight Exposed is an offer I am only making available for people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to get Insight Exposed or you’d like to get on my email list, then click here and fill out the form that appears.

An “eery dejà vu feeling” from my Fight Club email last night

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Last night, I sent out an email about going to see Fight Club at a local movie theater. To which I got the following reply from copywritress Liza Schermann, who has been living the “barefoot writer” life in sunny Edinburgh, Scotland. Liza wrote:

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Seeing this email in my inbox provoked an eery dejà vu feeling. I had just gone over the part of Insight Exposed where you have a screenshot of this note from your journal. For a split second, I had no idea where I’d seen this before. Then I remembered.

Like an open kitchen restaurant, only for email. The email that was getting cooked right before my eyes a few minutes ago is now served. Thank you, Chef Bejakovic! 👨‍🍳

===

I remember hearing marketer and copywriter Dan Kennedy say once that you shouldn’t ever let clients see you writing copy, because it’s not impressive work and it spoils the mystique.

That might be good advice, but I definitely don’t heed it Insight Exposed, my new training about how I take notes and keep journals.

Like Liza says, Insight Exposed is like an open kitchen. I smile from beneath my chef’s hat, I explain the provenance of a few recent emails, and I show you the various animal bits and pieces from which the email sausage was made.

Let me be clear:

Insight Exposed is not a copywriting training. But it shows you something that may be more important and valuable than copywriting technique. It shows you how I go from a bit of information I spotted somewhere and expand it into something that makes people buy, remember, share, and maybe even change their own minds.

I am only making Insight Exposed available to people who are signed up to my email list. In case you are interested in Insight Exposed, you can sign up for my list here.

“How is being clever working out for you?”

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A few months ago, I went to a local old-school movie theater and queued in a line that stretched around the block. In the entire line, there were maybe three women. The rest were all guys, mostly young guys, under 25.

The movie being shown was Fight Club.

I got several valuable snapshots from that experience. The most valuable was an exchange from the actual movie, a scene in which the main character, “the Narrator,” played by Ed Norton, meets Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt.

The two are sitting next to each other on a plane. Tyler starts telling the Ed Norton character how you can make all kinds of explosives using simple household items. And then the following exchange goes down:

NARRATOR: Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I have ever met. [Pause.] See I have this thing, everything on a plane is single-serving—

TD: Oh, I get it. It’s very clever.

NARRATOR Thank you.

TD: How is that working out for you? Being clever?

NARRATOR [a little unnerved, shrugs his shoulders.] Great.

TD: Keep that up then. Keep it right up.

I read an article a few months ago, The Impotence of Being Clever. It’s one of a few related blips on my radar. Another was a second article, Beware What Sounds Insightful.

Both articles circle around the growing mass-realization that things that sound clever and insightful often aren’t — that “insightful” is a brand of shiny varnish that can be applied to any cheap furniture.

Last fall, I put on a live training called Age of Insight. It was all about exactly this brand of shiny varnish. About presentation techniques that take any idea and make it sound profound.

I’ve done a ton of thinking about this topic, and as a result, Age of Insight is the most in-depth treatment of it that anybody has created, at least to my knowledge.

Like I wrote back when I was putting on that training, I believe insightful presentation techniques will become mandatory in coming years. You will have to know them and use them, just like you have to know copywriting techniques to effectively sell a product, at least if you want to do it in writing.

There’s a deeper parallel there:

You can use copywriting techniques to sell a mediocre product. And you will sell some of it, definitely more than if you didn’t use proven copywriting techniques. But you are unlikely to sell a lot of it, or sell it for very long.

On the other hand, you can use copywriting techniques to sell a good or even great product. You can make a fortune doing that, feel good about it, and even enjoy the process for the long term.

The same with this insight stuff.

You can use insightful presentation techniques to sell a mediocre idea. And you will do better than if you didn’t use them at all.

But if you also find a genuinely novel, surprising, even mind-blowing idea, and then use insight techniques to sell that — well, the result can be explosive, and it can survive for the long term.

I’m not sure when will I re-release Age of Insight, which deals with the presentation side. But right now, I’m releasing Insight Exposed, which is about good or great “insight products” — meaning novel, surprising, even mind-blowing ideas.
Insight Exposed is only available to people who are on my email list. If you’d like to get on my list, click here and fill ou the form that appears.

Why I’ve just sent you the only Times New Roman newsletter you are likely to read today

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This past Wednesday, I found myself mystified by an article titled The Reaction Economy. It was written by a William Davies — “a sociologist and political economist” — in the London Review of Books.

Davies was complaining about Twitter, and how he is trying to wean himself off it, and how his brain screams to set the record straight whenever it sees idiotic conservative tweets. But Davies is a disciplined person, so he didn’t give in to the urge and get back on Twitter. Instead, he went and wrote a 6,276-word article in the LRB about it.

As I read this, I found myself mystified why I was reading it at all. I mean, what was fresh here? Some guy saying he wants to use social media less? Or a liberal airing his lungs about conservative trolls? Or an online pundit shaking his finger and warning me, as I nod along in silence, that social media is designed to provoke outrage?

And yet, there I was, reading, paragraph after long paragraph. I asked myself why. One small part was the good headline, The Reaction Economy. That sucked me in initially. But what kept me going had nothing to do with the actual content, which was neither new nor insightful.

I realized that the real reason I was reading was that the article was hosted on the LRB website. Beyond that, it was the formatting — 10-line paragraphs, drop capitals, Times New Roman font.

Copywriter Gary Bencivenga once told a story of how his ad agency rushed an ad into the New York Times. In the rush, the NYT typesetters set the ad with a sans-serif font. Gary’s agency complained, and the Times offered to run the ad the next week, for free, with the correct serif font. This was not a proper A/B split test. Still, the serif ad ended up pulling 80% more sales than the sans-serif ad the week earlier.

Is there really sales magic to serif font? Probably not. But we use cues all the time to decide on value, and to guide our decisions. I’ve written before how I find myself unable to spend more than 20 seconds reading a 700-word blog entry or email newsletter, but that I’m happy to read a four-volume book of 1,900 pages for more than a year.

Quality of content is a part of it, but only a part. The fact is, I use cues all the time to evaluate that quality, and I rely on past habits to determine what deserves my attention or not.

So my point for you is is, why stack the odds against yourself? Why give your reader subtle cues that your writing is skimmable, disposable, low-value fluff? The bigger principle, which I’ve seen proven in different areas of life, is: Assume people are already acting how you want them to act. Very often, they will end up doing just that.

Since you’ve read this far, I assume you must be a reader. So I will remind you that, for the next three days, until February 27th, I am opening the doors to my Insights & More Book Club. After that, I will close off the club to new members. We will start reading the next book on March 1st, and it makes no sense to have people join mid-way. The only way to join is to be signed up to my email newsletter first. If you like, you can do that here.

The quantum theory of sitcom or blowing your readers’ minds

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Two weeks ago, I wrote an email all about my futile, morning-long search for a quote about Larry David and how he ran the writers for “Seinfeld” like a team of huskies pulling a sled.

It turns out my search wasn’t entirely futile. I did come across the following interesting bit by Larry Charles.

Charles used to be the supervising producer on “Seinfeld.” In a New Yorker article, he remembered the exact moment, during the development of season three, when he was talking to Larry David and when things clicked:

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We went, “What if the book that was overdue was in the homeless guy’s car? And the homeless guy was the gym teacher that had done the wedgie? And what if, when they return the book, Kramer has a relationship with the librarian?”

Suddenly it’s like — why not? It’s like, boom boom boom, an epiphany — quantum theory of sitcom! It was, like, nobody’s doing this! Usually, there’s the A story, the B story — no, let’s have five stories! And all the characters’ stories intersect in some sort of weirdly organic way, and you just see what happens. It was like — oh my God. It was like finding the cure for cancer.

===

Last November, I put together a live training about creating an a-ha moment in your reader’s brain or brains.

I did a lot of research and a lot of thinking to prepare for that training.

One thing I realized is how there’s 98% overlap, perhaps 98.2%, between creating an a-ha moment and creating a ha-ha moment.

The difference mainly comes down to context, tone, the kind of setting you find yourself in.

On the other hand, the structure, techniques, necessary ingredients, and resulting effects are all the same between a-ha and ha-ha, insight and comedy.

So maybe it’s worth looking at Charles’s quote above in more detail, at least if you want to blow your readers’ minds.

Notice what it doesn’t say:

* There’s nothing about character development

* There’s nothing about carefully crafted language

* There really nothing about the substance of the thing, rather only about the form, the structure

Maybe you find all this kind of abstract.

Maybe you’d like some more concrete stories and examples to illustrate how to take the quantum theory of sitcom above, and use it to blow people’s minds.

If that’s what you’d like, I’ve put together a course about it, called Most Valuable Email. It tells you one way, which has worked very well for me, to take Charles’s idea above and apply it to writing daily emails.

Most Valuable Email also gives you 51 concrete examples of the most successful, influential, and insightful emails that use the Most Valuable Email trick.

It’s very possible you’ve decided Most Valuable Email isn’t for you. That’s fine. Otherwise, you can find more information here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

If you have an ecommerce business, then I’d like to talk to you

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If you have an ecommerce business, and you want to make more front-end sales, increase your ad spend profitably, and make more money from your current customer list, then I’d like to talk to you.

I haven’t talked much about this over the past year — but these are things I know about.

My longest-running client, back when I still did client work regularly, was an 8-figure ecommerce business.

I wrote dozens of cold-traffic funnels from them, from snout to tail, including a unique front-end format I called the “horror advertorial.”

That client was consistently making up to 2,000 front-end sales each day, using a bunch of my “horror advertorial” funnels. Another client of mine went from $2k/day to $12k/day in daily ad spend by adding in one of my horror advertorials to their existing funnel.

I’ve also done email marketing for ecommerce businesses. I’ve worked with 8-figure direct response supplement businesses and tripled results in their email funnels. I’ve managed two 70,000-person email lists and pulled out free money for them out of thin air, month after month.

All that’s to say these are things I know about.

So if you have an ecommerce business, and you want my help or advice, then get on my email list. And then write me, and we can start a conversation.