Copywriting

The BEST kind of infotainment, for me, now

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… is listicles. Let me give you 10 reasons why.

No, listicles ain’t it, though my recent email with 10 reasons why auctions can beat launches did work well. It drew a bunch of interest, including from some very successful course creators and audience owners.

I don’t think it was the listicle part of that email that did it. Rather, I think there were a few other reasons why that email drew big fish from deep under the surface of my email list.

Would you like to know what I think is the biggest of those reasons?

Would you like to know what I believe is the BEST kind of infotainment right now, which draws in even sophisticated and big-time marketers and business owners… and which also happens to be the only kind of infotainment I still regularly consume?

It’s not funny stories about what happened around the kitchen table last night…

… not personal reveals of childhood trauma…

… not pop culture references…

… not historical anecdotes…

… not insightful analogies that put familiar facts into a new context…

… not rants and raves…

… not, like I said, listicles.

Nothing wrong with any of those, and you can weave them into your emails, as I do, often.

But on their own, all of these have become insufficient, at least to draw my weary attention and interest.

Rather, the BEST kind of infotainment, in my immodest opinion, because it is the the ONLY kind of infotainment that still sucks me in on a consistent basis, is…

“What’s working for me now”

(… and its flip side, “What’s not working for me any more.”)

It’s important to highlight this is still infotainment. It’s still there to attract and give your readers momentary pause, to allow people to nod along for a minute and say hmmm.

It’s not heavy-handed teaching or nuance or complexity. And its ultimate and not-so-secret goal is still to sell – you as a trustworthy and successful and relatable person, and your current offer, whatever that may be, as a worthwhile and credible opportunity.

Why does “What’s working FOR ME now” work so well, for me, and on me?

Under the shiny “NOW” hood, it’s still the old-fashioned engine, made up of news and benefit and proof.

Except, in today’s world, news spreads quickly and soon stops being news, often before your audience has had a chance to even see your message.

And as for proof, we’ve all become skeptical and jaded and suspicious.

The fix to both is to share, not “What’s working now,” but “What’s working FOR ME now.” Not, “How TO” but “How I.”

So there you go.

Whether you’re new or established, my suggestion is to write more “What’s working FOR ME now” content.

Not only will it draw in even sophisticated readers, but it will force you to try out new things in your business, make them work for you, and then figure out how to package that up in a sexy and sellable way. And if you’re constantly doing that, you will find success, and soon.

By the way, “What’s working FOR ME now” is an expansive category that allows for lots of different experiments and reports.

One small slice of that category is what I’ve called my Most Valuable Email trick.

The Most Valuable Email trick allows you to create “What’s working FOR ME now” content quickly, without taking weeks or months to run an experiment and collect and process results.

In fact, I used the Most Valuable Trick in this very email. And like I say on the sales page, you can get going with it in an hour from now. If you’d like more info, or to get started today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

He auctioned his CAT?!?!

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Yesterday in my Daily Email House community, I announced the winner of the prestigious “Inaugural Pool Party Funniest Comment” award.

The lucky winner was audio-engineer-turned-newsletter-operator Filip Stilin. Filip’s winning comment was:

“Subject line: He auctioned his CAT?!?!”

(In case you’re wondering why Filip’s comment was possibly funny, I could explain it, but would that make it funny now? I suspect no. Such is the nature of humor. You had to be there.)

Filip’s prize for writing this funniest comment are A) a physical copy of my favorite comedy book, which has influenced my writing as much as any copywriting or marketing book I’ve ever read, and B) the pleasure of seeing his comment turned into an actual subject line in my email today.

Now here’s the point, and why you might feel this email is anything beyond an inside joke run amok:

The whole idea for this “funniest comment” contest came up as a suggestion during the auction I ran last week, by one of the auction participants.

It was a suggestion I immediately adopted.

That’s because the biggest thing I’ve learned over the past year of running a community is to stop trying to do everything myself… to start asking for feedback and guidance and input… to let people participate and shape the direction of the group… instead of hitting them over the head repeatedly with content and “value” and then wondering why nobody’s engaging.

It’s kinda opposite of how I run this newsletter, which is guided exclusively and jealously by my own standards and tastes and preferences.

That’s not to say I can never adopt others’ suggestions in these emails. In fact that’s what I’m doing today with Filip’s subject line.

But that’s all done in line with the core concept of this newsletter, which I’ve realized is about performing real magic, about turning ideas into reality, about casting spells that make living, breathing rabbits appear.

That might sound grandiose, and maybe it is. In any case it’s true.

For example, the spell for today was “Apply a suggestion coming from the audience.”

Tomorrow’s spell might be something else.

This spell-based approach has been profoundly valuable to me in running this newsletter, and has made this newsletter 1000x more fun and educational and ultimately profitable than it would have been otherwise.

If you you wanna find out more about this “real magic” way of running a newsletter, and of the power of turning ideas into reality, I have created a course all abut it. It describes my approach in detail, gives lots of examples, and maybe encourages you to apply the same in your own world. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Hot new “no cure, no pay” repackaging of a service offer

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Long-time reader and customer Rasmus Gullaksen writes in reply to my email yesterday:

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A bit unrelated, but I came up with a new ghostwriting offer for my audience a few weeks ago. And I’ve never experienced so much demand for a service EVER. literally had 25 ish people write to be about this offer after promoting it 2-3 times on LinkedIn.

Most LinkedIn ghostwriters sell 6-8 monthly posts for X amount. But that has all the risk on the clients side (if the posts dont perform, the client still pays) and no big upside for the ghostwriter (if 8 posts do well and make a lot of money, the ghostwriter doesnt get anything more)

So I came up with the offer (a kind of No cure, no pay ghostwriting)

1. I’ll overhaul your LinkedIn profile page for $1k (so it sells better)

2. And then I’ll ghostwrite for you for free until you get a new client from your content, and only once that happen, I get a cut off the amount you make from that deal. If it takes 10 posts to get there, the client wins (10 free posts) and then they also get a new client (win for them, win for me) + I don’t make any commitment to post X times for them, I just post as many as I think are necessary + ramp up if things go well etc. I then get paid only if my content gets them results, and that only gets easier and more lucrative as time goes.

Right now im just trying to figure out what kind of business owner has the best business model for me to do this for. Currently helping a motivational speaker, a legal advisor, and a SaaS founder.

===

I think what Rasmus is doing is… absolutely GREAT.

There’s lots of clever stuff going on in Rasmus’s offer above. What I wanna focus on is a super basic thing, which I believe drives this whole thing – that this is a service offer with a guaranteed outcome.

Is that really so hard?

To come up with a specific outcome for the service you provide… and to find a way to guarantee that outcome?

At least for some clients? And to then factor out your risk, by making this offer ONLY to those right kinds of clients?

If you offer services — copywriting, media buying, dog walking — maybe it’s worth thinking about how and for who you could provide a guaranteed, bundled up outcome.

Maybe it can mean you sell more easily… have an easier time with delivery… AND make more money?

Putting the idea out there.

If you already do this, and guarantee an outcome with some of the services you offer, write in and let me know.

I wanna hear your experiences. And who knows, maybe I end up promoting you and your offer, like with Rasmus above.

Become an investigative reporter with high-level salesmanship skills

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A bit of Bejako background:

I went to high school in a rich suburb of Baltimore, Maryland (we weren’t rich, but ok).

All the other kids in my class were ambitious and smart (one girl’s dad later won the Nobel Prize in chemistry). They worked hard their entire high school days. They ended up going to schools like Princeton and Stanford, and became lawyers and doctors and architects.

Meanwhile, 17-year-old Bejako had zero drive to go to college, and had no idea what kind of work he might ever want to do.

His best guess — the only option that kind of turned him on – was the idea of moving down to Annapolis, Maryland’s small, quaint, maritime capital, and becoming a reporter on some local newspaper that covered state politics.

Fast-forward to the present, and switch back to the first person:

While I never became a small-town reporter, the same lack of ambition and non-entrepreneurial nature I had in high school has stuck with me throughout life, now into middle age.

I am really not motivated by money, try as I have to change that. I’ve also never thought of myself as an entrepreneur or online business owner. And yet, that’s kind of what I’m doing now, and what’s more, I’m not really qualified to do anything else.

I’m telling you all this because a couple nights ago, I was reading a book about direct marketing. It said the following:

“Understanding your ultimate prospect has nothing to do with creativity. It requires relentless, investigative salesmanship. You need to become an investigative reporter with high-level salesmanship skills.”

“Hm,” I said to my pillow. “An investigative reporter on the salesmanship beat? That’s something I can imagine myself doing.”

And in fact, the very next day, I told myself to treat what I’m doing as investigative reporter. I started collecting data about offers I had made, successful or unsuccessful. I came up with theories about why things turned out as they did. I started trying to write up a story that makes sense that fits the data to the theory.

It’s been fun and it’s getting me to do things I should have been doing all along.

My point is not that you specifically should start treating your business as an investigative reporter.

My point is that, if “value-creating entrepreneur” or “small business owner” doesn’t really feel like a suit that fits you, there lots of other suits you can put on, including ones that you like the look of. And it will still be you inside the suit.

You gotta do certain things to see success if you have an email list and want to make money with it. Selling is one of them. Understanding your audience is another. Creating new offers is still another. But there are lots of ways to get yourself to do those things, including things that align with your own natural motivations and ambitions.

Or in the words of Internet marketer Rich Schefren, “Put your business goals of your self-development goals.” It’s much more likely you will see success if you work with your own psychology, rather than trying to change it.

So much for Monday Morning Mindset.

For some specific strategies on how to take your existing skills and interests and turn them into money, enough to pay for a house:

https://bejakovic.com/house

How coaches and course creators can give confidence and lasting knowledge to their students

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Here’s a little riddle for ya:

– pine

– crab

– sauce

There’s a fourth word you can attach to each of these three words, which will lead to three other common words.

What is that fourth word?

While your brain works on that, I can tell you I riddled this riddle myself yesterday.

At first, nothing came to me in spite of trying. Then I gave up trying to guess the fourth word, much how the fox gave up trying to get the grapes, because they are unreachable and therefore must be sour.

But then, a few moments later, out of nowhere, without me seemingly doing anything and while I was busy thinking how this is a stupid riddle and how I don’t want to play, the fourth word popped up in my mind, covered by a thick syrup known as the feeling of insight.

The feeling of insight = that feeling of satisfaction, wonder, and possibility that happens when we emerge from the intellectual dark into light, when confusing and complex give way to simple and certain.

I read an article yesterday about the new neurology of insight. Basically, scientists have now pinned down the areas of the brain that light up when we come up with a solution to riddles like the one above, and we feel insight.

The names of those brain areas aren’t very interesting, unless you yourself are a neuroscientist.

What is interesting is something the article called the “insight-memory advantage.”

Basically, experiences of insight make people remember associated facts better than when they are simply told facts. This has practical applications, for example, if you are a coach or course creator. From the article:

“Applying insight-boosting strategies to teaching could lead to better learning outcomes for students. Insight seems to be a powerful and positive experience that generates accurate solutions, confidence in our answers and strong memories.””

So how do you generate a feeling of insight in your students?

I will leave you to ponder that on your own, for possibly obvious reasons.

One “insight-boosting strategy” is sure to pop up soon, if it hasn’t already.

Meanwhile, if you write emails about marketing or copywriting, there’s a non-obvious way to create insight, which I’ve personally used to great effect. To find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Others get audited for their travel and entertainment deductions… YOU deduct TWICE as much, yet get no flack from the IRS

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This week I’m promoting Jeanne Willson and Kirsten Graham’s free training on how solopreneurs can offload their bookkeeping without paying CPA prices.

Unfortunately, I know very little about the world of taxes or bookkeeping.

Fortunately, I know something about copywriting, and the world of direct marketing. That’s how I know of a sales bullet, written by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos, in a blockbuster sales letter from 1996:

“Others get audited for their travel and entertainment deductions. You deduct TWICE as much, yet get no flack from the IRS. The secret is on page 18.”

In case you’re curious about the secret to not getting audited while others do, it’s this, from page 18 of the book Parris was promoting (I’m summarizing):

Submit documentation and proof along with your tax return. The IRS officially discourages attached proof and evidence. Even so, it’s a proven recipe to reducing your chances of an audit, because while audits are triggered automatically, they are reviewed by a live human, and a human might look at your attached proof and decide your claims are legit.

This info, which supposedly comes from a well-connected IRS insider, is from the 1990s.

Is it still true today?

I cannot say. If you’re really worried about getting audited, I would refer you to Thursday’s training by Jeanne and Kirsten.

Jeanne and Kirsten will share a plan to take care of the looming cloud of a tax audit, without paying the $200-$500 per month that you would pay to your local CPA.

And yes, there will be a done-for-you service for sale at the end of Thursday’s training to make your tax worries disappear.

And yes, I will get paid something as an affiliate if you take Jeanne and Kirsten up on this offer.

But I’m not getting paid anything to plug Jeanne and Kirsten’s training on Thursday, which will be valuable and instructive on its own, whether you choose to buy the offer at the end.

If you would like to sign up for this free training, and reclaim the part of your brain that’s worried about taxes:

https://lessmathmoremoney.com/

If you’d like to partner with businesses on the back end…

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a new “back end” partnership I was testing out.

A business owner, who spends $700 a day on Facebook ads to generate leads, is converting a minuscule share of these leads to clients, while doing no ongoing followup with the rest.

After 2 minutes of talking to this guy over Zoom, we made a preliminary partnership deal:

1. He’d give me control of his email list.

2. I’d see what I could do.

3. If I could do something, we’d keep working together and split the profits.

4. If I could not, I’d have spent a bit of time writing a few emails for this guy for nothing, and he’d have spent a bit of time to talk to me over Zoom, also for nothing.

After I sent out that email, I got a reply from a Spanish copywriter, who wrote:

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I’m not sure if you’ll read this email, since I assume you’ll receive a lot.

But what you mentioned today really interests me. In my country (Spain), I don’t see the practice of sending a daily email as a very common one. Often, they don’t even use email as a sales channel.

In my niche (trading and finance), I see a lot of people with large social media followers who don’t follow up via email.

And that’s a service I’d like to offer: using other email lists and earning a commission on the sales those emails generate. But the question is…

How do you know for sure how many sales the list owner is making thanks to emails?

How do you know how many of those sales come from emails?

Should we trust the list owner?

Can they somehow give you access so you can see the sales generated yourself?

Thank you. I love your writing and job!

===

Maybe I’m projecting here, but the underlying frame I see in this reader’s questions is, “Will I get screwed? Will the owner not pay me for some sales I made him? Will there be INJUSTICE, perpetrated against ME?”

That’s the wrong way to look at it.

If you ask me, the right way to look at it is, does this make good sense for me to do now, and to keep doing?

When the topic of doing work on commission comes up, people often get hung up on revshare percentages, splits, tiers, contracts, agreements, and the technology of tracking, reporting, and checking whether sales you made were correctly attributed to you or not.

Ultimately none of that matters.

What matters is, are you happy with the money that ends up coming in as a result of the investment that you made?

If that works for you, then my advice is to stop stressing about the possible injustice — that somebody somewhere failed to pay you what you are due.

Travis Sago, who runs a “back end agency” that does exactly these kind of back-end partnerships, once proposed a thought experiment.

Imagine betting $1 on a coin flip. You put in $1, and then flip a coin. If the coin comes up heads, you lose your $1. If it comes up tails, you win $100.

Travis’s point was, keep putting in your $1, and keep flipping the coin. Even if the odds aren’t exactly 50-50, soon enough, you will be more than rich.

So much for a new perspective. Now for the offer.

If you are interested in partnering with businesses on the “back end” and maximizing your chances of success at every step, then Travis has an entire course about this, called BEAMER.

That course sells for $2,900. (It’s actually what I paid for it last year.)

$2,900 is a good deal for BEAMER, because if BEAMER leads you to even one modestly successful, one-time partner deal, it will pay for its $2,900 price tag, and then some.

And maybe you’ll have more than just one modestly successful, one-time partner deal.

Maybe you can take it as far as Travis has taken it, and make a few million dollars each year, simply partnering ongoing with people who aren’t really doing much with their email lists.

Now at this point, I could simply link to the BEAMER sales page, except…

There’s also another way to get BEAMER, at 1/10th (one-tenth) the price that it sells for via Travis’s site.

Travis also gives away BEAMER as a free bonus for those who sign up to his Royalty Ronin community, and who stay signed up past the free 7-day trial.

A month of Royalty Ronin will cost you $290.

That’s not exactly $1. But to me, it’s a reasonable investment — a reasonable wager to stake — to get set up with with inside knowledge on running back-end agency from someone who’s made millions from doing so… and to see if you are happy with the money that ends up coming to you as a result of this knowledge.

If you’d like to start a “back end agency” and you want to learn from an expert who’s done it before:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

The “gold standard” of course design

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From the annals of effective course design:

I recently read about real-life Dr. House competitions, aka “clinicopathological conferences.”

C.P.C.s work like this:

A doctor is given a case study of a real patient.

The would-be Dr. House is told the patient’s initial symptoms and lab results.

The doctor can then follow up with more questions, and if the data is known (eg. more lab results or more background info is available), then he or she is told what those are.

The doctor probes and narrows in.

Eventually, the goal is to make the right diagnosis of what actually ailed the patient.

The key thing is, since these are real-life case studies, the right diagnosis is known, because pathologists on the case actually found it, often in an autopsy.

(I checked just now and some of the correct diagnoses in these Dr. House competitions included “tertiary syphilis with mercury poisoning,” “intestinal anthrax,” and “wrong-site surgery.”)

In this way, the doctor is either proven right, meaning the diagnostic process was on point, or wrong, in which case the diagnostic process was lacking in some way, and there’s learning opportunity.

The article I read about this called C.P.C.s “the gold standard of diagnostic reasoning; if you can solve a C.P.C., you can solve almost any case.” Because of their design, C.P.C.s have become so popular as a teaching tool that the New England Journal of Medicine has been publishing transcripts for more than a century.

This caught my attention because I recently asked myself about other domains where I could apply the mechanism behind my Copy Riddles program.

The basic mechanism behind Copy Riddles is the same as the one behind the C.P.C.:

There’s starting data… there’s a nonobvious final result… which is in some way validated or proven.

In the case of Dr. House competitions, the starting data is symptoms and lab results. The nonobvious final result is the correct diagnosis, as validated by pathologists.

In Copy Riddles, the starting data is dry and factual source material, from a course or a how-to book. The nonobvious final result is a sexy sales bullet, as validated in a sales letter by an A-list copywriter, with sales across millions of households, often following an A/B test against other top copywriters.

I had a few ideas for other domains in which the same kind of mechanism could work:

– Comedy writing (take a premise, then come up with a punchline, compare it to one that got laughs)…

– Subject line writing (obvious enough)

– “Influence Riddles” (a setup where you have to convince someone to do as you want, given severe constraints, and then compare your answer to how it was done for real, in a real-life situation)

Apparently, medical diagnosis is another field.

If you have more examples or ideas for me of how to use this same mechanism in other domains, write in and let me know.

Or, if you are thinking of creating a course of your own, and are wondering how to best organize it, then consider the above “gold standard” approach.

Or, if you are simply interested in the gold standard among courses that teach you how to write sales copy, you can read the full story of Copy Riddles here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

If nobody wants your profit-making offer, give it away

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Yesterday I organized a Zoom call for a few list owners.

One of these, a successful copywriter and marketer, was asking how to price, or how to persuade businesses to take him up on, his newfangled sales machine.

“Is $15k a year a good offer? The sales machine is super valuable, and has produced great results for the businesses who have used it. But it’s been a hard sell.”

I thought it was instructive that a successful copywriter and marketer was asking this question.

My answer was, if this thing produces sales so well, why not package up the results into a nice gift box, and sell that gift box instead?

In other words, instead of persuading business owners to buy a gizmo that costs $15k a year and promises to produce sales… why not persuade them to accept new money in the bank, which they can pay you a finders fee for?

In the words of marketing legend Claude Hopkins, who became the modern equivalent of a billionaire using little more than a typewriter:

“In every business expenses are kept down. I could never be worth more than any other man who could do the work I did. The big salaries were paid to salesmen, to the men who brought in orders, or to the men in the factory who reduced the costs. They showed profits, and they could command a reasonable share of those profits. I saw the difference between the profit-earning and the expense side of a business, and I resolved to graduate from the debit class. “

“Yes,” I hear someone saying in the back, “but business owners should already know that a sales gizmo isn’t really an expense, because it will help them make money. They should be smart enough to see a profit-generating solution when they see one. They should they should they should.”

Yes, they should.

But they don’t, just in the same way that the successful copywriter above should have remembered the century-old lesson that turned Claude Hopkins into a billionaire, but he didn’t.

The fact is, we have limited time and attention and energy, and doing the work of translation — of turning what we have into what we could possibly have, of what we buy into what it could do for us, of what we sell into what people really want — requires time and effort.

You can argue against this aspect of reality. Or you can work with it, and simply translate what you sell into a result that people care about, and that they can take you up on without risk.

Moving on.

I recently got a bunch of feedback from my readers, and I found that a large number of people list, as their #1 goal, getting consistent with emailing daily.

Maybe you too feel you should should should be writing consistent daily emails. But you still don’t do it.

If it’s not happening, and if it’s important to you, maybe it’s time for to take a different tack:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

“This changes everything” (no it doesn’t)

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This morning I was reading an article about Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the massive bestseller Eat Pray Love, and the “dizzying numbers of women” who have followed in her wake to narrate their lives and loves online. This passage made me tingle:

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On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany.

===

I’m not on social media, but I am on email, a lot. And the passage above sounds exactly what I feel when I read the often-emailed phrase, “This changes everything.”

For fun or frustration, I just typed that phrase into my Gmail and came up with 52 exact matches in the subject line or preview text.

From coaches… crypto peddlers… course creators… Internet marketing gurus… two A-list copywriters… a B-list copywriter… and about a half-dozen investing mavens who act as the face of various Agora newsletters.

Whenever I hear somebody who has been in business for more than 2 weeks breathlessly announce that “This changes everything,” I conclude that this person or brand is either 1) chaotic or 2) the sales equivalent of “emotionally lawless” ie. unscrupulous.

And I lose a bit of respect for them, if I have any left. I also become a little more jaded towards the idea that anything being advertised at me can be worthwhile.

I’m telling you this as a kind of public service announcement, so you can beware of people using this phrase, or maybe, so I can warn you against using the same in your own marketing.

My second public service announcement is to remind you of my recently reopened Skool group, Daily Email House.

“This changes everything?” I hear you asking.

No.

But Daily Email House might change a few things in your life or head to help you, as the current mission for the group says, “use your email list to pay for a house.”

If you’d like to join me inside:

https://bejakovic.com/house