Copywriting

Double-checking the windows of sales escape

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A true story, I mean, analogy:

A couple weeks ago, I was walking around town when a freak thunderstorm set in. I was only about a couple hundred yards from my apartment, but there was no braving this.

First, hurricane winds picked up, then a torrential downpour, finally large hailstones started beating down.

Along with a few dozen other people, I huddled in the metro station tunnel while the gods wore out their fury.

“Good thing I closed all the windows at home,” I chuckled to myself, as ominous music swelled in the background.

I got home and sure enough—

In the middle of the living room, a ficus ginseng plant, which banker and email-writing career coach Tom Grundy had sent me last year, was lying toppled over on the floor. Soil from the plant was all over the room.

“How did this happen?” I asked, possibly out loud. I walked around the apartment and came across a large puddle. One of the bedrooms was entirely flooded, including the mattress, which had soaked through.

It turns out that the window in that room was shut, but it wasn’t shut tightly enough. The furious wind blew it open, and then the rain and hail flew in, flooding the room, soaking through the mattress, and knocking over the plant in the living room and tossing the soil everywhere.

(The plant survived, by the way. It’s looking at me right now.)

I’m about to try to spin this story of emergency and disaster into a copywriting lesson, if you can handle one of those.

Last night, I hosted one of the Q&A calls for Copy Riddles, as part of the last-ever live cohort I will run of that program.

Several skilled copywriters and marketers submitted their bullets for the weekly CR bullet contest, including the following:

“How you could double your child’s IQ with this doctor-recommended breakfast switch. Page 17”

It’s a great bullet. It’s got a big promise I imagine most parents would respond to… a simple and intriguing mechanism… and proof in that phrase “doctor-recommended.”

There’s only one niggling thing, and it’s that, to my mind at least, the reader could read this and say, “Oh, great to know such a doctor-recommended breakfast switch exists! I’ll ask my pediatrician about it the next time I take the little monster in to see him.”

In other words, there’s a small, minor, minuscule chance, however unlikely, that the reader can be sold entirely on the promise of this bullet… and still won’t buy.

And that’s my analogy for you.

“You gotta close off all the windows and doors of escape for your sale” — maybe you’ve heard that advice before.

I know I did, but it didn’t really sink in for a long time.

In any case, knowing it is not enough, because really you have to know your audience as well, and keep learning about them, and keep shutting off all their paths to escape, including new ones that pop up.

Otherwise, even a seemingly shut window (bear with me here) can blow open unexpectedly, and then you have the sales equivalent of a mess in the living room and water all over the place and a mattress that’s been soaked through.

In other words, you have a lost sale, with good work put in and nothing to show for it. So it makes sense to double-check and triple-check the windows and doors of sales escape, using everything you know already and are learning about your skeptical, guarded, and inert prospects.

All right, analogy over. As for my offer:

While this is the last-ever live cohort for Copy Riddles, this program remains alive as an evergreen training.

Several of the people currently going through it have been through it three or more times already, on their own.

I also have it from a reputable source that Copy Riddles, even without the Q&A calls, is the best way to gain the money-making skill of writing sales bullets, short of being one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs. (I heard this from Vasilis Apostolou, formerly a copywriter at Agora, and now one of Parris’s copy cubs.)

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Once more, yesterday didn’t work out as I planned

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Early this morning, I got back to Barcelona following a 2-week trip that spanned 5 countries.

Diligent readers of this newsletter know that last weekend, as part of this trip, I missed a layover flight, which led to an almost 12-hour, cross-country, cross-corn-field bus ride.

Yesterday, I missed a second layover flight, which led to a 17-hour total trip to get back to Barcelona.

As I sat at Frankfurt airport, uncertain that I would make it back at all before the “airport curfew” struck, and faced with the prospect of spending the night at an awful airport hotel and then another day at the airport, I swore to myself I would never ever travel again, or in fact ever leave the house.

I bring this up because I got a question recently from a long-time reader and customer by the name of Jordan:

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This one might be a bit meta, but how did you start traveling and how do you travel so much? Did you start before having the income from this newsletter or after?

I’m also looking to travel more and I’ve found it intriguing how others do it. your insights are always very unique though.

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I don’t feel I travel very much these days, certainly not compared to how I did a few years ago, when I was living in Airbnbs for almost 2 years straight. I got burned out after that, and it took me a couple years to develop any interest in taking a trip further than the local grocery store.

I also don’t really have all that much to say about “how to travel.”

I personally had zero obligations or restrictions when I decided to uproot and start living like a high-class hobo. I also had good money to support this lifestyle, which was pouring in via freelance copywriting work, a year or so before I made a first dollar from this first newsletter.

Since Jordan flatters me by saying my insights are always very unique, let me share the one possibly unique thing I can say about traveling a lot.

It’s something I experienced personally, and something that I also heard confirmed when I had a quick call once upon a time with now-dead pickup coach Tom Torero, whose worldwide travels dwarfed anything I ever did or would ever want to do.

Possible insight alert:

If you travel intensely for extended periods of time, particularly to places where you don’t know anybody or have no right being, you have to have a routine, and ideally you have to have something productive to do most days, like a job.

… which is ironic, because I imagine most people want to travel so they can get away from their routine, and because they don’t want to work.

But such is the human mind.

We have a few basic needs. The rub is that among those basic needs, we have ones that are diametrically opposed to each other, such as the need for novelty and the need for stability. If you swing too far to either pole, it leads to craziness and eventual breakdown.

The thing is, you don’t need a tremendous amount of daily productive work to keep you grounded and sane.

For me, writing this daily email does it. Plus, like Jordan says, writing this daily email has had the nice knock-on effect of generating an income, and even introducing me to people online that I ended up meeting in real life on my travels.

I got a course that shows you how to write daily emails like this one to your own list. If you’d like to find out about it:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

What I really think about open rates and subject lines

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Course creator Matt Giaro, who helps folks monetize their skills and knowledge online, writes in with a softball question to help me out while I travel:

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A pretty simple one that might be a bit “too educational”:

What’s YOUR process of writing subject lines?

e.g, What comes first, the egg, the subject line, the chicken, or the email body?

PS: Enjoy your trip 🙂

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In a zero-drama nutshell, I almost always write my subject line…

… let me tease you for a minute…

… this is gonna be super valuable…

… AFTER I’ve written the body of the email. The egg comes after the chicken. As I say inside my Simple Emails course, after I explain how to open up an email, eg. how to roast the chicken:

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Subject line tip #2: Write your subject line after your email body.

I am talking about the subject line after I talked about opening your email, because that’s how I actually work.

I find it very hard to come up with a subject line out of thin air, and if I do come up with one that I feel is good, I’m most likely fooling myself. What I do instead is first write my email, then go back and pull out different phrases or ideas or facts that could go into the subject line.

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Beyond this, I don’t have a tremendous amount to say about writing subject lines, either in my own daily work, or inside Simple Money Emails.

In fact, I have just one other tip, which I think is much more important, and which is much more universal, than the one above.

This second tip explains why some copywriters insist that subject lines are super important, and determine the success or failure of your email…

… while other copywriters say that subject lines don’t matter all, and even make a show of sending their emails out with silly or flat subject lines, without any apparent detriment.

If you’d like to find out what my other subject line tip is, and more generally, if you’d like to find out how to write effective daily emails that make sales today and keep readers reading tomorrow, then:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

How to write in a client’s brand voice

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Copywriter Theo Seeds writes in with a cheeky two questions (as opposed to the usual one-per-family). Let me take Theo’s questions in reverse order:

> 2. Are there any non-marketing books you’ve picked up weird marketing lessons from?

Yes, dozens?

Books, including non-marketing books, are one of the main sources of ideas I draw on for this newsletter.

I estimate I’ve drawn marketing ideas from dozens of non-marketing books in hundreds of these emails over the 7+ years of this newsletter. The most recent one I can remember came last month, from the autobiography of MLB club owner Bill Veeck.

> 1. Do you have any tips on writing copy in a client’s brand voice? Is this something you ever took on, and if so, how did you approach it?

I’ve actually written an email about this topic before, and it was all about how I hated the experience of having to write in a client’s brand voice.

Sure, it’s fine if you’re writing a sales letter, where “good enough” is good enough.

But if you want to write dailyish emails, where it really has to sound like that person, and has to have their stories, and verbal ticks, and unique phrasing, I really don’t have any smart advice to give, because it’s not something I ever mastered myself.

Fortunately, I know somebody who specializes in exactly this.

The guy’s name is Justin Blackman, and he is known as the “Brand Voice Guy.”

Not only does Justin have a very clear and recognizable brand voice for his own daily emails (which I read), but he has a course on exactly what Theo is asking about above, how copywriters can write in a client’s brand voice, in a perfectly chamelon-like fashion.

The course is called Write Like Anyone. The core promise is that it will turn you into someone who is able to echo any client’s voice so well they will hire you again and again.

I haven’t been through Justin’s course. I don’t write for clients any more, and I’m pretty good at echoing my own voice.

But Justin’s course has gotten endorsements from people like Chris Orzechowski and Rob Marsh of the Copywriter Club, plus it features folks like Daniel Throssell and Abbey Woodcock as guest instructors.

Oh, and students seem to love it too. They credit it, like Justin promises, with making them look good in front of clients and winning them more projects.

In case you wanna find out more about Write Like Anyone:

https://bejakovic.com/writelikeanyone

Everything you ever wanted to know about me, but were afraid to ask

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In a couple hours from now, I will be setting off for the “Real Stockholm Tour.”

I’ve been in Stockholm for a day and a half so far. I have seen the posh and pretty center… the cute and cobbly old town… and, thanks to a boat ride I took with lots of tall and blonde Swedes, an island named Vaxholm, one of over 24,000 that form the Stockholm archipelago, which starts in the city and stretches for over 60km. I never knew that Sweden was basically Earthsea.

I’m here for the next week with a large fraction of my lifelong friends — a flatmate I lived with for 6 years, 10+ years ago in Budapest; a “daygame wing” I’ve known for 12+ years and have spent hundreds of hours with on the street; and a college friend and former housemate I’ve known for close to 25 years, since our time at UCSC, who I’m living with again after all that time.

Somehow we all assembled here, in part by luck and in part by strategy.

Today, like I said, it’s time for the real Stockholm tour.

Unlike the pretty, posh, or pristine that we’ve seen so far, the real Stockholm tour will consist of getting a burek — a Balkan pastry — somewhere in the suburbs and then seeing other and realer parts of this enormous though not tremendously populated city.

I’m telling you all this because frankly I don’t have a lot of time or mental space to write a different kind of email this morning. Which ironically, is my takeaway for you today.

If you write dailyish emails, but you find yourself without a lot of time or brain power, you can always simply tell people where you are right now, what’s going on, why you are either braindead or pressed for time, and then lead into your offer.

In my experience, readers enjoy those kinds of emails a lot. And such emails serve their purpose of keeping people reading to your offer and beyond.

Speaking of:

I will be traveling for a while still, even after Stockholm. I will have interesting things to promote and possibly interesting ideas to share during that time. But I expect I will also find myself again in situations like I am in today, without a lot of time or creativity.

Email marketing side tip:

Another good kind of email to write in a time or brain crunch is a Q&A email.

To help me do that, would you send me your questions?

It can be questions about anything I am qualified to talk about, including email marketing, copywriting, or online businesses.

It can also be questions about things I am eminently not qualified to talk about, such as climate change, weight loss, or raising children.

Or if there are things that you always wanted to know about me personally, but were afraid to ask, now’s your chance.

I don’t promise to answer all questions in a future email, but I do promise to read and honestly consider them.

And who knows, if you write me, you might find your name under the bright lights of this newsletter in a few days’ time, along with my best or most entertaining answer to what you ask.

The only way to have that happen is to hit reply right now, think what you most want to know from me, and then send me a email carrier pigeon, straight to my hotel room in Archipelago Central. Thanks in advance.

How I would eat ecom copywriters’ lunch… with some fava beans, and a nice chianti

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Over the past year, I have had an ungodly number of people sign up to my list who bill themselves as ecom copywriters.

Typically, the main service these folks offer is email marketing for ecom brands.

Makes sense to me.

Even though I am currently promoting an offer titled 1-Person Advertorial Agency, and though in the past I made good money writing advertorials for ecom clients, that money pales in comparison to the money I made writing emails, for those same clients, on a profit-share basis.

The thing is, I only got a chance to write those profit-share emails because I was already writing advertorials for these clients, and because their entire customer flow, and the success of their future offers and funnels, depended on the front-end copy I was writing.

Which brings me to the following 7-step plan that I would follow today, blindly and with 100% commitment, if I were bent on eating the lunch of all those email-writing ecom copywriters:

1. I’d find ecom businesses that are running paid traffic (easy enough with Facebook ad library, but more below on how to do this in a smart way). I’d look for a business that’s sending traffic straight from their ads to the product page.

2. I’d write an advertorial (or three) for such a business, and I’d do it for absolutely free. (Why not? It’s an investment of a couple hours that could pay back literally hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.)

3. I’d put the advertorial in a Google Doc, and format it nicely so it can function as a live piece of copy. I’d send this to the biz owner. I’d tell them it’s theirs to use, and there’s nothing to do but simply clone the Google Doc (to make sure I don’t mess with it) and redirect a bit of traffic to it to see how it performs against their base funnel.

4. I’d follow up until I get either a “Leave me alone” or a “Damn this worked great, can you write more like this?”

5. If it’s a “Can you write more like this,” I’d say sure. And then I’d make the business owner the following sociopath offer:

“I will write advertorials for you ongoing, for FREE (bear with me here), IF you will let me write emails for you, for FREE also. Just pay me a share of the profits I generate for you on the back end, after the money’s already in your Stripe account.”

6. If I get the objection that they already pay an ecom copywriter to write their emails, I’d politely say, “Fire them. I will do it for free, for just for a share of the profits I make you, unlike those people who charge you whether you make money or not. Plus, I’ll help you scale your ad spend with my advertorials, so we both profit.”

7. If they’re already working with an ecom copywriter who’s getting paid on a profit-share basis, I’d say, “Fire them, because they aren’t writing advertorials for you for free. I will, plus I’ve already proven that I can write copy that sells your offers on cold traffic, which is way harder than email.”

… and to make all this manageable in just a few hours of work a week, I’d use the AI Advertorial Toaster that Thom Benny and his protege Sam are giving away on their 1-Person Advertorial Agency workshop, which happens this Wednesday.

For reference:

It used to take me 4-5 days to write an advertorial.

Sam’s AI Advertorial Toaster pops up a near-good-enough advertorial waffle pretty much instantly. It’s why Sam can bake up and serve an advertorial, one which will convert on cold traffic, in under an hour now, instead of the 4-5 days it took me back when I worked with clients.

It’s also the reason why Sam has been able to write 20+ such advertorials per month, and why he’s pulled in over $50M for clients over the past year alone.

Last point:

Also on the 1-Person Advertorial Agency training, Sam is giving away his Ad Reanimator process, for identifying and contacting clients who are a perfect fit for advertorials — ecom businesses who had a long-running ads that recently died. (Advertorials make those ads come back to life.)

If you are an ecom copywriter already, and if your livelihood is writing emails for clients, maybe a cold chill passed down your back just now. After all, I’m advertising a recipe for someone to come and take your livelihood away, potentially by the end of this week.

The only thing I can tell you is, if you’re currently not offering advertorials to your email clients, there’s nothing stopping you from doing so, using Sam’s Toaster and the instruction manual he provides for it.

Not only will you protect yourself against competition sneaking in and taking your email clients away from you, but you have a chance to make a lot more money, whether you simply want to charge your clients for your advertorials, or do a revshare deal like I lay out above (again, it’s how I made most of my money).

And if you’re not an “ecom copywriter” yet, it is a legit opportunity right now, even if you have little experience to speak of.

In either case, Thom and Sam’s workshop is happening this Wednesday. For more info, or to sign up before it’s too late:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorial-agency

Announcing: 1-Person Advertorial Agency

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This Wednesday, Thom Benny and his protege Sam will hold a workshop titled 1-Person Advertorial Agency.

As you might know, Thom is an ex-Agora copywriter who now co-runs a fintech company and coaches copywriters on the side. And as for Sam, he is a copywriter who:

1. Drove $50M worth of sales with advertorials he has written for ecom clients, on cold traffic, over the past year alone

2. Takes less than an hour to write one of these suckers, and can churn out 20+ of ’em a month, because he’s getting AI to do much of the work

3. Is finding it easy to get good new clients, because he makes them an offer to reanimate their once-performing, recently dead ads.

And that entire system, everything that makes this possible, is what Sam will be sharing on this workshop:

The AI setup… how to tweak what the AI gives you so it actually converts on cold traffic… plus how to get clients who see the benefit of such advertorials and are happy to pay you generously. (Says Thom, “$5,000-$10,000 per project, delivering in just days, not weeks”).

For reference, Thom wasn’t gonna promote this workshop via affiliates. I insisted and nudged and insisted some more until he said ok.

In case you’re wondering why I’m eager to promote Thom and Sam’s workshop, it’s because advertorials are a kind of copy that I used to write a lot of for clients.

I know the effects advertorials can have on an ecom funnel. One client I worked for dropped in one of my advertorials into his existing funnel, and could immediately scale ads from $2k a day to $12k a day.

I also know the demand for such work. I recently had an ex-client write me to ask if I’d write advertorials for his new business. Another client, the CEO of an ecom brand, once paid me $2k to give him a brain dump of how I write advertorials.

That’s why I’m promoting this workshop to you in the short time that remains.

I was gonna offer bonuses because that’s what you do when you promote somebody else’s offer.

But frankly, Sam gives you everything you need on this workshop, including how to get clients, how to produce advertorials, and how to make them convert so clients keep hiring you and paying you.

And the deal on this workshop is frankly ridiculous.

This “1-Person Advertorial Agency” is a legit business-in-a-box. You don’t come across those so often. When you do, it’s the kind of thing that typically sells for $5k or $50k upfront, plus often sort of unpleasant monthly licensing fee.

For whatever reason, perhaps because selling trainings is not their main business, or because the opportunity is so big and so live, Sam and Thom are not stretching this out into a weeks-long course, but are delivering a one-day workshop that lasts a couple hours, and still gives you everything you need.

What’s more, they are not selling this workshop for $5k or $50k, plus monthly fees, but for $199, one time.

For the full info on this workshop, or to sign up before this business-in-a-box disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorial-agency

When 4.9 is bigger than 5

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It finally happened — I got my first 4-star review for my new 10 Commandments book.

Part of me is of course annoyed — “How dare you” — but a part of me is also relieved. The book has had 26 reviews so far, all of them 5 star.

My average ranking has now tanked from a perfect 5.0 to a more reasonable 4.9.

This brought to mind a Gary Halbert bullet:

* Almost foolproof contraception: It’s over 99% effective but… so new… most people have never even heard about it!

Unless you’ve been through my Copy Riddles program, you might wonder what this new and unheard-of form of contraception is. That depends, like Bill Clinton said, on what the meaning of “is” is. But I will tell you this:

The secret Gary is talking about is actually 100% effective.

The question then becomes, if Gary’s “almost foolproof contraception” is actually 100% effective, why did Gary knock it down to “99%”?

I mean, isn’t 100% better than “over 99%”?

Isn’t “foolproof” more attractive to the foolish, which includes all of us, than “almost foolproof”?

The answer is no, not in the strange way the human brain works, which master copywriters like Gary intuitively understood and additionally proved by experience.

It’s another one of those bits of elite copywriting you would never pick up on by looking at the finished copy alone.

In order to figure out that Gary’s “over 99% effective” is not an ordinary fact, but a bit of A-list wizardry, you need to peek behind the curtain.

That’s the basis of my Copy Riddles program.

And about that, here’s a quote from copywriter Kevin Orellana, who is going through Copy Riddles now for I believe the fourth time, and who won last week’s Copy Riddles bullets contest:

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Being a Copy Riddles customer has been one of the best decisions I’ve made!

I’ve actually been going through Copy Riddles since 2021 and till this day, I still get new insights from it.

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If Copy Riddles had a rating, it would be over 4.99. For more info on this program:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

What really makes for a good sex scene?

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As of last night, I’m about halfway through a 3-hour-long movie, titled Nymphomaniac, Volume 1. (There’s also a Volume 2, with more hours.)

I’m only halfway through it because I can only watch it in 25-minute increments. The movie is dark (literally, full of brown and black frames), heavy-handed, and worst of all, filled with gratuitous, very unsexy sex scenes.

I’m telling you this because, though you can’t tell it from Nymphomaniac, sex in movies can apparently be sexy.

Back in 1980, Francis Ford Coppola, best known as the director of the Godfather (volumes 1 and 2, each many hours long), was making a movie that was to feature a sex scene.

Coppola, who is a bit obsessive about making his movies good, tasked a UC Berkeley PhD student named Constance Penly with phoning up hundreds of famous and influential people to find out 1) which sex scenes were the best and 2) what those sex scenes had in common.

Would you like to know also?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

After hundreds of interviews and many hours of uncomfortable sex scene watching, Penley had her answer. The best sex scenes had two things in common:

1. The sex wasn’t supposed to happen, because of some big difference between the sexers

2. One or both of the characters were under threat of death

Penley gives the example of the sex scene in the original Terminator movie, between the characters of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. He is a rebel soldier from 45 years in the future, sent back in time. She is a woman of the present, being hunted by a cyborg assassin. Sarah and Kyle have sex, and apparently Penley thought it was hot.

(Incidentally, the Skynet future of the Terminator movies, which both Kyle Reese and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin are sent back from, was set in 2029.

That was distant back in 1984 when the Terminator came out, but it’s near to us now. And it looks like we’re right on track.

I saw a video just yesterday of an AI conference in China in which a woman was kickboxing with a humanoid robot that looked like it was trained on thousands of hours of UFC footage. For demonstration purposes, the robot was tuned to a setting of “Not Kill.”)

But back to those good sex scene criteria. What is it about these two criteria specifically?

I realized what makes a good sex scene is just like what makes a good promotional sales event — there’s a time-limited window and a real cost for not acting during it.

Is this a coincidence? Or am I reaching? I don’t think so. I think it goes back to the fundamental and age-old questions that all human minds are always asking:

Why? Why this? Why should I care? Why is it now or never?

And with that, I can finally wrap up my email and point you to the offer I have been working up to promoting. It’s a book, one I’ve written.

The reason I’m promoting it today is that it ties into the question of “why.” In fact, my book has the question of “why” running through it in different ways, from beginning to end. And not just that. It also shows you how to answer that question, implicitly and explicitly, to influence others without being heavy-handed and gratuitous about it.

Would you like to know how?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to stay off Reddit and improve your productivity

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In short, sign up to my Daily Email Habit service. Explanation plus proof:

I put in a funny image or meme at the top of each DEH email, to make it fun to keep opening up these emails day after day, and to put you in the right frame of mind to write your own daily email.

At least that was my reasoning for putting the funny image or meme in each DEH email. But apparently there are other benefits too. From email marketer Logan Hobson, who subscribes to Daily Email Habit:

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I find the daily meme an extra benefit to DEH. I started noticing that I recognized some of your images from reddit, and I wanted your images feel fresh, so I stopped browsing reddit as much and have improved my productivity, knowing I will receive a high-quality curated meme each day in your email without having to endlessly scroll to find one in the wild.

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Of course, the goal of Daily Email Habit goes beyond just improving your productivity and keeping you off Reddit. The real goal is to get you writing your own daily emails consistently, both so you make sales today, and so you build up a relationship with your audience, so they open and read your email tomorrow.

And about that, here’s marketing strategist Nick Bandy, who also subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and who has been emailing his list of buyers daily:

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DEH is the biggest ROI I’ve ever gotten on any course or product I’ve ever purchased. It’s incalculable.

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I have a bunch more testimonials from subscribers who praise Daily Email Habit. I also give away a sample 0th Daily Email Habit email, so you get a sense of what it looks like and what you’d be signing up for, including the funny image/meme up top. For all that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh