Copywriting

8 things not to do in your emails

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1. Give people bulleted lists of how to content without any stickiness

2. Use really obstruse, arcane, or recherché language

3. Open up with something vague and fluffy

4. Talk about yourself in a way that’s not relevant to the topic or interesting to your readers

5. Insult or demean your customers

6. Get needy

7. Have a story that goes nowhere and says nothing

8. Have a listicle that’s not 7 or 10 items long

Um. It might seem to you on first impression that I’m telling you not to do some things in emails that I’ve actually done in this very email.

And you know what they say about first impressions.

They come before second impressions.

And they tend to be right more often than not.

If you’re wondering why I would deliberately tell you not to do some things that I’m doing myself, well, I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow.

For today, here’s one bonus thing not to do in your emails:

9. Write an email that in no way presells the offer you’re going to make

And on that note, here’s a course that has little to do with today’s email, but that might still be very valuable to you:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

I’m free at last

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I entered the kitchen this morning in a kind of triumph and prepared a celebratory feast.

There was homemade shakshuka with a few fried eggs on top. There was bread, Catalan “pa de vidre,” which I love but rarely eat any more. There was butter, delicious butter, which I also rarely eat any more, except on special occasions.

And all this was a bonus added to the usual horsefeed that I chew through almost every morning.

“Free at last,” I said as a kind of thanksgiving prayer. “Free at last… thank God almighty, I’m free at last to eat whatever I want.”

The reason for today’s triumphal breakfast was that yesterday was the fifth and final day of the fasting mimicking diet I was doing.

If you don’t know the fasting mimicking diet, it’s a special diet, designed by a USC professor of nutrionology/how-not-to-die science.

The fasting mimicking diet has you eat significantly reduced calories and eliminate almost all protein for 5 days. Basically, you eat a bunch of vegetables and some olive oil for 5 days.

Why??

The claim is that this gives you A) all the benefits of an extended water fast, without B) any of the downsides, such as ravening hunger, impractical weakness, and long-term muscle wasting.

The USC professor has all kinds of medical studies, on rats and cats and maybe even owners of cats, to prove that his fasting mimicking diet does as he says.

I don’t have any real way to verify what he’s saying. But I trust the man — because you gotta trust somebody sometime.

I can also tell you that is that this is the second 5-day FMD cycle I’ve done, the first being back in February.

Both times, I was not hungry at all (just bored with eating vegetables all day), I could still go to the gym, and I got the results I was looking for.

As for what those results are, I’ll keep that private. I’m a little shy, and I’m sure you don’t wanna know anyhow.

The point though:

If you come from the world of direct marketing, as I do, you might be jaded, as I am, and think that every new “mechanism” is just some scheming copywriter’s invention.

But on occasion there really are genuine hacks, breakthroughs, secrets, better mousetraps or micetrap, which give you all the benefits without any of the downsides. Or at least something close to it, something close enough.

Once you have a new mechanism like that, your thing sells itself.

I was pretty much sold after hearing the name “fasting mimicking diet.” I guess so were many other people. Celebs such as Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, and Gwyneth Paltrow have done the fasting mimicking diet — and somehow, I doubt that they read the sales or scientific literature on it.

But let’s get to business.

My claim has long been that online courses have a real problem:

The good information inside them flies in one ear and flies right out the other.

It takes repeated reading/listening of a course to remember any of it. That’s bad.

What’s worse, it takes application of the ideas inside a course to actually get any bit of real value from the course.

But most people never do any of that.

I say this in spite of the fact that I myself sell online courses.

But I also sell something completely different:

My Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is not a copywriting course in any traditional sense. It’s not good information. It’s something else.

For more info on this training program that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, with a genuinely new mechanism that gets valuable copywriting skills into your head:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

I know what you did last night

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Well, I can take a guess. It’s not like I have a little camera in your kitchen or anything like that.

​​Also, I don’t know everything you did last night, nor do I want to. But I can take a good guess about at least one thing you did last night.

​​I’m guessing it’s one of the following:

1. You checked the latest Wimbledon results, or

2. You nodded with approval at the news that the far-right party in France lost at the elections, or

3. You read up on the U.S. election, maybe even going so far as to investigate what exactly “Project 2025” is.

So?

Did I guess right?

Did you do any of those things last night?

If you did, you may now marvel at the amazing clairvoyant powers of Cavaliere Bejako.

And if you didn’t do any of those three things last night, well, you really should have. At least one. At least statistically speaking.

A few days ago, I made a list of 10 ways to get an idea of what people are thinking about and interested in, right now.

And this morning, I cross-referenced some of these sources of information. Those three things above were the top three things I saw in my CIA-like sleuthing.

I did this research because I’ve been re-reading the Robert Collier Letter Book, which I have come to believe is the most valuable copywriting book ever published.

For example, after reprinting a sales letter that had helped sell 250,000 copies of an 820-page history book (!) by mail (!) in 1923, Collier says the following:

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The point would seem to be that if you can tie in with what people are thinking about and interested in, you can sell anything. And the particular form that your letter takes is far less important than the chord it happens to strike.

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So there you go. Figure out what people are thinking about and interested in, and you can sell almost anything.

Of course, what people are thinking about doesn’t have to be of general interest — something that will show up on Google Trends.

​​Your particular audience might have a unique and specific obsession right now that only a small number of other people share.

But the point is the same. If you can figure out what that obsession is, and if you can tie your sales message into that, then…

Well, would you like to buy something? Then consider this highly topical and highly valuable offer:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

A-pile vs. B-pile marketers

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A few days ago, I exchanged some emails with a business owner who was in a bad way.

“At the moment,” he said, “I’m feeling a bit like Halbert sitting in the dark trying to figure out what to write in that sales letter to get the power back on.”

If you don’t know the story of Gary Halbert, he was a well-known direct marketer and a better-known copywriting guru.

In the early days of his career, Gary was not very successful.

He would often spend his family’s utilities money to pay for stamps for sales letters to market some new scheme.

Those sales letters went out into the world. What came back were orders and some money, but never as many orders or as much money as Gary would have liked. Sometimes not even enough to cover the utilities bills.

The story goes that Gary was sitting in his kitchen one night, in the dark, with no water because he hadn’t paid the bills.

He was sick and tired of the stress and the visible signs of failure all around him.

And then — because that’s what makes a good story — the lights came on. Not in the kitchen, but in Gary’s head.

Gary had his moment of genius.

He figured out a new product and a new way to market it.

The result was a major success — millions of new customers and a multi-million dollar company, built on the back of one good, I mean, perfect, sales letter.

Now that I’ve told you this story, I’d like to propose that it’s proof that Gary Halbert was what I call a B-pile marketer.

We know of Gary today because his “sitting in the dark” moment actually produced a success. But it equally could have produced yet another failure. In fact, more than equally, because new direct marketing tests fail more than they succeed.

Had that happened, maybe nobody would know of Gary Halbert today, just like we don’t know the millions of other B-pile marketers who repeatedly failed and eventually disappeared. ​
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Compare this to marketers I’m calling “A-pile.”

A-pile marketers aren’t well-know either, but that’s because their story is not as dramatic. There’s no “sitting in the dark” moment. Instead, they build large, stable, cash-spewing businesses that work year after year, without ever being at risk of having the lights turned off.

What’s the difference between the A-pile and the B-pile?

Hark unto me, Buckwheat:

The difference is a marketing strategy that has the highest chance of being successful — of bringing back lots and lots of orders and lots and lots of money.

It’s a strategy that Gary Halbert must not have known early in his career. Or maybe he knew it and was just unable to practice it. I know for a fact — because I heard Jay Abraham say it — that it’s something Gary didn’t apply even later in his career, when he shoulda known better.

Maybe this proven, stable, cash-generating strategy went against Gary’s romantic and heroic nature.

If that’s your nature, too, then maybe this strategy won’t be right for you either.

On the other hand, if you’d like to keep the lights on, and keep the orders flowing, without having to produce a moment of genius, you can find this strategy described in detail in chapter 3 here:

https://bejakovic.com/a-pile

Inadequate performance

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Yesterday, my friend Sam wrote me that he had downloaded the presidential debates so he could watch the bloodshed.

This morning, my friend Peter forwarded me a New York Times editorial that’s calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race after his “inadequate performance in the debate.”

And then this afternoon, I met my friend Olga, who spent much of the day in bed, and who said the only thing she has done today is to watch the presidential debate.

Olga told me her impressions of the debate. And then she said, “Maybe the debate’s something you could write about in your newsletter.”

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, the following will not be any kind of shock:

I am completely out of the loop. Permanently. Always.

I didn’t even know there was a presidential debate until friends started chattering to me about it via text and in real life.

I most definitely have not watched it.

And as for writing about the top news of the day in this newsletter… as I told Olga, I would never do that.

Well, obviously I’ve broken that vow with this email. But I didn’t know how else to get the following point across.

My theory is that you gotta pay the piper somewhere.

If you decide to talk about the immediately available stuff, the stuff that hundreds of millions of people are talking about right now on TV, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, among your friends and family, then you gotta try really really hard to have something unique and clever and hot-takey to say.

And even if you try really hard, and even if you expose yourself to looking like a tryhard, odds are good that most days you will fail to say something that hasn’t already been said, better, by a hundred other people, just a few minutes ahead of you.

That to me is an inadequate performance.

On the other hand, if you choose to spend your time and effort reading and watching less available stuff, stuff that’s not being talked about today, or yesterday, or last week, then you have a green, untrammeled field to play in.

For example:

Did you know that the problem of bloody, hateful, two-party elections was solved 2,500 years ago?

Two opposed tribes lived together inside one city’s walls.

They were highly suspicious of each other.

​​Each had a strong us vs. them mentality.

The city was ruled by a king from one tribe, who favored his own and harmed those from the other tribe.

​​Then the king died, or more correctly, he was made to disappear after he showed signs of serious cognitive decline.

How to choose a new king without devolving into civil war?

It didn’t look promising.

Each of the two parties was horrified by the leader of the other side.

Each party absolutely refused to accept the other side’s leader as the new king.

Tensions were rising. Weapons were starting to jangle.

​​So what to do?

Simple. It was the old, “you cut, I choose.”

Specifically, it was decided that the Romans, the party that had just lost its king, would choose a new king from the other tribe, the Sabines. The Sabines could not veto or influence the Romans’ choice.

The Romans chose a quiet, reserved man from the Sabine tribe, named Numa Pompilius.

At first, Numa refused to take command of the city. He liked his quiet life. But after being persuaded that Rome would devolve into civil war without him, he agreed to become king.

Numa reigned for 43 years in peace and prosperity. He founded some of Rome’s most important institutions, such as the pontifex maximus, the 12 month calendar, and the cult of the Vestal Virgins.

Two thousand years later, a clever politician, Niccolo Machiavelli, said Rome owed a greater debt to its second king, Numa, then it did to its first king, Romulus.

Good Lord this has turned into a long email.

​​Don’t write emails like this. Or do. It’s up to you.

If you do choose to write emails like this, I have something that might help. It’s my Insight Exposed course, about my notetaking, journaling, and media-consumption process.

I don’t normally sell this course, for reasons of my own.

But since I’ve already broken one law today, I might as well break two?

If you want Insight Exposed, the order form is below. I will close it down in exactly 24 hours, tomorrow, Sunday, at 8:31pm.

And if you have questions or doubts if this course is right for you, write me before you buy.

​​Here’s how to read stuff others are not reading, and make it useful for your marketing and your life:

https://bejakovic.com/ie/

How copywriters can reposition so business owners chase them

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This morning, I woke up to a bunch of emails as usual. Two stood out.

One was from a business owner I had reached out to, cold, a couple weeks ago.

After that first cold email, we exchanged a few more emails.

And then this past Sunday, we got on a call and talked about working together.

On that call, I listened to him as he told me the details of his business right now and his plans for the future.

His business has doubled each year for the past four years. He would like to double it yet again. I would like to help him.

​​But as I told him on the call, there’s a roadblock in our way. Once he clears that, we could work together.

In the email in my inbox this morning, the business owner was giving me an update on that roadblock (it’s getting cleared, but slowly). He also said he’s just anted up extra money to get the roadblock cleared faster.

In case it’s not obvious what I’m getting at, it seems to me that this business owner is more eager to work with me than I am to work with him. And I’m eager to work with him — that’s why I cold emailed him in the first place.

The second email that stood out in my inbox this morning came from a copywriter. She was inquiring about my Water Into Wine workshop, happening this Thursday. She asked:

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Do you think it will work for someone like me who provides copywriting services?

I can apply what you teach in this workshop to my clients, but I wonder if it will also help my positioning as a copywriter. What are your thoughts?

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My very careful answer to this copywriter is “100% yes.”

As I wrote yesterday, during the Water Into Wine workshop, I will cover one specific repositioning formula. I’ll show how this formula can be used in three separate ways:

1. To give clear, “Oh I get it” positioning to an offer that’s currently vague or unclear

2. To give unique, attractive positioning to a product or service which is not unique or not attractive (yes, sometimes you’re stuck with those)

3. To open up new markets for an offer, where the selling might be easier and where the money might come in bigger, heavier bags

I’ll have examples of how smart marketers have used this repositioning formula in niches like bizopp, finance, weight loss, copywriting, baseball, and of course, dentistry.

I’ll also have examples of how this formula can be used to sell offers of different formats, including courses, coaching, certifications, tickets to live events, and done-for-you services.

One example I’ll include will be of repositioning copywriting services.

​​In fact, it will be an example using me and the business owner above. This repositioning formula, applied in way #3 above, is exactly what I used when I cold emailed him.

So yes, it’s possible to use this formula to reposition copywriting services.

The only question is whether you will want to apply what I tell you.

Well, that, plus whether you will actually be there on the workshop so you can hear me tell it.

The workshop is happening this Thursday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. It will also be recorded in case you cannot make it live.

The price to get in is $197.

I’m limiting the number of spots to 20.

Some have already been claimed, more will be claimed today.

I don’t have forward facing payment link for this. I want to first talk to everyone who’s interested, and make sure this workshop is a fit.

So the only way to get in is to first write me an email and express interest.

One way or another, the workshop is nearing. If you’re interested, it might make sense to hit reply right now, so we can talk and see if this workshop is a good fit for you.

Just how bad are you at multitasking?

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Nobody called me out on it. But yesterday, I made a kind of preposterous claim.

​​I was talking about the following headline:

“If you’ve got 20 minutes a month, I guarantee to work a financial miracle in your life”

… and I said that his was an example of a concrete promise, something real and palpable.

As of this writing, nobody wrote me to challenge me on that. So let me do your job for you:

“Really Bejako? A ‘financial miracle in your life’? That’s your example of a concrete and real and palpable promise?”

Yes, really. And to prove it to you, let me tell you a story.

This story involves a man. A man named Tony. Tony Slydini.

Little Italian guy.
​​
Wrinkled, like a salted cod fish.

Spoke with a heavy Italian accent.

Performed magic tricks like you wouldn’t believe.

One of Slydini’s magic tricks involved making a bunch of paper balls disappear, only to appear in a hat that was empty at the start of the trick.

Before making each paper ball disappear, Slydini performed a few elaborate hand gestures. He’d wave the paper ball around in front of him, close it in his hand, sprinkle some invisible magic dust on it, open his hand, close it again, etc.

If you haven’t seen this trick, I have a link to it at the end.

​​But before you go watch, read on. Because I’m about to spoil the magic for you, and that’s important.

How does Slydini make each paper ball disappear?

​​And how does he teleport them inside the hat?

If you don’t want to know, then stop reading now. Otherwise, I’ll tell you.

Still here?

Fine. Here’s the trick behind the magic, from an article in Scientific American:

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Slydini deposits the vanished paper balls into the hat when he reaches inside the hat to fetch invisible magic dust. This mock action prevents the audience from assigning an additional, key intent to the move: to unload the paper balls inside the hat, to later reveal them at the trick’s finale.

Just as our visual system strains to see the vase and the two faces at once, we struggle to conceive of a motion that has a dual motivation: to put and to fetch. Even when it should be apparent to every member of the audience, and to every YouTube viewer, that Slydini’s action of fetching magical powder inside the hat must be a ruse.

In other words, even when the ostensible purpose is preposterous, we still can’t consider an alternative explanation.

That’s how bad our brains are at multitasking.

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Our brains are sticky. This creates some strange phenomena.

Give me a warm cup of coffee to hold. Then show me a stranger’s face. I’ll evaluate the stranger as looking friendly.

Point my attention to the 20 minutes I know I have. Then make me a promise of a financial miracle in my life. I’ll evaluate your promise as concrete and real.

Don’t believe that it works?

You can see Slydini’s trick on YouTube. Link’s below.

​​You now know how the trick is done. But watch it yourself — it takes all of 4 minutes — and witness just how bad you are at multitasking:

 

If you’ve got 2 minutes right now, I guarantee more response to your offers

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A few weeks ago, I joined JK Molina’s email list. You might have heard of JK — he’s kind of the marketing coach to all the coaches who coach coaches.

Anyways, in between the steady flow of familiar promises – “make $100k per month with just Google docs and email” — I found an interesting persuasion idea in one of JK’s emails. Says JK:

“You get better leads by offering to take something they ALREADY HAVE into something they DON’T.”

Huh? The first time I read this, I had no idea what JK’s on about. But an example helped:

Bad ad: “How to make $30,000”

Good ad: “Turn the old car you’ve got parked in your garage into $30,000.”

A-ha. A dim, flickering light came on in my head.

And thanks to that flickering light, I could once again see Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullet #3. Gary asked which of these investing headlines won:

A:

The Millionaire Maker:
Can he make YOU rich, too?

B:

If you’ve got 20 minutes a month,
I guarantee to work a financial miracle in your life

As you can probably guess by now, the answer was B. Gary says it “worked like a charm and handily beat the previous champ.”

Gary’s explanation for why B won is that we’ve all gotten jaded by big promises, but the if-then structure somehow manages to disable normal critical faculties.

Maybe that’s really it.

Or maybe it’s what JK says above.

Maybe it’s that we don’t respond to promises unless we feel they are concrete and real. Unless those promises are anchored to something we can touch, taste, or in case of 20 minutes, simply know with 100% certainty that we have on us, right here, right now.

So try it yourself and see.

​​Use the if-then structure, or promise to turn the junk in your prospect’s garage into a stack of $100 bills.

I guarantee this will increase response to your offers. And if it doesn’t, come back tomorrow, and I’ll give you a new idea, for free, and keep giving you new ideas, until one of them does increase your response.

Also:

If you’ve got two thumbs and a smart phone, then I promise you a new way to fascinate your email subscribers every day. For more information on that:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Persuasion, Plan B:

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This past week, Lawrence Bernstein shared, via his Ad Money Machine, a very risky but very effective direct mail sales letter that ran some 15 years ago.

The teaser headline on the envelope read,

“Retirement, Plan B:”

… and then in smaller font, the copy went on to explain how you could now enroll and collect up to $120,000 each year, for the rest of your life, in the form of “pension paychecks.”

Pension paychecks?

As Lawrence said, “I don’t have the risk tolerance for such a promo, nor the legal team to cover me in case. But there’s no denying the success of this promo, based on its longevity.”

Maybe there’s something we can learn from this promo, without crossing over into risky legal waters.

Enter “Persuasion, Plan B.”

Persuasion, Plan A is to make your best argument. To give your audience the big promise. To pile on the reasons why, the testimonials, the features, the benefits, the bonuses, the urgency.

In many situations, that will work just fine.

But what if it don’t?

Persuasion, Plan B is what you can try then. It’s what you can witness in the promo above.

And it’s to suddenly whip up a creative repackaging that sums up, often in just a word or two, all the appeals in your offer, and suggests other appeals also, even if they’re not really there in your offer. (It’s not always illegal.)

I’m thinking about putting together a one-evening workshop about this. About using this kind of repackaging in your headlines, your body copy, your emails, and most importantly and profitably, in the positioning and packaging of your offers.

Persuasion, Plan B.

Is this workshop something you’d be interested in? If so, hit reply and let me know. If there’s enough interest, I’ll put it on. Otherwise, we can stick with just Plan A.

How to deliver a racist rant

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Before we dive into the racism, I’d like to remind you of my Copy Riddles program.

​​Somebody once told me that Copy Riddles is expensive, considering it just teaches you one niche copywriting skill.

I have to agree. But I also have more to say about it at the end of this email.

For now, let me tell you about the late great Patrice O’Neal.

As you might know, Patrice was black — a fact that will be relevant in just a moment.

Patrice was also the favorite comedian of a huge number of top comedians of the past few decades. Bill Burr, Norm Macdonald, Andrew Schulz — those are a just a few top comedians I found after a two-minute Google search, who all said there was nobody as funny as Patrice.

I’m using that to set up a contrast to the following. Because racist rants aren’t funny, are they?

Maybe they are. Or maybe they can be.

Take for example, Patrice’s HBO special, One Night Stand. It aired in 2005.

Patrice opens up without any of the usual, “Good to be back, how are you guys doing” fluff. Instead, he launches straight into his material. He says:

“So how many people are getting sick of the Hindu obstacle course at the airport?”

The audience laughs uncomfortably. They’re sensing this might not be stuff they should be laughing at, and they’re wondering where Patrice is leading them.

In fact, the audience is right to be wary.

Patrice is about to launch into a 5-minute racist comedy rant, mocking and imitating Indian people who work at airport security and who run convenience stores.

“I don’t mind foreigners,” says Patrice at one point, “but don’t be FROM your country.” And after he finishes mocking Indian accents, Patrice moves on to Mexicans.

This is the kind of stuff that wouldn’t fly for white comedians since the days of Don Rickles in the late 60s and early 70s.

And in fact, it wouldn’t fly for Patrice either, not in 2005. Except for one thing.

In between saying “How many people are tired of the Hindu obstacle course” and launching into his racist impressions, Patrice delivers one miraculous, life-saving line.

​​It goes like this:

“So how many people are tired of the Hindu obstacle course at airport? [He pauses while a few nervous laughs acknowledge the inappropriateness of this statement. Then he continues] I mean… I’m a racist, but it’s getting…”

… and here Patrice continues into the rest of his set, with the audience suddenly loose and laughing, and ready to laugh more at the rest of his jokes, racist though they are.

My point is not that you should be racist.

My point is also not that you should laugh along with racists, or condone racist behavior.

My point is simply how much you can get away with, if you correctly anticipate your audience’s objection, and call that objection out ahead of time. Even if you don’t do anything else but call it out.

Now back to my Copy Riddles course.

It’s true that Copy Riddles is expensive. It’s also true it only teaches you one copywriting skill, and a niche one at that.

On the other hand, experts in the field, like Ben Settle, John Carlton, and Gary Halbert, have all said that this one niche skill is what all copywriting comes down to.

All these guys have made millions of dollars from copywriting, and some have specifically credited millions in earnings just to this one skill.

When you look at it that way, maybe Copy Riddles isn’t so expensive after all.

Of course, it’s going to depend on your situation, and what you’re looking to do.

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles, and see if it could be a fit in your quest to write more effectively, and even make good money in the process, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/