Copywriting

Bejako goes back to school for a push

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I went back to school today. For the first time in 10+ years, I sat in class, behind a desk. With a bunch of other little idiots next to me, I listened to a smiling teacher as he pointed to his chest and said, “Me llamo Rubén. ¿Cómo te llamas?”

This went on for the better part of four hours, from 9am until 1pm.

For four precious hours, we went through the elementary particles of the Spanish language, presented at a snail’s pace. For four hours, I practiced saying the same damn things a million times to various Italians, Germans, and Greeks who were in the class with me.

You might have your doubts that this is an effective way to learn a language.

I have reasons to believe it will be useful.

And in any case, I’ll only do it for this week. This time investment (and during my most productive hours!) is not sustainable for longer than that. But I figure it’s worth doing at the start to kick things off.

And this brings me to one of the most valuable ideas that has shaped how I have run my career.

For example, I got going as a freelance copywriter by charging $5 for a 7-part email sequence.

Do you think that’s a shockingly low rate? Do you think I allowed myself to be exploited?

Who cares. I did it for a week and then I increased my rates a bit. And then a week later, I increased my rates a bit more. And then a bit more still.

Point being, it’s easy to fix and improve things once you get them going. But in most cases, the getting going is the hard part.

This isn’t my idea or observation, by the way. This is something I was fortunate enough to read a long time ago in an essay by somebody very rich, very successful, and very smart. Here’s what he said:

A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist.

Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.

The guy who wrote that is Paul Graham, a multimillionaire computer programmer who started the early-stage investing firm Y Combinator (Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe).

Graham said that one of the most common pieces of advice they give Y Combinator is to Do Things That Don’t Scale.

Now at this point, I had a valuable caution to give my newsletter readers about Graham’s bit of advice. But I’m not including that on this public archived post. I often reserve the most valuable and important ideas for my newsletter readers. I have to reward them somehow. If you’d like to join them, and start getting my daily emails, you can sign up here.

How to force insight

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I woke up very early this morning while it was still dark. I have some personal stuff on my mind, maybe that’s why.

Rather than rolling around in bed or sitting down in front of the computer, I got dressed and I walked down to the beach. And on my way back, I saw…

1. A blind jogger? It was a couple, a man and a woman, jogging towards me. They were jogging very close to each other, almost hip-to-hip. As they got near, I realized they were holding a short length of rope between them. The man had a sun hat on, pulled down over his eyes. He was more speed-walking than jogging, and he seemed intently focused on the rope.

2. Two Dutch guys stumbling home. One was tall, very drunk, and constantly talking. The other was short, a little less drunk, and trying to get his bearings on which way to go. And then, the tall, talkative one aggressively stomped his foot on the ground and scared a bunch of pigeons which flew at my head.

3. Another couple, dressed all in black. As they passed me, the man looked at me. And perhaps because I also wear all black, he smiled and nodded.

Ben Settle once shared a metaphor which has stuck in my head:

The cookie jar of ideas. It represents all the valuable knowledge in your industry.

As you get going in your industry, you take, take, take from the cookie jar for a long time. Eventually it’s time to add something back in.

But how do you do it? How do you create new cookies out of thin air? How do you come up with new insights for others to use? Do you have to be a genius or to have supernatural inspiration?

I’m sure that would help. But if you’re short on genius or inspiration, you can do what I do:

Simply describe what you see.

If it catches your eye, actually take notes and spell out what’s going on.

Do it over and over.

​​And once you have a bunch of detailed and interesting observations, then put your head in your hands, and stare at your observations for a while. Out of thin air, a cookie will suddenly appear.

And now for something entirely unrelated:

I would like to remind you of my consulting offer, and specifically my Email Marketing Audit.

I could try to tie this offer up to my cookie jar message above. I could try to tell you something like, “This observe-and-abstract method is how I have gained the many email marketing insights yadda yadda…”

But the fact is, one thing I genuinely have learned by observing successful email marketers is that it’s often better not to tie up your content with your sales at all… rather than to do it in a ham-handed or cheese-fisted way.

So no, this promotional add-on has nothing to do with the cookie jar.

Instead, if you want more info on my Email Marketing Audit, for no other reason than because you think it might benefit you and your business, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

“Email Marketing: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson”

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Here’s a quick checklist of elements that make for engaging, effective, and influential emails:

1. Conflict, outrage. We seem to take a constant delight in seeing or participating in a fight. The more real it is, the more engaging it is. The more status the fight participants have, the more engaging it is.

2. Surprising connections between unrelated things, or surprising distinctions in things that seemed simple and unified.

3. Metaphors, analogies, and “transubstantiation.”

4. Angst. All good copy is rooted in angst. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “The sky is either falling or is about to fall.”

5. Imitation and parody.

6. An engaging character. As Matt Furey didn’t but should have said, “For the email marketer, nothing transcends character.” The email of personality, rather than the email of “value.” Email is not about sharing valuable information. It’s about writing about normal things in a valuable and interesting way. It’s about accuracy of human observation and precision of the observation.

7. All right, enough of this. Let me come clean:

Everything I’ve just told you actually comes from a video titled “Visual Comedy: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson.”

Atkinson you might best know as the clumsy priest from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I watched Atkinson’s Visual Comedy guide a few days ago, expecting to be entertained. And I was that. But I found the video surprisingly full of deep analysis of what actually makes for visual comedy. It was like a prehistoric episode of the Every Frame a Painting series, if you’ve ever seen that.

And not only was this video insightful.

I realized that much, or maybe all, of what makes for good visual comedy can be ported very easily to email marketing.

For example, point #1 above is really about slapstick. As the Visual Comedy video says, “We seem to take a constant delight in seeing people hurt and humiliated. The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more dignified the victim, the funnier it is.”

And that Matt Furey non-quote in point #6?

​​It actually comes from Charlie Chaplin. “For the comedian, nothing transcends character.”

If you like, I’ve linked the entire Rowan Atkinson video below. You can watch it and try to figure out which techniques of visual comedy I mapped to each of my email marketing points above.

Of course, there’s more in this video than just what I’ve written above. The list of connections between visual comedy and email marketing is long and distinguished, and doesn’t just stop at 6″.

As just one example:

Maybe the most valuable part of this video is the detailed discussion of what exactly makes for an engaging character in visual comedy. I found almost all of this applied to email marketing directly, without the need for even the smallest bit of translation. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s a lesson I should apply myself.

So to wrap up:

​If you’re a goofy and thoughtless person who enjoys laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel…

​Or if you’re a deep and serious thinker who is interested in uncovering the hidden structure of things most people take for granted…

​Then I believe you will get value out of this video. Or maybe you’ll just get some pointed human observation. You can find it below. Before you click to watch it, you might want to sign up for my daily email newsletter, and get more insightful things like the essay you’ve just read.

“So cringe”: Content creators get rich without anyone knowing who they are

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I sat down just a few minutes ago, my hotdog + espresso soup at the ready, and I watched 8 minutes of:

* A hot girl putting a live fish down her sweatpants

​* A man walking up the side of a 30-foot light pole

​* A motorcyclist’s head falling off

​* Pigtails being cut by office scissors and meat cleavers

​* Cheating wives and husbands caught in the act and running for cover

​* A leech up somebody’s nose

The backstory is all these videos were produced by Network Media, a video content mill that’s gotten 200 billion views on Facebook and Snapchat over the past two years.

200.

Billion.

Let me repeat that number so that it perhaps has a chance to sink into your brain. If each of those video views were a hotdog, that means that you and everybody else on the planet would have eaten 25 Network Media hotdogs each over the past two years.

Network Media was started by Rick Lax, who looks a little like a young Mickey Rourke.

Lax ​​has a law degree.

But Lax’s primary passion was never law. It was always magic.

Lax wasn’t popular as a kid. To make things worse, he never could quite make it at the highest levels of the magic business.

He was apparently hurt to be excluded even from this community of misfits.

So Lax went outside the magic establishment, and started posting videos on Facebook, iterating, optimizing, and cranking out content. At first, his videos showed magic tricks. Later, they showed random stuff Lax figured out to be popular.

It got so Lax’s Facebook videos were easily getting 100 million views each.

Lax started to monetize his videos with Facebook’s “paid creator” ad share as soon as that became available. Immediately, he started making six figures a month.

What’s more, Lax realized the demand for his bizarre videos, which applied his insights from magic, was endless. So he brought on more people, often broke actors and singers, who were making minimum wage before Lax found them.

Lax turned many of his anonymous content creators into millionaires. By late 2021, Lax’s Network Media was pulling in $5 million a month across all its different videos.

I’d like to tell you more of Lax’s story, but I’ve just finished my hotdog + espresso soup and my time is up. So I’ll make you an offer instead.

Check out article below. It’s where I learned about Rick Lax and his $5M/month viral video business. The article contains lots of titillating facts, plus some useful techniques.

In fact, if you read the article below, you can find out why almost all of Lax’s video feature something surreal, such as tampons in the fridge or a dirty hairbrush as part of a cooking video.

​​Maybe that will even explain why I’m eating hotdogs in espresso sauce as I write this email.

So my offers is, read the article below, find out the technical term for this “tampons in the fridge” technique, sign up to my email newsletter, and then write me an email to tell me the name of this technique.

In return, I will share with you something else interesting, valuable, and related. It’s something that I might share with my entire list down the line, but that I will share with you first, and for certain, if you only take me up on my offer.

In case you want to do that, here’s the link to get started:

https://bejakovic.com/lax

The IOU theory of copywriting

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I read once (in a book) that credit, aka debt, came way before money. In other words, an IOU — a little slip of clay tablet commemorating the three sheep you gave to me — is a more powerful economic idea than gold coins.

I also read once (in an email) that copywriter Gary Halbert said the most powerful human motivating force is not self-interest… but curiosity.

Is there a connection between these two powerful facts?

Clearly. Because I personally think of curiosity as an IOU.

You give a couple of IOUs to your reader right in your headline. “I promise to pay you some valuable information,” each IOU says, “just give me a bit of time.”

As long as you’re in the reader’s debt, as long as he’s holding one of your IOUs, he sticks around. He wants to get paid.

The good thing is that you can give your reader a new IOU before paying off an old one. That way you can keep him around. But be careful.

If you start handing out too many IOUs… if the debt you’re incurring is too outrageous… if the repayment period is too long… then your reader is likely to get frustrated.

“This guy is never gonna pay up,” he will say. “This is just worthless paper.” He will throw away all your IOUs into the river, and along with them, your sale.

In other words, don’t overdo your debt of curiosity. But do do it.

And if you want some technical pointers on how to do curiosity in your sales copy, why, I’ve got just the thing.

It’s hidden right there inside Commandment III of my book on A-list copywriter commandments.

In case you haven’t checked this book out yet, but are a bit curious, here’s the link:

https://www.bejakovic.com/10commandments

Two marketing legends try and fail to pronounce my name

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A few days ago, reader Sam wrote in to tell me a curious fact:

On a recent episode of the Chris Haddad podcast, Chris and IM guru Matt Bacak spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to pronounce my name.

Matt: “B-E-J-A-K-O-V…”

Chris: “Buh-Jack-Oh-Vick? I think that’s how you pronounce it?”

[No, it’s not. But I can’t blame anybody for not knowing for what to do with this salad of letters.]

The context is that Chris, the very successful marketer and copywriter I wrote about yesterday, asked Matt, a legend in the direct response field, which copywriting books Matt recommends to people.

Matt had two recommendations.

The first was Evaldo Albuquerque’s 16-Word Sales Letter.

The second was Johh Buh-Jack-Oh-Vick’s 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

I was chuffed to hear that Matt and Chris were discussing my book.

But it wasn’t a complete surprise.

About a year ago, Matt had written me an email telling me how he recommends my book to people inside his mentoring program. At the time, I was a little too denso to do anything with Matt’s endorsement.

So if you really need a marketing and copywriting lesson in today’s email, then my message to you is:

​​Don’t be like me.

In other words, ​when doing marketing for yourself, treat yourself as you would a client, including being aggressive about collecting and using testimonials.

If you are a freelance copywriter or marketer of any stripe, I can almost guarantee that’s the most valuable thing will hear today.

​​But perhaps you don’t believe me.

Perhaps you want more copywriting and marketing advice, so you can compare which one is the most surprising, new, and useful for you.

​​If so, I have ten more copywriting and marketing commandments to share. Inside of a little book publicly endorsed by Matt Bacak. You can find the entire collection here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Getting comfortable copybragging on Facebook

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Speaking on a podcast a while back, marketer and copywriter (though not freelance!) Chris Haddad had the following harsh truth to share:

“If I was a freelance copywriter, I would be posting on Facebook about copy all the time. And I would be posting all of my testimonials and all of my successes. Because that’s the gig. And if you can’t do it, you need to go out and do something else.”

Chris was saying how back in the day, what made him successful as a freelance copywriter is he was willing to go out and shout, “Hey I’m Chris Haddad and I’m fucking great.” But that kind of bragging causes a discomfort in his seat these days. It’s also one of the reasons Chris didn’t offer any copywriting training for the longest time.

What if you’re the same?

What if you have a fear of the spotlight, and you cannot imagine bragging about yourself on Facebook?

​​And what if, unlike Chris, you haven’t yet reached the levels of success that allow you to say, you know what, I’ll do something else instead?

Well, I think you’ve got several options. Such as creating your own product in a non-marketing niche… or writing a daily email newsletter in the hope of establishing your credibility without bragging… or taking a page out of Sasha Fierce’s book.

Yes, Sasha Fierce.

Maybe that rings a bell. Maybe no? It’s the alter ego that Beyonce created for herself in her early days. Here’s Beyonce:

“Usually when I hear the chords, when I put on my stilettos, like the moment right before when you’re nervous… then Sasha Fierce appears, and my posture and the way I speak and everything is different.”

Psychologists agree. By conducting experiments on children and the weak-willed, they have shown how inventing an alter-ego for yourself (or at least asking yourself, “What would Chris Haddad do?”) works wonders in changing your perspective, your resolve, and your behavior. ​​Search online for the “Batman Effect” if you want to know more about this.

But for now, maybe it’s time to start inventing a braggartly Facebook alterego for your copywriting business. It might not be what you like to hear. But as Chris says, that’s the gig.

Are you expecting me to finish this email by bragging myself?

No, I will save that for tomorrow’s email. I do have something to brag about, and it even involves Chris Haddad in a way. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow. Sign up to my email newsletter if you’d like to read that when it comes out.

​​​​For today, if you’d like to hear all of Chris’s tough love insights into what it takes to be a successful freelance copywriter, then brace yourself, and then take a listen here:​

#1 copy critique I give inside the Inner Ring

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Yesterday, I held the fourth call of the Copy Riddles Inner Ring.

The Inner Ring is a little coaching group. I created it as an upsell to Copy Riddles.

In the Inner Ring, I critique people’s bullets.

The problem is, the bullets of the Inner Ring folks are getting too good. With each new week, there’s less and less biting and merciless criticism I can give.

If you think I’m trying to presell you on the Inner Ring, then stop thinking. I won’t run this offer again.

I made that decision a few days ago, for my own reasons. I might talk more about those down the line.

For today, I want to share a share a little diamond with you. It’s small but very valuable. I found it thanks to the Inner Ring. And it’s this:

There’s just one bit of feedback I keep giving people, week after week.

Even as their bullets become more intriguing… as their mechanisms become sexier… as their warnings become scarier… there’s one thing I keep repeating.

And that’s to make their copy 100% clear.

That’s my advice to you too.

Make your copy easy to read. Make it easy to understand. Take out fluff that clutters your message. Clean up stains that allow doubts to creep into your reader’s mind.

How do you do that? How do you make your message 100% clear?

There are many ways to fleece that feline. Today, I want to point you to just one. It’s an automatic, push-button tool that gets a lot of cat fur off quickly.

For example:

I started out this email with a first draft. That draft was at a 6th-grade reading level.

Thanks to this tool, I whittled it down to an 5th grade level. Then to a 3rd-grade level. And then, with a lot of work, to a 2nd-grade level.

You are still reading this email. Maybe you even found it persuasive. If you did, clarity is the reason why.

So if you aren’t using this tool yet, consider doing so. It’s valuable and it’s free.

And if you this tool, consider using it more. All the way to its full, second-grade potential. Here’s where to find it:

https://hemingwayapp.com/

The “knitted eyebrows” copywriting technique

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If you ever wished you had the nerve to engage in more risk-seeking behaviors such as unprotected sex or high-stakes roulette, here’s some good news:

Scientists have found a quick, cheap, and easy way to help you out.

According to a study published by researchers at the University of Ohio a couple years ago, all it takes is acetaminophen — ie. Tylenol, Panadol, etc.

The scientists found that a 1,000-mg dose of acetaminophen increased risk-seeking behaviors in a batch of 545 college students.

​​In other words, acetaminophen not only reduces physical pain such as headaches… but it seems to also reduce psychic pain, at least the psychic pain coming from fear and uncertainty.

So the next time you find yourself nervously turning away from a suspect sexual partner… or refusing to bet it all on red at the Casino in Monte Carlo… just pop a couple Tylenol, and you will be good to go.

You might think I’m being foolish or trivial. And perhaps you’re right.

​​But there is a point I’m trying to get to, if only my fingers would follow my brain.

I’ve read somewhere, and the Tylenol study above supports it, that we humans have grafted modern brain processes onto old physical hardware.

For example, when we have the intellectual or emotional experience of, say, trusting somebody… this is connected to physical sensation of warmth in our bodies.

​​The link goes both ways — trust inspires warmth, and warmth inspires trust. (Again, some scientists have run experiments to prove this.)

Similarly, other human emotions such as fear, disgust, anger, and joy, can and do trigger — and are triggered by — physical cues.

“Ugh why is this relevant to me,” I hear you saying, as your eyes roll to the back of your head.

Well, if you’re in the business of writing some frightening or infuriating or energizing sales copy, your first move might be to reach for adjectives. Like “frightening.” Or “infuriating.” Or “energizing.”

​​But that’s for kids.

What grownup copywriters do is pay attention to their own bodies.

Dry swallowing… gritted teeth… a fully expanded chest.

​​These are just some of the hundreds of physical cues you can include in your copy, and play your readers’ emotions like a keyboard.

​​Or if you want them to focus and read on, just talk to them about their eyebrows knitting together. And on that note, if you’d like to focus and read more essays like the one you’ve just read, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.

I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group, so read this email

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I have a good friend visiting me now. We met many years ago, in college, at the the “clothing-optional” LSD experiment known as the University of California at Santa Cruz.

A few days ago, my friend and I were discussing how UCSC has gained a lot of status since we graduated. That’s thanks to its location right next to Silicon Valley, and the huge amount of tech money that the school has been getting as a result.

This isn’t the only lucky and appreciating investment I’ve made in education.

Another school I went to has since relocated to a richer city. As a result, my diploma became more prestigious and valuable without me doing anything.

And of course, there’s the Dan Ferrari coaching group I was in a few years ago.

Starting in the summer of 2019, I was in Dan’s coaching group for a little over six months.

At the time, Dan was already a super successful copywriter, with a big string of controls for Agora Financial and for The Motley Fool.

But somehow, Dan’s fame has increased significantly since.

​​His name has become much more known in industry.

​​He even appeared as no. 1 in some arbitrary listing of the world’s best active DR copywriters.

​​And I’ve personally noticed people treat me with growing deference whenever I mention I was in Dan’s coaching group — they assume I must have learned some of Dan’s black magic.

So what explains Dan’s growth in status over the past few years?

Some part of it is just time and compounding — Dan has just stuck around and kept working and getting better. He’s also had new wins in the years since. I also have my own pet theory why Dan’s prestige has risen so high over past few years, but that’s another topic, for another time.

For today, I just want to share something that Dan once wrote in one of his once-every-79-years, Halley’s Comet emails:

“Your abilities as a marketer are only capped by how hungry you are to leave a mark.”

What I take from that is the value of high standards, both for ends and means.

​​In other words, if you want A-list skills, and maybe even the results that come with those skills, then it’s good to set high standards for what you find acceptable.

Over the past few days, I’ve been telling you about six different characteristics that make for a positive attitude. So far, I’ve covered 3. The fourth I want to tell you about is exactly this, high standards.

People who develop high standards — for example, athletes recovering from injury, refusing to accept anything but complete recovery, where they can compete and win again — are more positive about the journey, and are more likely to reach the destination than those who are willing to settle for 50%, 30%, or 10% of what’s possible.

Perhaps that makes immediate sense to you.

Or perhaps you feel a bit of resistance to this idea. Perhaps, like me, you think there is value in having modest standards, ones you are sure to achieve.

Well, if that’s what you’re thinking, then I can tell you we still have two more characteristics of positive mindset remaining. And both of those will be particularly relevant to you in case the idea of shooting for the moon sounds like you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

In case you’re interested in reading that when I write it, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.