Copywriting

This 9-figure copywriter just made the sales letter discovery of a lifetime…

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Dear friend,

Normally, I don’t write about these kinds of off-limits “insider strategies” of rich and famous copywriters.

But these aren’t normal times…

And the discovery that came out of this top-secret research…

Is simply too important, and has too much money-making potential, to be ignored.

Now in the rest of this email, I’m going to be sharing exactly what this discovery is…

The science behind why it works…

And how you can begin using it TODAY to write killer copy, to make yourself more sales in less time.

Also, in just a few moments from now…

I’ll show you how a tiny mistake in your sales letter lead could be costing you 80% of your sales…

Plus you will discover the “super fun” tactic one elite copywriter, whose sales will soon hit the billion-dollar mark, has found to make his prospects keep reading… and ultimately BUY.

***

All right. Let me emerge from modeling the lead of Stefan Georgi’s Gluco Secure sales letter. (And yes, Stefan is the 9-figure copywriter I referenced in the subject line.)

I’ve been writing my own sales letter lately, to promote the official launch of my bullets course. And in the top-secret research for that, I discovered the following:

Stefan Georgi says one of the biggest jumps he made as a copywriter came by mastering bullets.

“They make great headlines,” says Stefan, “plus they are super fun to write.” But that’s not all.

Stefan says that many copywriters forget to fascinate in the lead of their sales letter.

​​The lead. You know — the part that determines 80% of your overall sales.

​​Stefan doesn’t like the chance that he’s going to lose 80% of his readers right up front. So he adds camouflaged bullets at the end of his leads. (Like I did right before those asterisks above.)

​​​​These lead bullets are a kind of sales insurance to intrigue readers and pull them deeper into your copy. ​Stefan explains:

“Because even if my lead is a bit off, or if my big idea isn’t hitting as hard as I thought it would, throwing in those intriguing bullets at the end drastically increases the chances of the prospect sticking with me. And, the longer they stick with me, the more invested they become, and the more likely they are to ultimately buy.”

“Ultimately buy.”

Ultimately, I don’t have anything to offer you to buy today. But I will soon.

It will be my bullets course. That’s where, if you like, you can learn how to write A-list bullets that go at the end of your sales letter lead… or in your headline… or anywhere else you want to get your reader’s attention and interest.

But not today. Today, if you want to read Stefan’s thoughts on bullets, or discover the other big mistakes he sees in sales letter leads, here’s where to go:

https://www.stefanpaulgeorgi.com/blog/big-lead-mistake-5-forgetting-to-fascinate/

The story my clients offered me $0 not to tell

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A few days ago, a mysterious-sounding story bubbled up in several corners of the Internet where I make my home. Its title:

“The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell”

BCG in this case is Boston Consulting Group, a big international consulting company.

And the story sounds mysterious… until you realize that $16k isn’t very much money for a big corporation like BCG. So whatever this guy had to tell can’t be that shocking. Still…

I found the article interesting and surprisingly familiar. And if you are a freelancer or consultant of any sort, I think it can be valuable for you to hear.

In a nutshell, this former BCG-er’s article says three things:

1. Consulting clients often don’t know why they’ve hired a consultant. It’s a kind of cargo cult thing — just something that businesses like them do.

2. Consultants often have to make their work fit the client’s foregone decisions. Even if that means supporting foolish or wasteful actions.

3. As a result, the consultant who wrote the article burned out. His pay was good. His workload was small. And yet, his motivation, as a result of 1 and 2 above, was even smaller.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

I’ve had similar experiences working as a freelance copywriter. Not with all clients. But with enough.

I’ve been hired by clients who only wanted a sales letter because of direct response buzz in their mastermind. Often this meant the client had no real need of a copywriter, because there was zero hope they’d make any money from the copy I wrote.

There were other situations where the client was more experienced… but also very set on doing things that were clearly a bad idea. In this case, whatever expertise I could bring to the project was like trying to stop a runaway train by throwing a pillow at it.

I found both cases to be frustrating and demotivating work — even when it was well-paid.

And so, over time, I started screening out clients like these. But often I still didn’t screen well enough.

That’s one of the reasons why these days I’m trying not to take on new copywriting clients. Instead I just look to partner up with businesses, in a way where I simply get a share of the money that I make for them.

Like I said, I thought the BCG guy’s experiences and my own might be useful to you if you are a freelancer or consultant also.

That said, there is a good chance that you have to simply live all this stuff… and experience it on your own skin before you learn.

Still, I wanted to let you know about it. It might save you some wondering if there’s something uniquely wrong with you… and maybe it will even help you move more quickly towards work freelance or consulting work that’s more motivating, and less frustrating.

And if you want more like this:

I write a daily email newsletter. Mostly about hard-core direct marketing and copywriting topics. But occasionally about the business of copywriting, like today. If you’d like to try it out, here’s where to go.

“It’s like he reads my mind!”: The discipline to not lose your secret marketing edge

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“Could it be real?” Agassi asked himself in wonder. He slowed the tape down. “No… it can’t be true!”

The first three times that Andre Agassi faced Boris Becker, he lost.

The time was the late 1980s. Both Agassi and Becker were rising tennis stars — both future number ones.

But those first three meetings, it was all Becker. Three tight competitive matches. And each time Agassi fell short.

The trouble was Becker’s booming serve. The damn thing was unreadable and unreturnable.

The defeats stung Agassi. So he locked himself away and looked at hours and hours of footage of Becker serving, and winning, and winning.

And then Agassi noticed something. At first, he couldn’t believe it.

So he looked at more video tapes. And then more. On each one. Every damn time.

Becker had a tell.

Right before he served his unreturnable serve, he did this thing with his tongue.

If he stuck his tongue out to the left, it meant he would serve wide.

If he stuck his tongue straight out, it meant he would serve down the middle.

From then on, until the end of their careers, Andre Agassi beat Boris Becker 10 times out of 11. Becker kept telling his wife in disbelief, “It’s like he reads my mind!”

I’m telling you this story for two reasons:

One is to show you how people give away a lot with their physical gestures. And not just in poker or in tennis. Real life, too, or even Zoom. You just gotta pay attention. People can literally give away secrets they think are hidden inside their skulls.

But there’s a second thing. Like Agassi said:

“The hardest part wasn’t returning his serve. The hardest part was not letting him know that I knew this. So I had to resist the temptation of reading his serve for the majority of the match and choose the moments when I was gonna use that information to break the match open.”

So my second thing is to advise you to apply this same restraint to marketing and copywriting.

​​Once you figure out how to read your prospect’s mind, have discipline. And only use that information in those crucial, break-point, match-over opportunities.

​​Otherwise, your prospect will wise up. He will stick his tongue back inside his mouth. And then it’s back to the video room, for hundreds of hours of more research.

For example, I’ve figured out a magic phrase to get people to sign up to my email newsletter. But I can’t use it all the time, or it will lose its magic. I have to save it for special moments.

So for now, if you’d like to get on my email newsletter, so you can learn more about persuasion and marketing and copywriting, let me just say, here’s where you can sign up.

How Gary Bencivenga transforms his counterexamples

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A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once wrote an ad for an agency he worked for. The ad ran in the Wall Street Journal, and the headline read,

“Announcing a direct response advertising agency that will guarantee to outpull your best ad.”

As you might expect from Gary, this ad was packed with all kinds of proof. In fact, a quarter of the ad consisted of eight case studies of previous clients that hired Gary’s agency.

​​Seven of the clients got tremendous results. One did not, and they didn’t pay anything, as per the guarantee in the headline.

I thought of this ad today because of a book I just finished reading, called Transforming Your Self, by Steve Andreas. The book is about our self-concept — how we think about ourselves — and how to change that.

Right now I’ll only share one bit of this valuable book with you. It’s about the raw meat that your self-concept, at least according to Andreas.

​​(And bear with me me for just a bit. Because this does tie into Gary Bencivenga and sales and marketing.)

So say you think of yourself as “smart.” How do you know that? How do you know you’re smart?

Andreas’s answer is that you have a set of mental images, each representing an experience, which back up your claim to being “smart.”

Perhaps you see your parents praising you when you were 7… or some workplace triumph… or getting through a dense book and really grokking it.

Whatever. The point is you have examples that back up your claim to being smart. Probably lots of them.

But what about the counterexamples? What about that time the intimidating college professor asked you a question… and you just sat there squirming, like a sweaty turnip?

That’s the interesting bit.

According to Andreas, your self-concept becomes stronger when you include counterexamples in your mental database.

A counterexample makes your claim to a quality more real and believable. (I’ve tried it out personally… and I believe it.)

And by the way, that’s exactly what’s happening in Gary’s ad above. That one counterexample makes the ad more real and believable.

But what if you have more than one counterexample? What if they start to pile up? What if they rival, or even outnumber your good examples?

That’s what the rest of Andreas’s book is about.

But Gary, master psychologist that he is, figured it out intuitively. And if you read Gary’s ad, you can find the answer, both in the headline and in the offer itself. In case you want to crack the code, here is Gary’s original ad:

https://bejakovic.com/bencivenga-agency-ad

Makepeace, Schwartz, and Dan Kennedy all agree there’s something magic about the number—

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“A piece of alien technology that arrived from the future.”

That’s how one top-level marketer described a sales letter that A-list copywriter Clayton Makepeace wrote back in 2005. Clayton’s sales letter started out with the headline:

“The 23-Cent Life-Saver Heart Surgeons Never Tell You About!”

Beneath that, Clayton had three bullet points:

* So safe, it’s FDA-APPROVED for use in baby food

* So effective, you can actually SEE it working

* So cheap, it’s just PENNIES A DAY

Sounds great, right? But I’m not here to sell you a supplement. Instead, I’m here to sell you a number. For example, consider the following bullet by Gene Schwartz:

“Three things you must never say to your children – but almost everyone does”

Would you like to know what those three things are? I did. So I looked them up in the book that Gene was selling. And by my count, there are either two things or five. But not three. And yet, Gene chose to put three in his bullet.

Why?

For the same reason that Dan Kennedy decided to write the following passage as he did:

“I and my organization NEED honest, ambitious, reliable men and women in your area right now. You can join me and earn profits of $5,000… $10,000… even $20,000 per transaction, implementing my proven and improved Business System — working at it as little as 4 HOURS A WEEK.”

Dan explains the thinking behind this passage:

“Erroneously most people consider themselves honest, they see themselves as reliable, and they believe they are ambitious. What you don’t want to do (unless very deliberately) is use qualifiers that a lot of people would feel ruled them out or that would intimidate or worry them. There is also some magic in 3, not 2 or 4 or more. You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

And now for something completely different:

If you’re interested in persuasion, marketing, or copywriting, and if you are honest, ambitious, and reliable, then you might like my email newsletter. Each email is short, informative, and entertaining. You can sign up to get it here.

The thinking man’s horoscope

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Detailed and Reliable — LOW
Nurturing – LOW
Tough — LOW

Today I went through a part of Ray Dalio’s personality test. It takes 40 minutes to complete. I gave up after just 10. But based on those 10 minutes, Dalio’s test still spit out an uninspiring estimate of who I am (results above).

You’ve probably heard of Dalio. He’s a billionaire investor. A few years ago, he wrote an influential book about his way of thinking, called Principles. Well, now he has released a free online personality test, called Principles You.

Dalio got enthusiastic about personality tests a while back. He started by giving a bunch of his employees the Myers-Briggs.

“It gives you clarity of how people think!” Dalio said.

And to prove his point, he had those same employees fill out a survey after they got the test results. “How accurately does this describe the way you think?” 85% gave it a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1-5.

Impressive, except:

If you’ve been reading my blog over the past few weeks, you’ll know I recently wrote about cold reading. That’s when you tell people something about themselves without knowing anything about them.

In the very first cold reading experiment, all the way back in 1949, 39 students were all given the same personality profile. It came straight out of a horoscope.

And after reading their profile, 34 out of 39 students gave the profile either a 4 or a 5 on a scale of 1-5. That’s 87%. A finding that has been replicated since, and not just by Dalio.

But what the hell do I know?

I’m just some guy. And Ray Dalio is a billionaire.

​​Maybe his Principles You test really is more useful and accurate than a horoscope.

Either way, all I really want to suggest is that, up and down the success and skepticism ladders, people love categorizing others… and they LOOOVE being categorized themselves.

I think those two loves come from very different drives. I won’t get into that here. But I will leave you with this:

Entire businesses have been built by putting people into buckets. (Michael Gerber’s E-Myth comes to mind.) And if you need a unique mechanism… or you need a unique position in the market… then perhaps you can get started by creating a new diagnostic test. My suggestion for a name? Buckets You.

On a related note:

If you are honest, ambitious, and reliable, then you might get a lot of value out of subscribing to my email newsletter. Click here to try it out.

A transparent but effective marketing ploy (thanks, Jay Abraham)

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Yesterday I heard marketing coach Rich Schefren tell a “How did he get away with that?” story about the first time he bought a Jay Abraham product:

The product was supposed to arrive in a month.

But it didn’t arrive in a month. Or in two months. Or three.

When it eventually did arrive, some six months later, it came with a letter written by Jay. The letter said something like:

“Here is the product that you ordered from me and boy, are you lucky I decided to hold off on releasing it! This extra time allowed me to add in all these extra case studies and valuable modules and colored streamers that will do x, y, and z for you!”

And for the record, today, many years after this first experience, Rich counts Jay as one of his two biggest mentors.

My point being:

Jay’s ploy may have been transparent. And yet, just like canned laughter on a TV sitcom, it still served its purpose.

In fact, what Jay did illustrates one of the essential functions of marketing. So let’s see if I can do it:

You’ve probably heard me mention my book 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters. This book is short, only 40 pages. And if I could have, I would have made it even shorter and even easier to read.

But I needed at least this many pages to cover all 10 of these commandments, the best you-won’t-find-em-on-Facebook copywriting strategies I’ve come across so far.

And since I wanted to make each of the commandments crystal clear, I also included 3 supporting real-world examples to make each comandment stick in your mind. So 40 pages really was the minimum to do all that.

Anyways, if you haven’t yet seen this book, you might find it both valuable and a quick and easy read. In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The “2-sentence persuasion secret” that A-list copywriters know and you don’t

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I’ve got a “2-sentence persuasion” secret I’d like to tell you, which I extracted straight from the head of John Carlton, and which will help you write killer sales copy, for more sales in less time.

Interested?

If you say yes, then I say… I’m not surprised. Hear me out.

I took my own advice from a few days ago. And I looked at the top three guys in the “copywriting course” space. I wanted to see how they sell their stuff.

And by the top three, I mean Stefan Georgi with his RMBC course… Ben Settle with his Copy Slacker course… and Derek Johanson with his Copy Hour course.

(If your blood pressure just shot up because you believe these three are NOT the top guys in the “copywriting course” market… fine. You’re probably right. I just feel that, for people who might be potential customers for my bullets course — name still TBD — the above three are my top competitors.)

Anyways:

I looked at their sales pages. And I told my brain to search for commonalities. Here’s what it came back with:

1. Mechanism. All three sales letters prominently feature a mechanism — it’s actually the name of all three courses.

2. Authority. Beyond mechanism, all three rely on authority to wow you. Stefan’s page is all about his own authority and the massive sales he’s made… while Ben and Derek defer to A-list copywriters for their implied or direct endorsement of the mechanism.

3. The promise. Both Stefan and Ben basically say, “More sales in less time.” Derek’s promise is more vague — killer sales copy, and ultimate success. Perhaps he’s just targeting a slightly different audience than Ben and Stefan.

So my point for you is:

This kind of research is something you too can do… and it might prove valuable in helping you define your promise and your positioning.

Or it might not.

I’m not sure if I will really go with “2-sentence persuasion” and all that other stuff when promoting my bullets course. Because even though Ben, Stefan, and Derek are all successful in selling their courses… I bet the copy is not a major part of why those courses sell.

Instead, I think it’s about the relationships those guys have with their lists… their reputation in the market… their word-of-mouth endorsements.

That’s why you can’t really trust most online copy. Sure, it can give you good ideas. But it’s worth testing anything you find, and making sure it actually works for you.

By the way, if you are interested in killer copy and more sales and less time, and you’re curious about my 2-sentence persuasion approach… then sign up for my newsletter. That’s where I will send out announcements once this offer becomes available.

#1 secret of wealth creation for marketers and copywriters

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Today, for the first time ever, I took a closer look at Parris Lampropoulos’s Copy Vault sales page.

Parris, who is an A-list copywriter, offered the Copy Vault training back in 2018. And back in 2018, when I decided I wanted in, I raced past the sales letter and went straight to the order page. Rabbit brain.

So today, while working on a project, I finally took a closer look. And right away, I saw something odd. The headline reads:

For the First and Last Time Ever,
Parris Lampropoulos Opens the Vault and Reveals His Top Wealth-Creation Secrets
for Copywriters and Marketers

Hmm. That sounded strangely familiar.

The bit calling out copywriters and marketers… the promised secrets of wealth-creation… and that “first and last time” thing…

Had I seen all of those somewhere before? Oh yeah. Of course:

Available on DVDs for the First and Only Time…
“Gary Bencivenga’s
7 Master Secrets
of Wealth Creation
for Marketers and Copywriters”

That’s the headline that Gary Bencivenga, an even more famous A-list copywriter, wrote for the sales letter for his farewell seminar, back in 2006.

Coincidence?

Hardly. Rather, it’s the #1 wealth-creation secret for any marketers or copywriters who are willing to listen. Here’s why.

I recently heard marketer Caleb O’Dowd talk about how he does research. Caleb said two things.

First, when you enter a market, you should look at your top 3-5 competitors. (Or I guess one is enough, if your competitor happens to be Gary Bencivenga.)

Caleb said there are reasons why those people are at the top. So reverse engineer their successful sales letters… figure out those reasons… and you too will know exactly what to say to prospects to get a response.

Very obvious, right?

Right. But still something that was eye-opening to me. Because while I’ve spent hundreds of hours of research on copywriting projects… very little of that time went to analyzing copy from the competition.

Silly me. That’s something I will change starting now.

And what about the second tip Caleb had about research?

Well, that’s in the video below.

​​The video is from the Q&A after-party of the recent Clayton Makepeace tribute. It features a bunch of A-list copywriters, including Gary Bencivenga and Parris Lampropoulos, answering questions.

​​I personally think it’s worth watching for Caleb’s answer alone. But perhaps you’re wondering if you really need another Obvious Adams tip on research.

In that case, let me repeat something I wrote a few weeks ago, also in connection to Caleb:

“Caleb said deep research is the kind of thing very few marketers are willing to engage in. But those who do inevitably wind up at the top of their market. They don’t just succeed, they have breakthroughs, and they make millions.”

By the way, Caleb isn’t the only one to put such a premium on research and understanding your audience.

Gary says the game is won or lost in research. He calls deep research the “launchpad of copywriting breakthroughs.”

And Parris says the #1 secret in copywriting — more than any technique or book — is to understand your audience.

In case that’s sufficient motivation for you to find out Caleb’s other research tip…

Well, let me interrupt for a second. And say that, if you are a copywriter or a marketer, and you’re after wealth-creation secrets, you might want to sign up to my email newsletter.

And now, if I’ve convinced you about the value of research, and you want to see what Caleb’s second tip is, here’s the video:

Do as top copywriters and marketers do… not as they say

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A lot of people wrote to me over the past 24 hours. Many guessed the right answer to the riddle I posed yesterday.

I won’t reveal what that right answer was. After all, I have to withhold something as a reward for people who are signed up to my email newsletter.

But I will tell you this:

Among the people who did NOT guess right, there were lots of good ideas.

Curiosity… emotions… a big idea… a starving crowd… believability.

And you know what?

Makes sense. Because the copywriters I mentioned yesterday talked about the critical importance of each of those things.

Maybe you’re wondering what my point is. So let me set it up with something that may or may not surprise you.

In the interview where I got the Gary Halbert quote I cited yesterday, I heard Gary talk about the bullets he wrote for his Killer Orgasms book. Like a proud father, Gary said there are two really, really important things about those bullets:

1. None of them are hypey

2. They are based on truth

Well, I’ve looked at those bullets. They are most certainly full of hype.

I’ve also looked at the book Gary was selling. And it sure looks like it was slapped together after the bullets were already written. The payoff seems to be an afterthought. And sometimes there is none.

My point is that you can’t always go by what people say.

I got this bug into my head via marketer and copywriter Glenn Osborn. Glenn’s MO is to look at what successful promoters do, and learn from that.

So that’s what I’ll do tomorrow.

I’ll tell you about the #1 wealth-creation secret for marketers and copywriters — as I’ve heard it discussed, AND as I’ve seen it done. In fact, as I’ve seen it done by one of the famous A-listers I talked about yesterday.

And I’ll tell you this: This #1 secret is not the answer to my riddle yesterday… or any of those other things that people guessed.

If you’d like to sign up to my newsletter, so you can read tomorrow’s email, and so you can join in any future riddles I send out, click here and follow the rabbit hole to the end.