Copywriting

How a copywriting tortoise can compete with dozens of hares

by

A true but ridiculous story:

​​One summer, through no real fault or merit of my own, I lucked into a job as a well-paid management consultant. I did it even though I have no background or qualifications for such a position.

I was walking down the street, around the corner from my apartment, and I noticed a plaque on the wall with an impressive-sounding company name.

“I wonder what they do,” I said to myself. “I’ll check when I get home.”

It turned out the company built software for banks. So I sent an email to their public-facing email address, saying how I have a background in economics and software development (true enough), and that I’m interested in working with them during the summer.

An email came back two minutes later. It was from the CEO of the company. “When could you come into the office to talk?”
​​
He hired me a couple of days later, at what was then a royal sum of money for me, to do some management consulting about how he should run his company.

Second story:

Back in 2019, a call went out among subscribers to Ben Settle’s print newsletter. A publishing company in the real estate space was looking for “A-list copywriters” to write VSLs.

For more info, interested applicants were to write to the CEO of the company.

I really wanted this job, but it took me about a week to finally write to the guy.

During that week, I’m sure 50 to 100 other would-be “A-list” copywriters wrote in to apply the same job with their best-crafted pitches.

But that’s not what I did.

Instead, I spent that week researching this publishing company, and writing two new leads for their current hot promotion.

I heard back from the CEO as soon as I sent my leads in. He was impressed I’d done that up-front work, and he liked the copy I’d written.

A few days later, he hired me for a big project. He later hired me for a second project. Not long after that, I got several referrals from him, which also resulted in lots of new work.

I’m not telling you either of these stories as specific strategies for winning projects. ​​When it comes to copywriting clients, I’ve never had much success with cold emailing. And I don’t recommend just doing free work whenever somebody asks you for it.

The point I want to get across is simply this:

In any collection of 50 smart, hard working, gung-ho hares, I’m unlikely to stand out and win the prize. I’m just not very fast, or very ambitious.

On the other hand, in a race involving just me, a slow and lazy tortoise, my odds are much better.

Maybe your totem animal is equally uncompetitive. So instead of working to make yourself into a better competitor, my suggestion is to look for ways to make the competition a non-issue.

One last tip:

While I haven’t had much success with cold copywriting work, I have gotten two good clients that way.

​​And while I don’t recommend doing free work whenever somebody asks you for it, I have also done free work for prospective clients with great success, including some I cold emailed.

I talk about that in much more detail in a training I call Niche Expert Cold Emails.

​​This training doesn’t cost any money, but you do have to do something to get access to it. In case you are interested, here are the full details:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/​​​​​​​​

Cold email to future email marketing work in 10 days

by

11 days ago, a marketer named Jon Williams wrote in to take me up on my Niche Expert Cold Emails offer. I sent Jon the promised training video. Yesterday, he wrote back with the following result (edited slightly):

Hi John!

That didn’t take long at all.

I just got your reply with a better email if possible technique for cold outreach and it gained me some future email marketing work as a kind of white label service for a guy in my hometown of all places lol.

How it worked out:

I downloaded his video making guide and got onto his list. I actually just wanted the guide and was all good with it as it helps me out making educational videos to attract more clients.

Anyhow, I noticed I didn’t actually get the link to download the template.

Worse than that, the email went to spam folder immediately.

After checking, I found it and emailed a reply to him directly saying it went to spam and after running in a quick diagnostic, I found out what was causing that error & told him how to fix it, for free.

(I know it’s a little different than your technique)

He was thrilled to hear about that because he’s needed to fix it and just hadn’t taken the time to fix it before I replied to his email.

After he’d emailed me back a working link the conversation just went from there when he asked “do you specialize in email marketing?”

We just had our first a conversation / intro call yesterday over zoom!

Here’s an ugly truth from my lean-and-hungry freelancing days:

Back when I was hunting for clients, I tried cold emailing on a few different occasions.

Each time, I found it a frustrating waste of time and effort.

But like Jon’s story above shows, cold email can sometimes produce good results, and it can even do so quickly.

The key in my experience is not to get invested in any one lead. Either in terms of your emotions… or in terms of the work you put in to reach out to them.

I know that goes against a lot of cold email “wisdom” out there.

​​”Wisdom” says you should separate yourself by researching your lead’s family history and his dog’s name… writing a short novel, for free, featuring the lead’s ancestors and his dog… then publishing the novel on Amazon under your cold email lead’s name… then emailing a screenshot of your ghostwritten book along with any earnings the book has made and a message that says, “If this message happens to reach you, can we please please for the love of patience please get on a call?”

On the other hand:

I’m also not suggesting you just spam every potent client with the same canned cold email, regardless of how drunkenly clever you make it. I tried that also. It doesn’t work either, or at least it never did for me.

So how exactly do you make cold emails work?

One possible strategy is described up there in Jon’s comment.

Another two strategies are what I talk about in the Niche Expert Cold Email training. These are the only two cold email strategies that led me to client work (both led to sizeable clients).

​​And if for some reason I absolutely had to win a client today via cold email… or alternately have an anvil dropped on my head like Wile E. Coyote… then these two strategies are what I would reach for and use.

So here’s the deal:
​​
Niche Expert Cold Emails is a free training I put out last January.

But it’s really only “free” as in “direct-response free.” Meaning you still gotta do something to get me to send it to you.

​​But if you do want this training, and you want to see what you would have to do, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

How to write for influence

by

A while back, while pondering lazily how I could become more successful in life, I came across the article:

“How To Be Successful”

“Hmmm maybe I will read this article,” I said to myself, “and it will tell me the secret I have been missing.”

It looked like a good bet.

The article had 894 upvotes on a popular news aggregator. It had 300 comments. And it was linked to repeatedly ever since it was published, popping up every few months, each time with a big new response.

So what did this article say to justify this level of influence and interest?

Well, it had 13 insightful and surprising ideas such as:

* Work hard
* Focus
* Build a network

No?

​​You say these ideas aren’t tickling you with their novelty?

You don’t feel any insight from hearing these secrets of success?

Well, that’s kind of my point.

The article is solid. But it’s hardly novel or uniquely insightful.

It could have been written by some diligent high schooler in a 2,000 word Quora response.

But if the quality of the content is not it, what possibly explains the success of this “How to be successful” article?

Is it the presentation? The copy in the headline? The story in the lead? Is it just blind luck?

I’ll quit teasing you.

The article was written by Sam Altman. Altman is a 37-year-old tech investor worth some $250 million.

At age 26, Altman became president of the startup incubator Y Combinator (Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase).

Currently, he is the CEO of OpenAI, the Elon Musk- and Peter Thiel-backed research lab that is looking to replace every creative job on the planet with better, faster, cheaper software.

Maybe none of that means too much to you.

So the point I am trying to make is that within the venture capital and tech world, Altman probably could sign his name on a cocktail napkin… then take a photo of his napkin… post it on Twitter… and get thousands of people liking his autographed napkin photo and enthusing, “This! This is what makes the difference between the hugely successful and all the wannabes!”

And that is how you write for influence.

First, you become somebody famous, admired, and elite. And then you say whatever you like, even if it’s just “work hard.” People will still upvote, share, and spread your message on their own.

That’s not to say Altman’s “How to be successful” advice is not solid. It probably really is where it’s at.

Just nobody would hear the message it if it wasn’t coming from the mouth of Sam Altman.

But since it is coming from him, maybe you will hear it. Maybe you will even hear it right now.

So in case you are more ambitious than I am, and you want to read all of Altman’s 13 well-trodden points, and 1000x your chances of becoming a lightning success, here’s the full article:

https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful

How to get really rich in sales and marketing

by

One afternoon a few years ago, I was sitting by the beach in Barcelona, eating my empanada and trying to mind my own business, when I saw an Indian guy selling beach blankets.

He was talking to a group of women who were interested but not yet decided on buying.

He sweet talked them a little bit.

He answered some questions.

He applied a bit of pressure at the right moments.

Eventually, he convinced them to buy.

He was about to close the sale when the women decided that they wanted another pattern of beach blanket after all.

The guy hung his head.

“No problem,” he seemed to say. And he jogged across the beach for a few hundred yards to get the other pattern from his stash.

He jogged back, handed over the correct blanket, and finally closed the sale.

While I was watching this, all I could think is how much work and skill it had taken for this guy to close this one sale, which probably netted him a profit of a dollar or two.

And it’s just about the same level of work and skill that it would take for a $100 or $1,000 or maybe even $10,000 sale.

Point being, it’s not really what you do that matters so much as who you do it for.

You can have the same skills. Do the same work. Maybe even make the same offer. But find a hungrier market, a richer market, a more invested market, and you will make more money, while having an easier time doing it.

At least that’s my inspirational message for you for today.

This message ties into my 11th Commandment of A-list Copywriters.

11th Commandment? Maybe you thought there were only 10?

Nope. There is an 11th apocryphal A-list commandment, discovered only in 2018, on an audio cassette buried in a clay vessel at the bottom of a flooded cave in western Ethiopia.

If you’d like to find out what that apocryphal 11th commandment is, then make sure you take me up on the offer at the end of my 10 Commandments book.

And if you haven’t got a copy of that book yet, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

About my semi-confessional love note to the wrong girl (and my lifelong history of sending such notes to the wrong people)

by

When I was in 10th grade, I had a light-to-moderate crush on this girl in my English class, Sarah K.

One day, while we were in class, I wrote Sarah some kind of a note. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote. It was not a full-on confession of love. More like a semi-confession, veiled in some kind of inside joke.

The class was seated in an L-shaped arrangement of desks. Sarah’s desk was in front of and perpendicular to mine.

I folded up the note.

I waited for the opportune moment.
​​
And I tossed the note from where I sat to Sarah’s desk.

But Sarah didn’t notice. She was busy writing something. In fact, everyone was busy writing something. Well, except me.

“Psst, Sarah!” I tried to get her attention.

But in my characteristically careless way, I forgot that Sarah K. shared the desk with Sara L.

Sara L. looked up from her writing. She saw my hopeful-then-terrified face. And then she spotted the note on the desk.

Sara L. picked up the note. Unfolded it. Tried to parse the meaning of whatever I had written for Sarah K.

Sara L. then frowned, shook her head a little, and gave me a disapproving look. It said, “You are SO weird.” She crumpled up the note and threw it over her shoulder.

Well, that was a long time ago. It doesn’t sting much any more.

​​But really, how little things change.

Yesterday, you may have been surprised to get an email from me with the subject line “Death of a postcard.”

I meant to send that email just to the 20 people who are the first subscribers to my Most Valuable Postcard.

But instead, I ended up sending the email to my entire list. Years of daily ritual clicking is a hard habit to break.

I realized my mistake only a few moments after I sent out the email.

I literally groaned. Because here’s something you might or might not know about me:

In spite of the frequent typos, missing articles, and ungrammatical sentences in my emails (a consequence of how I write, a topic for another time), I actually hate making mistakes.

The memory of even a tiny mistake can keep me up at night, or startle me awake in the morning.

And sending out a semi-confessional note to a mass of people who were not supposed to get it — well, that’s a less tiny mistake than just a typo.

Like I said, I groaned.

And then, in the very next moment, I took a deep breath.

I reached into my mental library. I pulled out my copy of Daniel Throssell’s Email Copywriting Compendium. ​​And I flipped the mental pages until I got to rule #101.

“Aha,” I said, “here we go. Here’s the fix for this mess.”

I won’t tell you what Daniel’s rule #101 is. If you’ve bought the Email Copywriting Compendium already, you can reach for it now in your mental bookshelf, or at least pull it up on your computer, and look up rule #101 yourself.

And if you haven’t bought the Email Copywriting Compendium yet, well…

Daniel certainly doesn’t need my help in selling it. And since so many people on my list are also on Daniel’s list, I’m not sure what help I can give.

Still, I have been in a giving mood lately. And I have been sharing resources that I personally find valuable. So I will link to Daniel’s Compendium below.

If you write daily emails, I encourage you to get it and read it. Maybe even twice. That’s how many times I’ve read it so far, and I might read it again.

And in case you’re wondering:

This is not an affiliate link. It’s also not part of any kind of JV, cross-promo, list-swap deal with Daniel.

I’m just linking to Daniel’s Compendium because a) you might get value out of it and b) in gratitude over that rule #101. Plus a few other of Daniel’s rules, which I’ve peppered into this email.

​​Maybe you can spot these rules in action. If not, here’s where to go:

https://persuasivepage.com/compendium/

Excluded by Amazon: The book that’s too powerful to promote

by

Yesterday, as I finished up my email promoting Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind, I rubbed my hands together and started a reverie:

I imagined myself sitting in the shade, under a tiny palm tree, by a tiny beach, sipping a very tiny beer, and eating a very, very tiny steak.

After all, I was planning to put in an Amazon affiliate link at the end of yesterday’s email.

Depending on how many people actually took me up on my recommendation to get Brown’s quality, value-packed book, I might make $0.14 in affiliate commissions… or maybe $0.22… or who knows, if I was really persuasive… even $0.47!

That won’t buy a proper vacation even in a reverie, but a tiny vacation? Sure.

But then this tiny reverie was rudely popped. As I clicked to get the affiliate link, Amazon told me off:

“This product is one of the Amazon Associates Program Excluded Products. We do not support direct linking to this product. Please direct customers to another product or the category for this product instead.”

Excluded? Another Product? After I’d written the email???

I decided to invest a few minutes into threatening and cursing my laptop. That produced no result. So I looked around, made sure nobody had seen me, and pulled myself together.

I dug into why some products are excluded from the Amazon affiliate program. It turns out there are only three reasons why:

1. It’s alcohol

2. It’s an external promotional page linked to by an Amazon property

3. The third-party seller requested that the product be excluded

Brown’s book, by being a book, and by being on Amazon and not an external page, must fall into the third category.

In other words, like I wrote yesterday, maybe the information in this book really is too powerful.

Maybe Brown himself wants to keep it hush-hush. Maybe he only wants a select few, those who are cool enough, smart enough, mature enough, to read this book.

Maybe he wants to keep this book from appearing on a bunch of SEO-optimized top 10 lists and Medium filler articles and “most underrated” email newsletters.

So let’s see if that added information makes the book more attractive to you.

Whether you click the link below or don’t, I’m eating boiled chicken breast either way. I mean, I’m not getting paid anything by Amazon if you buy this book, and even if I were, it wouldn’t buy me steak tonight.

Before you go, if you want to hear more from me about excluded, possibly too powerful, insider information, then sign up for my email newsletter. And now, here’s the link to Brown’s book:

https://bejakovic.com/tricks

The destructive power of analogy

by

Today I’d like to start by sharing an inspirational quote:

“If you feel you’re under-motivated, consider this: the word ‘motivation’ is used only by people who say they don’t have it. People who are ‘motivated’ rarely use such a term to describe themselves. They just get on with the task at hand. ‘Lack of motivation’ is an excuse: it’s giving a name to not just getting the job done.”

I read that in Derren Brown’s book, Tricks of the Mind. Brown seems like somebody I might have become in another life, had I only craved attention instead of shying away from it. And so when I read Brown’s quote, I nodded along and said, “Hmm that’s interesting. Maybe that’s even profound. Hey maybe there’s hope for me!”

Well, it wasn’t really me saying that. It was the little angel who usually sits upon my right shoulder.

“Psst, you there,” said the little devil who usually sits upon my left shoulder. “You wanna go smoke some cigars and drink some hooch? Or do you wanna hear why that D. Brown quote is bunk?”

“Err no,” I said. “This quote is inspiring. Please don’t ruin it for me. I’d like to believe it. Plus it makes sense. After all, if motivated people don’t know the feeling of being motivated, clearly it’s not a real thing.”

“Well let me ask you this,” said the little devil. “Do you know any 9-year-old kids?”

“No.”

“Well pretend like you do. Or just think back to when you were 9. Do you ever remember waking up in the morning after a blessed 10 hours of deep sleep… jumping out of bed… and with a stretch and a big smile on your face, saying, ‘Boy I feel so healthy today!'”

“Oh no…”

“Yeah, that’s right. Kids don’t talk like that, at least not the vast majority, the ones who have been perfectly healthy their whole life. But does that mean that there is no such thing as health? That you can’t be in good health or in bad health? Or by extension, that there’s no such thing as motivation and lack of m—”

“Get thee behind me Satan!” I yelled. But my mood was already spoiled and the quote above was ruined for me.

Maybe I managed to ruin it for you as well. If so, it was all for a good cause. I just wanted to illustrate the destructive power of analogy.

Fact is, Brown might really be right. There might not be any such thing as motivation.

But the fact he tried to prove it in a specific way (“motivated people never use the word”) was easy to spoil with my analogy to kids and health. And maybe, just maybe, your brain made the same leap after that which my brain did.

“Well, health is real… and if health and motivation are alike in this one way… then motivation must be real.”

​​But that’s not proven anywhere.

Anyways, now I’m getting into ugly logic which is really not what persuasion or this email are about.

I just want to point out that, if you want to persuade somebody of something, or if you want to dissuade somebody of something, then the most subtle and often the most persuasive thing you can do is to take two pushpins and a piece of string.

​​Stick one pushpin into an apple. Stick the other into an orange. Tie the string between the pushpins. Make it tight.

And then hold up your creation to the world and say, “Draw your own conclusions! But to me, these two look fundamentally the same! Just look at the string that connects them!”

Anyways, D. Brown does not talk much about analogies in his Tricks of the Mind. That’s his only omission. Because this book really has everything you need to persuade and influence — and from somebody who is both a serious student and a serious practitioner of all this voodoo.

In fact, the last time I mentioned this book in one of my emails, a successful but low-key marketer wrote in to tell me:

John!

Maybe you didn’t get the memo! You can’t tell people about Derren Brown’s “Tricks of the Mind”.

It’s against the rules.

As a friend of mine said, “That’s too much in one book. Don’t give the chimps tools.”

LOL

Well, maybe my mysterious reader is right. So don’t buy a copy of Derren Brown’s book. But if you do want occasional chimp-safe tools from that book, or from other valuable persuasion and influence sources, then you might like my daily newsletter.

Use the Force to avoid copy that’s too long

by

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy that’s pretty much the one we live in, I was wasting time doing “research” (ie. not writing when I should have been). But at least I discovered the following curious fact:

George Lucas’s early drafts for the Star Wars script talked about “the Force of Others.”

These early drafts gave detailed explanations of what the Force of Others was, how it tied into a “Kyber crystal,” and how there was a “Bogan” side and an “Ashla” side of it.

Following his better instincts, Lucas stripped out all the explaining in the final draft. He got rid of the crystal and the Bogan nonsense, and dropped “the Others” and simply called it “the Force.” Star Wars went on to become a pretty, pretty big hit.

There’s a copywriting lesson here. But first, here’s another illustration:

Back in 1982, Darryl Hall was writing the prototype of a song called Maneater. He was stumbling on the last line of the chorus. “Oh here she comes… She’s a maneater and a …”

Hall can’t remember the original final line, because his girlfriend told him to “drop that shit at the end.” So he did. Maneater went to the top of the charts ​and stayed there longer than any other Hall & Oates song. Hall said that cutting down the last line made all the difference.

Conventional direct response wisdom says that longer copy outperforms shorter copy. It’s been proven over and over in many tests.

Copywriter Victor Schwab, who wrote How to Write a Good Advertisement, definitely supported the use of longer copy. But Schwab also wrote the following:

“Some ads don’t need much factual under-pinning… The copy about some products can soar successfully — without ‘coming a cropper.’ An abundance of factual material merely inhibits its flight. If too explicit about the “why” and “hows,” such copy pulls the reader’s imagination up short.” ​​

I can’t give you a recipe for when you should take out the “whys” and “hows” of your copy. I think it’s a matter of having a good feel for your market and your product, and knowing what they need to hear — and what not — in order to make the sale.

In other words, trust your intuition. Or use the Force. The Bogan Force. Of Others. And stop yourself if you say too much.

I should have stopped there. But I have one final thing to say. I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to get my emails, much like what you just read, you can sign up here.

Ben Settle’s secret three-act content strategy revealed

by

A few days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line:

“Ben Settle emergency emails in support of Copy Riddles?”

That email officially had the highest open rate of all my emails over the past 10 days. I don’t know if that was because of the subject line. But for my own reasons, I will run with it and pander to your apparent tastes, by telling you a three-act Ben Settle story:

Back in 2016, Ben released a tiny Kindle book titled, Persuasion Secrets of the World’s Most Charismatic & Influential Villains.

The villains book turned into a sleeper hit.

As I write this, the book has 286 Amazon reviews and an Amazon ranking of 42,849. From what I know of Amazon publishing, that means the book continues to sell 4-5 copies every day, six years after its publication.

I reckon the villains book didn’t make Ben a tremendous pile of cash, not directly, not compared to other parts of his business.

But it almost certainly got him a large and constant new source of highly qualified leads. And it certainly gave him positioning and exposure in the direct response industry.

For a while, everyone associated Ben with the villains concept. It truly made him unique. And this probably led many more highly qualified leads trudging towards his hut, banging on his door, and demanding to be sold something.

So what did Ben do next? Perhaps you know act two. In 2018, he released Persuasion Villains, volume II.

Act three came in 2019. That’s when Ben released Persuasion Villains, volume III.

Which brings us to the present day and a tweet I came across a few days ago.

The tweet was written by one Matt Koval, who was apparently a big face at YouTube for over 10 years. Koval was the one whipping those early and confused YouTubers into the all-consuming media machine that YouTube has become.

Anways, Koval was tweeting in response to some YouTube influencer’s new video, and he wrote:

“One of the earliest pieces of content strategy advice we used to give at @YouTube was to try and turn your viral hit into a whole series – and it’s great to see @RyanTrahan do just that. It’s a TON of work, but no doubt a huge boost to his channel.”

But really, what is Koval’s “series” idea more than the standard DR practice of testing out different sales appeals in your ads? And then doubling down on the winners, for as long as they continue to pay for themselves?

As far as I know, Ben isn’t releasing any more villains books. This probably means he has milked this franchise to the point where putting out a new villains book isn’t worth the opportunity cost.

But maybe you’ve had a hit idea that you haven’t milked dry yet. Whether in your YouTube videos, Kindle books, or email subject lines. So rather than trying to be creative and have an all-new hit, turn your proven hit into a series.

In other news:

As I write this, I only have one Kindle book out there, my 10 Commandments book.

The 10 Commandments book hasn’t been as much of a success as Ben’s original villains book. But it has sold a lot of copies, and it continues to make sales. More importantly, it continues to drive highly qualified prospects to my email list.

And who knows? Maybe I will take my own advice.

Maybe I will lumber up the mountain, get a few more stone tablets of copywriting commandments, and write a second installment in this series.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read volume I, here’s where you can get your very own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

A push-button storytelling trick for a stronger second draft

by

Let me try to charm you with a pretty exciting story I witnessed a few days ago:

I was sitting on a stool at a seafood restaurant at the main Barcelona market, waiting for my order of oysters and fried squid. Suddenly, I saw it. A lobster, on a bed of ice, on top of a seafood display shelf in front of me. But the little guy was still alive!

The lobster started walking backwards, off the plate, onto the glass counter. The nearest restaurant patrons moved away. One tried to grab the lobster from behind. But the lobster turned around, and the brave patron backed off. For a moment, it looked like a panic might start.

But then the owner of the restaurant, a middle-aged woman with a pixie cut and a big smile on her face, came, confidently picked up the lobster, and put him back on the plate of ice, pushing the poor bastard down to keep him from walking off again. The end.

Pretty charming story, right? Pretty… pretty… charming.

But can we inject some electricity into this pretty charming story? Can we force it to come alive, like Frankenstein’s monster? Well, let’s push the button and see:

I was balancing on a stool at a seafood restaurant at the main Barcelona market, counting down the seconds for my order of oysters and fried squid. Suddenly, my eyes locked in on it. A lobster, on a bed of ice, on top of a seafood display shelf in front of me. But the little guy still twitched with life!

The lobster scrambled backwards, off the plate, onto the glass counter. The nearest restaurant patrons fell out of their seats. One tried to coral the lobster from behind. But then the lobster spun around, and the brave patron backed off, arms up. For a moment, it felt like the place might erupt in a panic.

But then the owner of the restaurant, a middle-aged woman with a pixie cut and a big smile on her face, swept in, confidently grabbed the lobster, and plopped him back on the plate of ice, crunching the poor bastard down to keep him from escaping again. The end.

Better, no? I mean, maybe a little ham-handed, maybe a little freshman-writing-class-y, but the idea is sound. And the idea is this, from a quick story once whispered by Hollywood screenwriter Larry Ferguson:

“There was a girl who came to me with her first screenplay. It was a good first shot. I gave her some advice. I told her, ‘I want you to go home and take a yellow Marks-A-Lot and highlight every verb in this 120-page screenplay, and then I want you to read them out loud and ask yourself, Can I find a stronger verb.'”

So there you go. If your current draft is a good first shot, highlight your verbs. Sweat and struggle a bit until you hit upon stronger verbs. And you might discover you’ve created something sexy, something truly alive.

But you know what?

Stronger verbs, and stronger words in general, are just one good way to edit your copy to make it more biting and bothersome.

There are at least six other editing techniques, which I’ve seen A-list copywriters using regularly, either consciously or unconsciously. A few of these techniques are much more subtle, and maybe even more effective, than just reaching for stronger words.

If you’d like to own all of these techniques, you can find them in Round 20 of Copy Riddles. Round 20 is all about taking that pretty, pretty good copy you’ve written and turning it into something that wounds people with intrigue and curiosity, even if they can’t quite pinpoint why.

And Round 20 isn’t just a bunch of boring how-to. Instead, just like the rest of Copy Riddles, it forces you to practice each technique yourself, and compare your results to the results that A-list copywriters got.

After all, the only thing better than a demonstration you can see… is a demonstration you can try out — I mean, play with, fondle, and feel — yourself.

Enrollment for Copy Riddles closes later tonight, at 12 midnight PST. That’s less than 12 hours away. To sign up while there’s still time:

https://copyriddles.com/