Copywriting

The “gold standard” of course design

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From the annals of effective course design:

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

C.P.C.s work like this:

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

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

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

The doctor probes and narrows in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Subject line writing (obvious enough)

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

Apparently, medical diagnosis is another field.

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, they should.

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

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

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

Moving on.

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/deh

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This changes everything?” I hear you asking.

No.

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

If you’d like to join me inside:

https://bejakovic.com/house

Use your email list to pay for a house (cheaper than you might think!)

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Here are some fascinating financial facts:

The average monthly mortgage payment for a house in the US is $2,329. (If you’re not fascinated yet, hold on.)

Add in property taxes and insurance, you get up to around $3,000. (Getting intrigued?)

In high-cost states such as California and Massachusetts, the average monthly cost to pay for a house is as high as $3,600. (I bet you’re fascinated now, or at least feeling some tingles.)

At the same time, if you choose not to own, but to rent, like I do, then on average you are paying only about $1,800/month for a house, looking at all rentals around the U.S. (Ta-da!)

I’m fascinating you with all these facts because yesterday I reopened my Skool group, Daily Email House.

One new thing is that I started letting in people from my list into the group (previously the group was only for subscribers of my Daily Email Habit paid service).

I also made another change. While the group was previously just a kind of aimless social club, I decided to start having a “mission” for it.

Since I wanted to get this boat off the dock as quick as possible, and since most decisions in life are alterable, I set the mission to the first thing that came to mind, “Use your email list to pay for a house,” playing on the old name of the group.

Well, it seems like that off-the-cuff mission statement has resonated. For example, Steve Raju, of the on-and-off-but-wonderful “License to Quill” newsletter, joined the group and wrote:

“John, I think you should give away a house, every day, possibly forever, only via email.”

An old House member, copywriter GC Tsalamagkakis, also commented:

“And the fact that you can say ‘using daily emails to pay for a house;’ as a challenge for some people in a group and it actually makes sense is still mind-blowing to me.”

Most interestingly, a number of folks who applied to join the group, like this new member, listed as their #1 current goal some version of:

“Literally use my email list to pay for a house.”

Now let’s get back to those fascinating facts up top.

The average house in the US will cost you something like $3,600 a month.

That’s not a negligible amount if you have to pay it. On the other hand, it’s also not a sexy amount if you’re promising it as an bizopp inducement:

“Use your email list to make $3,600 per month!”

I doubt many people would have tripped over themselves running to take me up on that promise.

I can imagine I would even get some emails from all the copywriting experts on my list, reminding me of the importance of making a BIG promise in your marketing. And things would be even worse if I were to promise just the $1,800/month that’s needed to pay the average rent.

My point for you being that everybody promises money. That is lazy and ineffective. It only happens so much because money is easy to promise for the promiser, if that’s a word.

There’s a translation step that still needs to happen in your prospect’s head whenever you promise money.

Your prospect hears “money,” but then imagines a house, or a watch, or a vacation that money can buy. And when that translation happens, your prospect feels the warm glow of security, or improved social standing, or fun and freedom, feelings that “money” alone cannot generate.

So why not skip the translation step? Why not take the direct route to the result you want? I once heard copywriting coach David Garfinkel say:

“Either you do the work and get paid, or your prospect does the work and gets paid.”

Meaning, either you put in the work to translate your offer into terms that your prospect cares about on a bare-metal level… or your prospect has to do it, and more often than not, “gets paid” by not doing it and not handing you any of his or her money as a result.

That’s a little sales tip, in order to help you pay for a house using your email list. And if you’d like more support and help on that journey, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/house

How much is infotainment worth?

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How much is infotainment worth? I mean, how much do stories and pop culture analogies and outrage in your marketing sell, above and beyond what you could sell by appealing to personal interest alone?

I don’t know. As far as I know, nobody has ever tried to quantify it.

But I do know of an analogous situation, one that has been quantified. Check it:

Back in 1946, baseball club owner Bill Veeck was the first to introduce fireworks at a baseball game. The baseball establishment was outraged. “It cheapens this great and noble sport,” they said.

Veeck was undeterred. Eventually, other team owners came around, and today, fireworks are a standard addition to many major league games.

Of course, the change in attitude came down to money.

As Veeck argued and found to be true, fireworks at a baseball game pay for themselves many times over, primarily in the form of keeping fans at the stadium longer and selling more hotdogs and beer. When combined with a home-team win, the results are multiplicative. Here are the stats:

1. Lose game, no fireworks: X

2. Lose game, fireworks: 1.4X

3. Win game, no fireworks: 2X

4. Win game, fireworks: 3X

In my mind, this is analogous to selling with or without infotainment.

In this analogy, fireworks are the fun, infotainment, insight.

As for “winning the game,” that maps to your customers actually profiting from the product or the service that you sell.

And “extra money made via concessions” maps to how much more money your one-time customers are willing to spend with you in the future.

Do the baseball numbers above map perfectly to selling?

Again, I don’t know. I would be surprised if they mapped perfectly, But I do suspect they are indicative.

The fact is, infotainment has value in terms of customer loyalty and future willingness to buy. But it has far less value than a product that delivers real results. You can be unlikable or dull, and people will still buy from you, over and over, if they get value from what you sell.

Of course, if you both have a great offer that actually produces results… and you add in your stories and analogies and outrage… then you can look forward to really amazing profits, ones that insulate you from the ups and down of the market and the claws of the competition.

Now I got a favor to ask you, or rather, a deal to make with you:

I’m always on the lookout for great products to promote. The problem is, lots of stuff looks great on the outside. But does it actually deliver results? That’s where I’m hoping you can help me.

What’s a product or a service that you paid $200 or more for over the past year, which really delivered?

It could be an info product, a service, or something you paid to have done for you. And by “really delivered,” I’m not talking about being fun and diverting, but of giving you real value in your real life.

If you’re game, hit reply and let me know of stuff you’ve paid for that was a good investment.

In turn, I’ll reply to you and tell you three offers I’ve bought over the past year or so, all of which cost around $1k, all of which delivered real value to me, and all of which happened to be sold via infotainment.

Do we have a deal? If so, hit reply, and fire away.

How to get informed (it’s not the news)

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Perhaps you’ve seen the trending anti-news article that’s gone viralish over the past week.

It deals with news versus reality, specifically, deaths as reported in the news versus the deaths people actually die from.

The article compared data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to news reports of deaths in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news website of Fox News.

Some of the results:

First, there wasn’t much difference between the three news outlets, in spite of different political leanings.

Second, there was a big gap between which deaths get written about and which deaths actually happen.

On the over-represented side, murders were 43 times more reported than their share of deaths. Terrorism deaths got 18,000 times more coverage than their share of actual deaths.

On the under-represented side, deaths from things like stroke and heart disease were underreported in the news by a factor of 9 and 10, respectively.

I personally don’t watch or read the news, and this kind of stuff allows me to be smug. “You see,” I imagine telling some imaginary debate partner, “I haven’t been missing anything.”

The fact is, the news doesn’t represent reality, meaning stuff that happens out there. The only reality it represents is what biases exist in the human mind, across time and across space and culture:

Our cravings for novelty… for low probability, high-impact events… for negative rather than positive outcomes… for individual dramatic stories rather than statistics encompassing millions of data points.

But though I personally ignore the news and even like to be smug about it, it’s not just cynical and self-serving news outlets that do this to us.

We do the same thing to ourselves, all the time, because of habit but also because of our inborn neurology. We focus on the negative… the low-probability… the high-impact… and we weave stories about such things that often have little to do with the reality of of our existence.

This all sounds kinda depressing, and I don’t want you leaving my email that way.

So let me share a resource I’ve shared multiple times over the past year and a half.

It lays out a simple process that has allowed me to see reality more clearly and to challenge stories my brain likes to tell itself.

This process worked for me when I first read about it and tried it a year and a half ago. It’s working for me still.

Maybe most importantly, following this process opened up some sort of a gateway in my mind that’s allowed related ideas and practices to flow in, which have made me more happy and resilient these days than I have felt my whole adult life.

In case you want to get informed about reality:

https://bejakovic.com/stillworking

What to do when people won’t buy money at a discount

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Last year, I read a book called Ice To The Eskimos by sports marketer Jon Spoelstra. I highly recommend it, because of stories like this one:

Back in the 1990s, Spoelstra gave a talk to a bunch of basketball team owners in Spain.

Says Spoelstra, at that time, pro sports teams outside the US lacked one big thing the Americans had: marketing. The owners of such non-US teams thought that if fans wanted to come, they would come. If the fans didn’t wanna come, they wouldn’t.

Spoelstra knew better. And to make his point, he ran a little stunt during that talk to the Spanish basketball team owners.

He took out a hundred peseta bill. “Who here will give me a 10 peseta coin for this 100 peseta bill?”

The team owners murmured and looked around the room. Maybe the translator had fumbled something? Or the American was crazy?

Spoelstra repeated his offer. “Who will give me a 10 peseta coin for this 100 peseta bill?”

More murmuring. Finally one of the team owners pulled out a coin and held it up. Spolestra jumped on the coin, and gave the team owner the bill in exchange.

“Do you have another 10 peseta coin?” Spoelstra asked.

The team owner shrugged and pulled one out. Spoelstra gave him another 100 peseta bill.

They repeated the deal a few more times.

“When will you stop giving me 10 peseta coins for 100 peseta bills?” Spoelstra asked the team owner.

The team owner smirked. “Only when you run out of 100 peseta bills.”

That was Spoelstra’s point about marketing. You hire a ticket salesperson… he makes you 100 pesetas… and only keeps 10 for himself. It’s a good deal, and one you should keep making as long as you can.

“Fine fine,” I hear you saying. “Thanks for the bland insight. Do you have anything more, or are we done here?”

I do have one more thing to share with you. One year later, the organization that had hired Spoelstra to give that presentation sent him a report about the attendance figures for each team.

The team owners who still refused to hire a ticket salesperson saw the same attendance numbers as before.

The team owners who took Spoelstra’s advice and hired a ticket salesperson all had attendance increases of 50% or more.

But here’s the bit that thrilled my novelty-seeking heart:

The team owner who actually traded with Spoelstra and got a 100 peseta bill for each 10 peseta coin, didn’t end up hiring one ticket salesperson… or two… but three ticket salespeople.

I don’t know his final attendance numbers, but Spoelstra says that over the coming year, that team owner had more attendance growth and revenue growth than anyone in the room. At the end of the year, the team owner ended up sending Spoelstra a framed 100 peseta bill with an engraving that said, “I didn’t stop. Thank you.”

Maybe that “I didn’t stop” was all due to the personality of that team owner.

After all, he was active while others were passive, daring while others were hesitant, even in a controlled and safe environment of Spoelstra’s presentation. Maybe he was just a risk-taker and a leader, where others weren’t.

Maybe.

But maybe it was also due to something else. Maybe it was due to the actual physical and emotional experience that team owner had of handing over a 10 peseta coin and getting 100 pesetas in return, over and over.

That kind of real and direct experience, and the resulting neurological imprinting, even if it’s done in a joke and play context, can have wide-ranging effects.

That’s something to keep in mind if you are trying to create change in your audience, or in yourself.

And on an entirely related note, I’d like to remind you of my Most Valuable Email training.

You are likely to get benefit from this training if you simply buy it and read it. But you are likely to get 16x the value if you put it into action, however hesitatingly and jokingly at first. And same goes for your own audience.

For more info on Most Valuable Email:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

My personal help

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Yesterday, I hosted the final Q&A call for the last-ever live cohort of my Copy Riddles program. There were beers and tears involved (well, beers).

At the end of the call, I asked if anybody had any final comments or questions before we end. Shawn Cartwright, who runs the online martial arts school TCCII, spoke up to say:

“I really appreciate the comments and Q&A and the video. Will you consider doing an unlisted playlist so we can go back and take a look? It’s not just… I actually will go back and look at some of these.”

Like I told Shawn and the rest of the guys on the call, I definitely will create a playlist out of all the call recordings. And probably more.

The fact is, one of the reasons I did live Q&A calls for Copy Riddles is because people on such calls tend to ask good questions… and I tend to give good answers. And when I give a good answer to somebody else’s question, I often realize I am speaking to myself as much as to the person who asked the question.

My point is that we’re all talking about ourselves, all the time, regardless of what we appear to be saying on the surface.

That fact, if you choose to believe it, can be useful to you if you are listening to what your customers are saying, and if you want a better insight into who they are and what they want… and it can useful to you if you do like I do, and give advice to people, only to realize it’s advice you should be taking as well.

As I’ve heard marketer Sean D’Souza say, “If you wanna solve your own problems, go solve somebody else’s.”

Because of all this, I decided to bring back an offer I ran only ran once, last year, called Unstuck Sessions.

I got the idea for it from marketer Travis Sago.

In a nutshell:

If you’ve got a problem or a challenge, or if you’re stuck — in your financial situation, in your business, career, or life — maybe I can help you get unstuck?

I’ve long said that for a business owner, 60% of the value of bringing in a professional copywriter is the value of an outside perspective.

Something similar here.

The offer is, you and I get on a Zoom call and talk. I ask questions. You unburden yourself and vent. I spot and challenge assumptions you might not even realize you’re making.

The goal is to get you over your challenge and get you unstuck, ideally, in an easy and natural way, without having to simply grin and bear the pain of whatever you’re doing now until things change or get better or lighting strikes.

As for why you’d want me to help you get unstuck, I won’t try to convince you much there.

If you’ve been reading my emails, if you feel like I have knowledge or experience or simply a point of view that can be useful for you, then you’ll probably know if this is for you.

I’ll be doing four Unstuck Sessions over the next month. They will not be free, but will not be prohibitively expensive either.

If you’re interested, the first step is to hit reply and tell me who you are and in a sentence or two what you’re stuck with.

If it’s something I think I have anything meaningful and helpful to say, and if there are still any Unstuck Sessions left, we can the take it further. Thanks in advance.

Free “marketing personality” quiz (turns out I am a big-idea brain)

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Today I got a free quiz for you. A personality quiz. A marketing personality quiz.

In my case at least, it’s proven to be flattering and even insightful.

The background:

Earlier this year, career coach Shaina Keren took the initiative to put me in touch with Michal Eisik, who runs the CopyTribe program.

Shaina wrote that she’d been subscribed to my Daily Email Habit service and found it useful… maybe Michal would like to promote it to her CopyTribe crowd?

It’s taken a while — rivers flow slowly in JV land — but Michal and I finally agreed to do a cross-promo.

She would let her people know about my Daily Email Habit. In turn, she asked, would I be willing to let people on my list know about her free marketing personality quiz?

I unthinkingly said sure, but then I kind of bit my lip.

The fact is, I don’t like to promote stuff I can’t vouch for myself, even if it’s a free lead magnet.

And a “marketing personality” quiz?

As long-term readers of this newsletter might know, I had an addiction in my youth to personality tests. It took me a number of years of self-denial to wean myself off this addiction, and afterwards, I took a holier-than-thou attitude to all kinds of systems that categorize people based on a series of multiple choice questions.

But what to do? I realized my only way out of this situation was to risk unleashing my personality test addiction once again, and to take Michal’s quiz myself.

So that’s what I done. My impressions/results:

1. Michal’s quiz consists of 12 questions, which is more in depth than I had expected. What’s more, I had to sit and think about my answers to each question, because these are not simple BuzzFeed B.S. choices. As a result, the very act of taking the quiz was somehow insightful.

2. Inevitably, there were some choices that felt forced or arbitrary. (Eg. am I more “intuitive” or “visual” or “generative”? I feel I am all three. But I ended up choosing “intuitive,” because, well, it felt right intuitively.)

3. My result came back and it turned out I am a “Big-Idea Brain.” I liked the sound of that because, if you drop the “idea” part, then my marketing type sounds like it’s just “Big Brain,” and frankly, I’ve always suffered from the need to feel smarter than I am. So that part was flattering.

But the quiz results also told me true stuff about myself that I hadn’t shared in my answers (“you need a notepad (or twelve) just to keep up with yourself”).

And they even pointed out a few things — I won’t share those here, because according to other personality tests, I am an “I” — that maybe others can see about me, but that I don’t see myself, but that rang true, and made me think.

Anyways, Michal’s quiz is worth taking — worth a couple minutes of calm and collected time.

Maybe your result will just be fun and flattering. Or maybe you will also learn something useful about yourself, which you can then use in a profitable way towards your marketing or copywriting career.

To take Michal’s marketing personality quiz:

https://bejakovic.com/quiz

12 sticky disciples to get your message out into the world

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If I ever launch my AIDA University, a 4-year, overpriced curriculum teaching people how to persuade, the mandatory reading for the first semester will include the book Made To Stick.

In that book, authors Chip and Dan Heath tell you how to create a message that sticks.

Basically, they say that you should turn your message into a simple, unusual, concrete, and emotional story.

Which is all good and fine but— are simple, dramatic stories really the only kinds of sticky messages?

Clearly no. I imagine that, in the interest of making their own message sticky, that is, simple and concrete, the Heath brothers decided to stick to teaching just one sticky format.

But I’ve been keeping track of different kinds of sticky messages. Today, I’d like to share them with you.

If you have an idea you want to go out into the world, then here are 12 ways, 12 little disciples, that can preach your message from the housetops:

1. Story, particularly drama

Well ok, yes, this is familiar enough, and it’s what Chip and Dan Heath talk about as well. (Bear with me. I have different ones after this one.)

2. High stakes

Classic example: Stansberry’s “The End of America” video sales letter, which was one of the two or three biggest direct response campaigns of all time, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars through a single VSL.

3. Visuals

Here’s one that made Rich Schefren’s Internet Business Manifesto stick:

Rich Schefren's Internet Manifesto | Tyrone Shum | Flickr

4. Exercises

The first thing that comes to my mind is the following old chestnut, used as a sticky message to illustrate lateral thinking or the absence of it:

Say we have a pen and a piece of paper with 9 evenly spaced dots (as shown). How do we draw 4 straight lines through the 9 dots, without ever lifting our

5. Quizzes

Is your “fat loss type” an I, G, C, or T? What’s your Myers-Briggs? Are you a Pisces or a killer whale? Take our quiz to find out what this says about you as a marketer.

6. Metonyms

A metonym, as I learned once but keep forgetting, is “a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government.”

A great pop culture example of using a metonym to get the point across and to persuade the other side comes from the movie Ford v. Ferrari.

In that movie, Matt Damon, playing car designer Carroll Shelby, is explaining to Henry Ford III why Ford’s sports driving team sucks.

Damon points to a little red folder that one of Ford’s underlings is currently thumbing through (the folder is the metonym, albeit nonverbal) and says:

“As I sat out there in your lovely waiting room, I watched that little red folder, right there, go through four pairs of hands before it got to you. Course that doesn’t include the 22 or so other Ford employees who probably poked at it before it made its way up to the 19th floor. All due respect, sir, you can’t win a race by committee.”

7. Parallel case studies

… which are a subset of dramatic stories, but which occur often enough and are successful often enough compared to regular stories, that they warrant including.

A famous example is the Wall Street Journal “Two Young Men” sales letter, though wise marketers (eg. Andre Chaperon) have been using the same format online as well.

8. Authority (scientific research)

Scientists from MIT report that this kind of message is very sticky, in fact 38% stickier than the average.

9. Demonstration

“It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries.” Good if you get to see the demonstration on TV… better yet if you see it live… best if you can actually experience it directly on yourself.

10. Outrage/saying the “wrong” thing/playing against type

This is what a huge chunk of classic direct response headline complexes are about. Think “Lies Lies Lies” by Gary Bencivenga… “What THEY Don’t Want You To Know” by Eric Betuel… or “Why Haven’t TV Owners Been Told These Facts” by Gene Schwartz.

11. Rhyme, alliteration, or co-opting phrases that already exist in the mind

This is a broad category but it all comes down to wordplay of one sort or another that our brains seem to enjoy:

– “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”

– The “Big Black Book” series of big Boardroom blockbusters

– “The Plague of the Black Debt,” which along with the End of America above, is another of the two or three biggest direct response campaigns of all time

12. Metaphor or analogy

An analogy is like a listicle, in that it organizes under one umbrella a number of related points, some of which are strong, and others, which can be disguised and hidden among the stronger ones.

If you have other good categories of sticky messages, write in and let me know. I am putting together a new book in which this kind of stuff will feature. I will appreciate your help, and maybe what you send me will wind up in the book.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t done so yet, you might enjoy my most recent book,

“10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters”

In that book, you can find lots of simple, unusual, concrete, and emotional stories.

But you can also find demonstrations (check out the very first sentence of the intro)… outrage (that’s the whole point of featuring con men and pickup artists in the title)… co-opting phrases that already exist in the mind (“10 Commandments”)… authority… quizzes… high stakes… and even visuals, at least such as can be done with words (specifically, the opening of Commandment V).

For all that, and more:
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https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments