Copywriting

Dark psychological things hidden behind conspiracies

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“This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.

“Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices — the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized — are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.”

So says Edward Snowden.

He’s the former NSA drone who exposed a bunch of inside NSA data. He had to flee America and is now living in exile in Russia.

I thought Snowden’s idea above was interesting. But if Snowden is right, then it makes me wonder…

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories, but ignore conspiracy practices?

I came up with a few possible answers. They might be useful to you if you are in the business of persuading:

1. Our brains prefer neat, human-sized explanations.

​​Conspiracy theories give us this. Conspiracy practices don’t — they are a mess of individual actors, institutions, and changing mass behavior.

2. Conspiracy theories are black and white, while conspiracy practices are not.

​​Conspiracy theories allow us to focus our blame on something alien and evil. Conspiracy practices often mesh with our deeply held beliefs and commitments, like paying off our mortgage, voting for the party we believe in, and taking the medication our doctor tells us to take.

3. We get habituated to anything.

​​There is value in something new and different (conspiracy theories) over what we already have and know (conspiracy practices).

4. Conspiracy theories give us hope.

​​Because conspiracy theories are new, because they are run by a few people, because they are external, we believe they are opposable. We even hope that one good fight can be enough. Things are much more murky with conspiracy practices.

5. Conspiracy theories often involve added drama.

Examples: pedophilia, satanists, Hollywood stars, billionaires, midnight rituals. And we like drama. On the other hand, conspiracy practices are mundane.

6. There is official pushback on conspiracy theories…

… but there is no official pushback on conspiracy practices. In other words, conspiracy theories trigger reactance, and conspiracy practices do not.

When you add all this up, it’s no wonder direct response copywriters figured out long ago that unfamiliar, hidden conspiracies, run by a few bad actors, can get crazy attention and drive a lot of sales.

That’s why I cover conspiracies in round 3 of Copy Riddles, which is all about that essential copy ingredient, intrigue.

But like I tried to show above, standard copywriting tactics like conspiracies go deeper. They tap into more fundamental human needs and desires.

And the best copywriters know this, and use it to their advantage.

So that’s why Copy Riddles has another round, which I called “Dark psychological things.” It teaches you how A-list copywriters tap into things like mistrust and outrage and desire for the “Inner Ring” to drive sales.

As I’ve mentioned over the past few days, Copy Riddles is open right now. But it will close tomorrow night (Sunday) at midnight PST.

Why exactly that time?

Because that’s when the official Copy Riddles midnight ritual kicks off… and I have to be there in time to meet the brothers and sisters of my Inner Ring.

More seriously, if you are interested in a higher level of copywriting chops, here’s where you can find out about Copy Riddles before it closes:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Some snob tells me how to write better

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A few days ago, I came across a list of 36 rules for writing well. The list was put together by Italian novelist Umberto Eco, best known for a book that became a 1986 movie starring Sean Connery.

(Roger Ebert: “If the story had been able to really involve us, there would have been quite a movie here.”)

If I sound a little bitter, it’s because Umberto Eco is directly attacking me and my writing with his stupid rules. Here are a few of them:

1. Avoid alliterations, even if they’re manna for morons.

13. Don’t be repetitious; don’t repeat the same thing twice; repeating is superfluous (redundancy means the useless explanation of something the reader has already understood).

17. Don’t write one-word sentences. Ever.

22. Do you really need rhetorical questions?

30. Do not change paragraph when unneeded.
Not too often.
Anyway.

I’ve covered many of Eco’s rules in this newsletter. Except my advice was to do the things Eco warns against.

I guess the difference is that Umberto Eco has snobbish taste on his side, while I have numbers. Because things like alliteration work to get people’s attention, and even to make sales.

If you don’t believe me, look at the curious case of The Big Black Book.

This was a book of consumer tips that sold like crazy, through a sales letter, to a list of infomercial buyers of an audio cassette program on reprogramming your subconscious.

What?

Why did people who bought a bunch of tapes… by watching TV… about reprogramming your subconscious… want to buy a book, on an entirely unrelated topic, sold through a different format?

Easy.

Because that audio tape program was called Passion, Power, and Profit. Get it?

Passion, Power, Profit… Big Black Book.

Crazy as it seems, these buyers bought mostly on the strength of alliteration in the product name.

Same thing with words.

Umberto Eco’s rules don’t mention amazing, secret, or magic, when used as an adjective. But based on his other rules, I bet he would think those words are cheap, overused, and ineffective.

Wrong again. Those words have been used in direct response marketing for a hundred years plus. And they show no sign of wearing out.

In fact, words like amazing and secret are used so often, and with so much power, that I put them in a list of 20 such magic words.

It’s part of round 14 of Copy Riddles. That’s my program about bullets and copywriting. The promise is that in just 8 weeks, Copy Riddles gets A-list copywriting skills into your head, through a combination of exercises and demonstration.

The deadline to join this run of Copy Riddles is this Sunday at 12 midnight PST. 2 days from now. Coming up soon.

So if you want skills that pay the bills… or complete command of copywriting… this might be worth a look:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Parents and frenemies in stories of fear and shame

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When I was 23, I had this accident. It was quite serious.

I was gripping a dull butter knife. In a moment of anger, I decided to stab the knife into the wall.

Stupid.

Because the wall was fine. The knife was fine. But I was not.

There was a lot of blood. I wound up in the ER. And my right ring and pinky fingers would no longer obey when I told my hand to close.

A few weeks later, I had to get surgery to fix those two fingers, if they could be fixed.

And I remember when I got back from the hospital.

I was living in something like a crack house, with four other college guys, including one who was actually dealing drugs.

So I locked myself in my room, which was empty of furniture except for the mattress on the floor.

I was still groggy and confused from the general anesthesia.

I had this giant plastic-and-wire contraption on my right arm to keep my fingers and hand in place.

And panic came over me. I was alone out here, I realized. My closest family was thousands of miles away. I felt vulnerable and in pain, a step away from death.

My point in telling you this personal anecdote:

Human beings have twin drives. To preserve face… and to preserve body.

Preserving face is about avoiding shame and humiliation.

Preserving body is about getting free from pain and fear, like in my story above.

Now I’ve recently been looking at stories I’ve written in sales copy. And I noticed something in each type of situation:

It makes the story more powerful to either bring in an audience (face threatened) or to make the hero isolated (body threatened).

When I think back on my post-surgery panic, the biggest thing that sticks out is the loneliness and isolation of it.

Because we have a weird relation to other people.

Sometimes others are good. Sometimes they are bad.

I felt especially vulnerable because I was alone curled up in my empty crack house bedroom after a three-hour surgery. It would have been great to have somebody there.

​​But had I been in a situation where I had done something shameful… the last thing I would want is an audience to witness it.

So that’s my takeaway for you for today.

If you’re telling stories, you can can selectively bring in an audience… or take out a community. Do it right, so it matches your primary emotion, and you will get people more motivated than they would be otherwise.

But community or the lack of it can also influence the attractiveness of your offer. That’s something very intriguing I learned only recently… which I will talk about in my newsletter email tomorrow.

In case you want to read that when I send it out, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

Constant scarcity loses to recent scarcity

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Yesterday, a copywriter who reads my email newsletter wrote me with a job offer.

The offer sounds great. I’m planning to get on a call with the copywriter and the COO of the company to talk about it, hopefully later today.

It took over two years of everyday mailing to get to this point.

For the longest time, nobody read my newsletter. But gradually, a few people found me, and then a few more.

And now, even though I still have a small list, opportunities are coming my way out of unexpected corners.

I’m telling you about this for two reasons:

First, if you’re getting started in any kind of service business, then writing daily emails is a great way to get in front of high-quality, high-paying clients, very slowly.

Maybe you can do it faster than I did, if you work hard on growing your list and if you push your services in your emails. Both things I never did much of.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m telling you about this, and the real point of today’s post.

Several copywriting influencers claim you should reach out to your email list whenever you’re looking for work. They advise saying something like:

“I just wrapped up a big project… I currently have an opening in my schedule… if you’re interested, reply and we can talk.”

I always had a bad feeling about this advice.

I’m sure it works, if you have a big enough reputation and a big enough list.

But if you have a small enough list or a small enough reputation… then the message above smells of need, at least to me.

​​I figured there must be a better way.

My suspicions were confirmed when I read Bob Cialdini’s book Pre-suasion. Cialdini cites laboratory research showing that constant scarcity is less motivating than recent scarcity. From the research:

If there are always a few cookies in a jar, you want them more than if there are a lot of cookies. But…

You don’t want them nearly as much as when there were always a lot of cookies… and now suddenly there are only a few.

“Pfff, lab persuasion!” you might say. “What does that have to do with the real world?”

I don’t know. Let’s find out.

As I mentioned at the start, I have a new job offer. That’s in addition to my ongoing clients in the ecommerce space… plus a real estate business I’ve recently joined… plus my own books and courses, which I’m building up and selling.

And like I said, new opportunities are popping up, more and more often, as my little newsletter picks up steam.

In other words, I’m really not looking for more work. But I am still open to it.

So if you would like to work with me in some form… before I get so entangled in other projects that it becomes impossible to say yes to anything new… then get on my newsletter, get in touch with me, and we can talk.

The power of the fake diagnosis

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“Please spit in the cup,” the nurse said. “And now we take the test strip and wait a few seconds. Oh… you see how the color changed? I’m afraid that means you’re positive for TAA deficiency.”

Back in 1988, a bunch of undergrads at Williams College got tested for Thioamine Acetylase (TAA) deficiency.

TAA is a pancreatic enzyme, the undergrads were told. People who don’t have enough of it can experience mild but irritating pancreatic disorders.

Turns out TAA doesn’t really exist. The point of the charade was to see how the undergrads would react to the fake diagnosis. Because next they were given a questionnaire.

The questionnaire had a list of common symptoms of TAA deficiency (“headache, diarrhea, backache, …”).

It also had a list of common risk factors contributing to TAA deficiency (“taking aspirin or Tylenol, getting less than seven hours of sleep, skipping a meal, …”).

Perhaps you can see where this is going:

The deficiency group of students noticed 50% more symptoms in their life… and 20% more risk factors … than the control group did. (The control was people who didn’t have the test strip change color.)

But as I said, in reality, both groups had the same levels of TAA coursing through their bodies — zero.

The authors of this study call this “confirmatory search.”

It’s the underlying mechanism by which our brains get infected by medical student syndrome… personality tests… and horoscopes.

We look for proof, we ignore disproof.

My point is there is power inside these made-up diseases, syndromes, and categories. Even when they don’t explain anything. And even when people who get a diagnosis are not given any way out.

So imagine what would happen if you actually diagnose a real and troubling condition for people… point out the symptoms and risk factors so they can convince themselves… and then give them a solution that can fix it.

It might make you immune to empty lobby syndrome… for the rest of your life.

If that’s something you currently suffer from, and if you experience the anxiety and lack of cash flow it brings, I have a solution for you. It’s the ideas and suggestions I share inside my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Hitchcock sales structure

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The exciting climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest goes like this:

Eva Marie Saint is about to fall off a cliff.

Cary Grant is reaching down to try to keep her from falling.

“I can’t,” she says.

“Yes you can,” he says.

And then one of the evil guy’s henchmen comes and starts to crush Cary’s fingers underfoot. But Cary needs those fingers to hold on to the cliff, and to keep himself and Eva from death below.

Like I said, that’s the climax.

But don’t worry.

It all turns out fine. The police arrive and shoot the evil henchman, who falls off the cliff. The main bad guy is caught. The secret microfilm is safe. And some time later, Cary and Eva, who made it off the cliff and got married in the meantime, head back east by train to start a new life together. The end.

Pretty usual Hollywood, right?

Right. The only unusual thing is the speed:

That entire anti-climactic sequence, from the moment Cary gets his fingers crushed to the train ride home, takes a total of 43 seconds.

​​43 seconds!

For reference, North By Northwest is a movie that lasts 2 hours and 16 minutes.

Of the total, 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 17 seconds goes to building up tension and misery.

The last 43 seconds goes to relieving it.

And yet people watch. And more relevant for us, they buy.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve previously had the task of selling many generic, unremarkable, sometimes suspect physical products. To boot, these products often sold at 3-4 times the price you could find on Amazon.

How can you possibly sell millions of dollars of a commodity at three times the price that anybody can get, just by shopping as they always do?

In my case, the answer was stories. Full of tension and misery. That’s how the bulk of the sales message went.

And when you thought things were bad, an evil henchman came to make it all worse.

The relief of all that tension, in the form of talking about the product, was really an afterthought. Not quite at Hitchcock levels, but still.

So that’s my takeaway for you.

Don’t sell overpriced crap.

​​But even if you sell something great, it probably makes sense to talk less about it than you want to. Instead, focus more of your prospect’s time and attention on that “I can’t/Yes you can” drama.

And in case you want more storytelling and selling ideas:

You might like my email newsletter.

A new way to approach copywriting

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I recently started keeping track of every article I click on mindlessly, purely because of an intriguing headline. Here are a few:

* After Years Of Conflict And Instability, Iraq Is Opening Up To Tourism

* A Writing Tip I Learned At Oxford

* A New Way To Approach Wayback Machine

* The New Credible Science Of Longevity Versus The Old Anti-Aging Snake Oil

* Nikola Tesla Invention From 100 Years Ago Suddenly Makes More Sense Today

So I record those headlines, and then I ask myself, Why? Why did I click on this?

If you’re in the business of marketing, I’d like to suggest this new habit to you too.

But why?

Because, as Gary Halbert said, you have to steep yourself in what’s working now. If you’re clicking it, others are clicking it. Pay attention, and you’ll find out what’s working now, both in terms of format (“A New Way To Approach X”) as well as in terms of topics (“Wayback Machine”).

But Gary also said something else. He said you have to ground yourself in the fundamentals of marketing.

That’s why asking why is useful.

Human psychology changes very slowly, if at all, from what I can see. And if you ask yourself why, you’ll get back to a few fundamental answers, over and over and over. And then you can make your own formats, for your own topics, and still have people clicking and reading.

By the way, human psychology changes so slowly that there are some ads that ran a hundred years ago, which could still run successfully today.

If you want to see an example, I’ll share one tomorrow in my email newsletter. And if you want to get on that newsletter so you get to see that ad, here’s where to go.

The hidden religion of persuasion

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“Well… I need to tell you all something. And it’s the most important thing I could ever say to you. In a little while, you’ll know for certain that I’m putting my very life on the line, and the safety of my family, by sharing this with you. So I hope that buys me at least a few minutes of your precious time.”

So starts out the video by one Altiyan Childs.

Childs was the 2010 winner of Australian X Factor. He came back to relevance last month because he released a YouTube video, lasting five (5) hours, which was shot in what looks to be his bedroom.

In the video, Childs exposes the hidden religion that all stars, celebrities, and people in power belong to, and are bound by an oath never to reveal.

How does Childs know?

Because he himself belonged. But he is now publicly renouncing this evil religion (he found another religion, Christianity, following a near-death car crash) and warning the rest of the world of the danger we’re all in.

The video got about a million views on YouTube in the first few weeks while it was still up.

That’s actually not a crazy number. I saw a similar video, with a similar expose, featuring a similar level of celebrity, pop up last year and get almost 20 million views in a few months’ time.

And I guess even this 20 million is peanuts to the overall popularity of the belief that some kind of evil cabal controls world affairs.

I think there are many marketing and persuasion lessons that can be sucked out of that need and out of Altiyan Childs’s video. Today I just want to focus on one.

Because what really underlies the popularity of such beliefs? Here’s my own secret revelation:

Such beliefs put our messy lives into an order-creating context.

Take a bunch of seemingly random and unconnected facts… draw surprising connections between them… and then place them inside of a bigger frame that gives the whole picture a simple and clear meaning…

… and this creates the feeling of insight.

And this feeling, as I’ve written before, might just be the most powerful and secret persuasion tool that the powers that be don’t want you to know about.

My point is that if you take those three steps outlined above, you can sell not only Christianity… but you can also sell supplements, coaching programs, and financial newsletters.

That’s a big claim.

And I can’t blame you if you’re still skeptical.

All I can say is, I’m putting my very life on the line to dig in further to bring you the full facts on this.

Once the facts are revealed, you will be able to see the truth and make up your own mind.

In the meantime, I hope this buys me a few email opens of your precious attention. You can sign up for my newsletter here. Because I will be back with this topic soon, assuming that the powers that be don’t get to me first.

Green Valley must fire its warehouse manager

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Last week, supplement company Green Valley, which was founded by A-list copywriter Lee Euler, sent out a panicked email that started with:

Dear John,

We discovered somewhat of a sticky situation last week…

So I’m hoping maybe we can help each other out…

You see, late last week our warehouse manager called to let me know that we have NO room for a large shipment that’s already on its way to our fulfillment facility here in Virginia…

That means I now have to get rid of a few pallets worth of one of our top sellers…

So, I’m knocking 70% off Gluco-Secure—a natural breakthrough shown to…

I don’t know who’s at fault here. But I find the warehouse manager’s “not my circus, not my monkeys” attitude contemptible. ​​Particularly since he allowed a similar situation to happen last September. That’s when Green Valley sent out an email that started:

Dear John,

I never do this.

But I have a small problem and I think maybe we can help each other out.

Yesterday afternoon the Green Valley warehouse manager let me know that they have NO room in the warehouse for a truckload shipment of product that’s scheduled for delivery next week.

Somehow wires got crossed but it turns out we have 4 pallets of our top-selling joint pain formula that we need to clear out FAST to make room quickly for new inventory.

So, I’m doing something I never do…

I’m knocking 70% off a powerful joint-healing discovery…

Somehow wires got crossed?

Twice in under one year?

I don’t know what this warehouse manager is doing all day long. He’s clearly not doing his job. That’s why I say Green Valley must fire him, and must do it now.

But one person they shouldn’t fire is their email copywriter. Because that guy obviously knows about the power of reason why marketing.

Reason why is the most widespread and effective click, whirr mechanism in advertising.

​​Click, whirr, by the way, is the useful but somewhat-dated analogy Robert Cialdini used in his book Influence. You press the tape player button click, and whirr goes the automated behavior tape.

The incredible thing is that, just as with canned laughter and obvious flattery, reason why is effective even when it’s blatantly untrue.

I’m not saying you should lie… but you might choose to stretch the truth, until it turns into a reason why.

Because reason why works on you too. So if you ever need to justify why stretching the truth is ok, you can always say, for your own peace of mind and your customer’s,

“I never do this. But I have a small problem and I think maybe we can help each other out…”

Speaking of sticky situations:

I recently had an influx of new subscribers to my email newsletter. And I’m getting really close to a big round number of subscribers that I’ve always coveted.

So I’m going to do something I never do, in the hopes of quickly filling up those extra few newsletter subscriber spots.

For today only, I’m opening up my email newsletter to anybody to subscribe, for free, right here on this page. This opportunity might not come again for a long time. If you’re the type to grab a great opportunity when you see it, click here to subscribe now.

Superior solution, inferior marketing results?

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Direct marketing is counterintuitive. For me even the basics don’t come easy, so I have to use all kinds of metaphors to trick myself and avoid making stupid mistakes.

Otherwise, I end writing copy that seems perfect to me — but that makes as much of a splash as a feather floating down a well.

So here’s one metaphor that helps me and might help you, too. Let me illustrate it with a scene from this morning:

The apartment I’ve been staying in for the past few days is cold. This morning, I got cold while working there for an hour. Then I went out for a walk.

My body was tense and alert and guarded. Cold.

Outside, the sun was shining. And whenever I walked into a patch of sunlight somewhere, my body relaxed and my scowl changed into something like a smile. Warm.

But then I’d step back into the cold shadow next to a building or a bunch of trees. Each time, my body tensed up again and the scowl came back.

And so on. Over and over. Warm sunlight leading to a moment of openness and hope. Cold shadow again, making me closed and guarded.

My point is:

This is the same thing that’s going on with your prospects right now.

And if your marketing or copy is not getting all the results it’s capable of, it’s because you’re taking the focus off your prospects and their problems.

It’s a mistake that’s easy to make.

You try to get people to believe your message. You try to show them how you’re better and how you’re an expert and how you deliver results. How your solution is superior and solves the problems they have.

But people can’t hear you.

Because they’re shivering in the shadow, looking for a bit of warmth. The problem is you’re shifting the focus off them too soon, and onto some external thing.

People say they want a solution to their problem, but they really don’t. Not for a long, long time.

What they want is to be understood, to be validated, and to get an understanding themselves of why they’re in this mess to begin with.

That’s the warm sunshine that gets people’s body temperature up.

So keep the focus on them.

And only when they get so sweaty and uncomfortable that they can’t take any more hot sunlight… do you provide the cool shadow of a leafy tree and say, “Here, here’s what you need. And can I interest you in an ice-cold lemonade as well?”

Well, can I?

Because if you want more ideas on how to improve your marketing results, I write a daily email newsletter on that topic. You can sign up for it here.