Copywriting

Become an investigative reporter with high-level salesmanship skills

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A bit of Bejako background:

I went to high school in a rich suburb of Baltimore, Maryland (we weren’t rich, but ok).

All the other kids in my class were ambitious and smart (one girl’s dad later won the Nobel Prize in chemistry). They worked hard their entire high school days. They ended up going to schools like Princeton and Stanford, and became lawyers and doctors and architects.

Meanwhile, 17-year-old Bejako had zero drive to go to college, and had no idea what kind of work he might ever want to do.

His best guess — the only option that kind of turned him on – was the idea of moving down to Annapolis, Maryland’s small, quaint, maritime capital, and becoming a reporter on some local newspaper that covered state politics.

Fast-forward to the present, and switch back to the first person:

While I never became a small-town reporter, the same lack of ambition and non-entrepreneurial nature I had in high school has stuck with me throughout life, now into middle age.

I am really not motivated by money, try as I have to change that. I’ve also never thought of myself as an entrepreneur or online business owner. And yet, that’s kind of what I’m doing now, and what’s more, I’m not really qualified to do anything else.

I’m telling you all this because a couple nights ago, I was reading a book about direct marketing. It said the following:

“Understanding your ultimate prospect has nothing to do with creativity. It requires relentless, investigative salesmanship. You need to become an investigative reporter with high-level salesmanship skills.”

“Hm,” I said to my pillow. “An investigative reporter on the salesmanship beat? That’s something I can imagine myself doing.”

And in fact, the very next day, I told myself to treat what I’m doing as investigative reporter. I started collecting data about offers I had made, successful or unsuccessful. I came up with theories about why things turned out as they did. I started trying to write up a story that makes sense that fits the data to the theory.

It’s been fun and it’s getting me to do things I should have been doing all along.

My point is not that you specifically should start treating your business as an investigative reporter.

My point is that, if “value-creating entrepreneur” or “small business owner” doesn’t really feel like a suit that fits you, there lots of other suits you can put on, including ones that you like the look of. And it will still be you inside the suit.

You gotta do certain things to see success if you have an email list and want to make money with it. Selling is one of them. Understanding your audience is another. Creating new offers is still another. But there are lots of ways to get yourself to do those things, including things that align with your own natural motivations and ambitions.

Or in the words of Internet marketer Rich Schefren, “Put your business goals of your self-development goals.” It’s much more likely you will see success if you work with your own psychology, rather than trying to change it.

So much for Monday Morning Mindset.

For some specific strategies on how to take your existing skills and interests and turn them into money, enough to pay for a house:

https://bejakovic.com/house

How coaches and course creators can give confidence and lasting knowledge to their students

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Here’s a little riddle for ya:

– pine

– crab

– sauce

There’s a fourth word you can attach to each of these three words, which will lead to three other common words.

What is that fourth word?

While your brain works on that, I can tell you I riddled this riddle myself yesterday.

At first, nothing came to me in spite of trying. Then I gave up trying to guess the fourth word, much how the fox gave up trying to get the grapes, because they are unreachable and therefore must be sour.

But then, a few moments later, out of nowhere, without me seemingly doing anything and while I was busy thinking how this is a stupid riddle and how I don’t want to play, the fourth word popped up in my mind, covered by a thick syrup known as the feeling of insight.

The feeling of insight = that feeling of satisfaction, wonder, and possibility that happens when we emerge from the intellectual dark into light, when confusing and complex give way to simple and certain.

I read an article yesterday about the new neurology of insight. Basically, scientists have now pinned down the areas of the brain that light up when we come up with a solution to riddles like the one above, and we feel insight.

The names of those brain areas aren’t very interesting, unless you yourself are a neuroscientist.

What is interesting is something the article called the “insight-memory advantage.”

Basically, experiences of insight make people remember associated facts better than when they are simply told facts. This has practical applications, for example, if you are a coach or course creator. From the article:

“Applying insight-boosting strategies to teaching could lead to better learning outcomes for students. Insight seems to be a powerful and positive experience that generates accurate solutions, confidence in our answers and strong memories.””

So how do you generate a feeling of insight in your students?

I will leave you to ponder that on your own, for possibly obvious reasons.

One “insight-boosting strategy” is sure to pop up soon, if it hasn’t already.

Meanwhile, if you write emails about marketing or copywriting, there’s a non-obvious way to create insight, which I’ve personally used to great effect. To find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Others get audited for their travel and entertainment deductions… YOU deduct TWICE as much, yet get no flack from the IRS

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This week I’m promoting Jeanne Willson and Kirsten Graham’s free training on how solopreneurs can offload their bookkeeping without paying CPA prices.

Unfortunately, I know very little about the world of taxes or bookkeeping.

Fortunately, I know something about copywriting, and the world of direct marketing. That’s how I know of a sales bullet, written by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos, in a blockbuster sales letter from 1996:

“Others get audited for their travel and entertainment deductions. You deduct TWICE as much, yet get no flack from the IRS. The secret is on page 18.”

In case you’re curious about the secret to not getting audited while others do, it’s this, from page 18 of the book Parris was promoting (I’m summarizing):

Submit documentation and proof along with your tax return. The IRS officially discourages attached proof and evidence. Even so, it’s a proven recipe to reducing your chances of an audit, because while audits are triggered automatically, they are reviewed by a live human, and a human might look at your attached proof and decide your claims are legit.

This info, which supposedly comes from a well-connected IRS insider, is from the 1990s.

Is it still true today?

I cannot say. If you’re really worried about getting audited, I would refer you to Thursday’s training by Jeanne and Kirsten.

Jeanne and Kirsten will share a plan to take care of the looming cloud of a tax audit, without paying the $200-$500 per month that you would pay to your local CPA.

And yes, there will be a done-for-you service for sale at the end of Thursday’s training to make your tax worries disappear.

And yes, I will get paid something as an affiliate if you take Jeanne and Kirsten up on this offer.

But I’m not getting paid anything to plug Jeanne and Kirsten’s training on Thursday, which will be valuable and instructive on its own, whether you choose to buy the offer at the end.

If you would like to sign up for this free training, and reclaim the part of your brain that’s worried about taxes:

https://lessmathmoremoney.com/

If you’d like to partner with businesses on the back end…

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a new “back end” partnership I was testing out.

A business owner, who spends $700 a day on Facebook ads to generate leads, is converting a minuscule share of these leads to clients, while doing no ongoing followup with the rest.

After 2 minutes of talking to this guy over Zoom, we made a preliminary partnership deal:

1. He’d give me control of his email list.

2. I’d see what I could do.

3. If I could do something, we’d keep working together and split the profits.

4. If I could not, I’d have spent a bit of time writing a few emails for this guy for nothing, and he’d have spent a bit of time to talk to me over Zoom, also for nothing.

After I sent out that email, I got a reply from a Spanish copywriter, who wrote:

===

I’m not sure if you’ll read this email, since I assume you’ll receive a lot.

But what you mentioned today really interests me. In my country (Spain), I don’t see the practice of sending a daily email as a very common one. Often, they don’t even use email as a sales channel.

In my niche (trading and finance), I see a lot of people with large social media followers who don’t follow up via email.

And that’s a service I’d like to offer: using other email lists and earning a commission on the sales those emails generate. But the question is…

How do you know for sure how many sales the list owner is making thanks to emails?

How do you know how many of those sales come from emails?

Should we trust the list owner?

Can they somehow give you access so you can see the sales generated yourself?

Thank you. I love your writing and job!

===

Maybe I’m projecting here, but the underlying frame I see in this reader’s questions is, “Will I get screwed? Will the owner not pay me for some sales I made him? Will there be INJUSTICE, perpetrated against ME?”

That’s the wrong way to look at it.

If you ask me, the right way to look at it is, does this make good sense for me to do now, and to keep doing?

When the topic of doing work on commission comes up, people often get hung up on revshare percentages, splits, tiers, contracts, agreements, and the technology of tracking, reporting, and checking whether sales you made were correctly attributed to you or not.

Ultimately none of that matters.

What matters is, are you happy with the money that ends up coming in as a result of the investment that you made?

If that works for you, then my advice is to stop stressing about the possible injustice — that somebody somewhere failed to pay you what you are due.

Travis Sago, who runs a “back end agency” that does exactly these kind of back-end partnerships, once proposed a thought experiment.

Imagine betting $1 on a coin flip. You put in $1, and then flip a coin. If the coin comes up heads, you lose your $1. If it comes up tails, you win $100.

Travis’s point was, keep putting in your $1, and keep flipping the coin. Even if the odds aren’t exactly 50-50, soon enough, you will be more than rich.

So much for a new perspective. Now for the offer.

If you are interested in partnering with businesses on the “back end” and maximizing your chances of success at every step, then Travis has an entire course about this, called BEAMER.

That course sells for $2,900. (It’s actually what I paid for it last year.)

$2,900 is a good deal for BEAMER, because if BEAMER leads you to even one modestly successful, one-time partner deal, it will pay for its $2,900 price tag, and then some.

And maybe you’ll have more than just one modestly successful, one-time partner deal.

Maybe you can take it as far as Travis has taken it, and make a few million dollars each year, simply partnering ongoing with people who aren’t really doing much with their email lists.

Now at this point, I could simply link to the BEAMER sales page, except…

There’s also another way to get BEAMER, at 1/10th (one-tenth) the price that it sells for via Travis’s site.

Travis also gives away BEAMER as a free bonus for those who sign up to his Royalty Ronin community, and who stay signed up past the free 7-day trial.

A month of Royalty Ronin will cost you $290.

That’s not exactly $1. But to me, it’s a reasonable investment — a reasonable wager to stake — to get set up with with inside knowledge on running back-end agency from someone who’s made millions from doing so… and to see if you are happy with the money that ends up coming to you as a result of this knowledge.

If you’d like to start a “back end agency” and you want to learn from an expert who’s done it before:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

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