Copywriting

Copywriting: a business or a job?

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I was out of clean underwear, and things were looking bleak.

I was staying in an Airbnb apartment. I put my clothes to wash earlier in the morning.

But halfway through the cycle, the washing machine got stuck. It blinked stupidly. Even though I talked to it and comforted it, it wouldn’t spin or finish the cycle. My clothes, including all my underwear except what I had on, were stuck inside.

I wrote to the owner. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she answered. “My husband will come after work to take a look at it. If he can’t fix it, we’ll call the repairman.” It was 10am.

A few hours passed. I walked by the washing machine and spotted that the floor was wet. The washing machine was leaking somewhere. Water had pooled behind the machine, and was running along the wall all across the room. It even reached the next room, with the hardwood floor.

I wrote to the owner again. “Oh my God!” she said. “I’ll call the washing machine repairman right away!”

The point being, incentives matter. And on that topic:

Today I got paid the second 50% of the biggest copywriting project I have done to date. And so I did a debrief for myself, to see how the project went, and what I could learn from it.

My conclusion was this: I did a good job. I put in a lot of work, I gave the client much better ideas than they had initially, and I delivered solid copy.

And yet:

Will the client actually get value out of my copy? Will they simply send some cold traffic to it, and have the copy make money out the gate? And if not, will they know what to fix and tweak and test?

If I’m being honest with myself, I know there would be a bunch of things I’d have done differently if there were was some revenue share at stake on this project.

I would have taken more control of the project to put this copy into action sooner… I would have pushed back harder against client ideas that I thought were suspicious… I would have insisted on being involved in the project even now, after I’d delivered the copy.

Royalties are a good system. I’ve told my clients this for a while. And if you’re a copywriter, maybe you can do the same, using the same argument I’ve just given you.

And if you need an argument to bite the bullet and actually make this suggestion to your clients, and to even insist on it, then remember Dan Kennedy. “Copywriting is a business,” says Dan. “You have to get paid on the back end, otherwise you just have a job.”

That’s all the motivation I have for you for today. Now for the sales pitch:

I write an email newsletter. Sometimes I talk about the business of copy, other times I talk about copywriting itself. If this is the kind of thing that floats your lancha, you can join the newsletter here.

Stop reading this blog unless you want to march in my army

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How do you overcome somebody’s confirmation bias?

That’s something I found out today in a provocative article titled the “Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral.”

The article tells the story of a 13-year-old Jewish kid from Washington D.C. who became a true-believing moderator of an alt-right subreddit.

The story itself is less interesting than it sounds. What is interesting is how Mike Caulfield, the author of the article, explains how this kind of “grooming” happens.

How could a Jewish kid from a liberal family be persuaded to join a far-right community, made up of people who are often hostile to Jews?

And more broadly, how is it possible to overcome somebody’s confirmation bias… and implant ideas that were once inconceivable?

I won’t repeat Caulfield’s entire argument here. But the gist is the idea of gradual curation. Here’s how it works:

1. A person (the mark, for short) goes to a subreddit or a Facebook group or somebody’s blog.

2. There he gets exposed to a curated claim. This is a claim that is carefully selected, provocative, but not threatening to his world view.

For example, the 13-year-old above was accused of sexual harassment by a classmate. So maybe he came across a claim on Reddit that said, “Study in Cambridge Law Journal reports up to 90% of rape allegations are false.”

3. At this point, the mark is intrigued but also a bit cautious. So he goes on to verify the claim for himself by doing a quick Google search. There it is, “Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). ‘False Allegations of Rape’. Cambridge Law Journal. 65 (1): 128–158.”

4. Mind is blown. Now the mark is ready to repeat the process one level down… with another curated but more provocative claim, which gets him closer to the alternate reality.

None of this is news to marketers. Curating facts is what good direct response copy is all about, and Gene Schwartz wrote about “gradualization” back in 1966.

There are even copy tricks to simulate verifying something yourself. But maybe it’s a bit tasteless to give you a step-by-step here, since we started by talking about the radicalization of a 13-year-old.

So instead, let me tell you what I personally get out of this. It might be relevant to you also:

The upshot for me is to avoid curated content as much as possible. That means turning off social media… news sites… and I hate to say it, newsletters like mine.

Because everybody has an agenda. And if you give somebody a freeway into your mind that’s open 24 hours a day, every day, it gets harder to resist that agenda.

You start being groomed… and the next thing you know, you might be marching in somebody else’s army, fighting somebody else’s war, fully convinced it was your idea all along.

Do copywriters have to be funny?

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“That’s the face of every married guy ever.”

Sam Kinison was a former Pentecostal preacher turned standup comic. He was a stout man, with girlish shoulder-length hair, and in the video I watched of him today, he wore a black trench coat on stage. He started off his set in a sweet and quiet tone:

“I’ve been going around the country trying to get as many people as I can not to get married. I’ve been married and I’m just trying to help. Anyone here never been married?”

A guy in the front row raised his head.

“You never been married?” Sam said, his eyebrows rising up innocently. He walked over to the unmarried guy. “Ok, just promise me this.”

“If you ever think about getting married,” Sam said, “remember this face.”

And he started screaming — AAAAAAARRRH AAAAAAARRRH AAAAAAARRRH — the patended Sam Kinison “I’m in hell” scream, right into the poor unmarried guy’s face.

“That’s the face of every married guy ever,” Sam concluded, back in his normal sweet voice.

In my email self-critique yesterday, I criticized myself for missing an opportunity to be funny.

But do you have to be funny if you write copy?

As Dan Kennedy likes to say, you only have to be funny if you want to get paid. Dan even wrote a book all about it, “Make ’em laugh and take their money.”

From what I’ve seen, a few rare individuals can be funny just by being who they are. By being unfiltered or obnoxious or polarizing. Sam Kinison was apparently one of these. According to his brother:

“With Sam, what you saw was what was there. He didn’t exaggerate for the stage.”

But what if you don’t have such an unfiltered personality?

Well, here’s what humor writer SJ Perelman once said. Perelman was asked what it takes to be a comic writer. He responded:

“It takes audacity and exuberance and gaiety, and the most important one is audacity. The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good. Even if he isn’t.”

In other words, you can fake it. Fake it till you make it… or at least fake it until you’ve finished writing that email or VSL lead or seminar stump speech that’s been sitting and looking at you for days.

And if faking it isn’t working, then go on YouTube and watch some Sam Kinison screaming… or Bill Burr ranting… or Eddie Murphy grinning.

​​These guys will make you feel good for a few minutes. They might even give you some audacity. Just remember this face — AAAAAAARRRH AAAAAAARRRH AAAAAAARRRH

My unflattering email critique to my earlier self

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[I gave myself a harsh email critique recently. It’s for an email I wrote exactly two years ago, which gets a “C” at best. If you want to see why, here’s the original email in bold, along with my comments in brackets:]

SUBJECT: The email that broke the camel’s back

[I’ve found that “play on a popular phrase” rarely works as a subject line, at least to my personal newsletter list. So I would say, force yourself to come up with 10 new subject lines, and use the best of those. But if you insist on the subject line above, then make it more specific and intriguing. Something like, “The sticky sweet email that broke this camel’s back.”]

A while back, I subscribed to the Farnam Street email newsletter.

I’d seen a headline in the New York Times about Shane Parrish, the guy who writes Farnam Street. The headline read:

“How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter”

Interesting.

So I subscribed, without knowing too much about what the content I would be getting.

[Only people who really love you will read past this opening. Everybody else will leave. As James Altucher says, you have to bleed in the first line. Options:

– “How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter.” Lead off with this and then explain what it’s all about.

– “And that’s when I unsubscribed.” Lead off with the end of the story (below) and then work your way back to explain how it all went wrong.

– Make it into a metaphor. “I only dated the Farnam Street newsletter for a few weeks. In that short time, we had several nasty fights…”]

The first email arrived with a ton of links to important, helpful articles on the Farnam Street blog. I scanned through, but I didn’t read anything.

A second email hit me a few days later, with more helpful content.

Then a third.

And a fourth.

There was nothing wrong with any of these emails. And the content was apparently good — after all, Shane Parrish got a feature written about him in the New York Times.

But none of it clicked with me. It was too earnest, too virtuous, too positive.

[Ideally, make this section more concrete. Give examples of specific emails, and make each example funny or stupid. If you can’t do that for any reason… then make this section shorter. Your copy should never be both abstract and long, which is what’s happening here.]

Finally, I got an email with the headline “Introducing your new favorite holiday tradition” (it was around Christmastime).

I opened it up. It was about a “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” to exchange books and then spend the evening reading them together with friends and family.

That’s when I unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no beef with Farnam Street or their email newsletter. I personally didn’t find the content interesting. On the other hand, a lot of other people obviously get a lot out of the same emails that I unsubscribed from.

[This is a missed opportunity to be a bit funny. You can make fun of the Icelanders and their nerdy tradition… of Shane Parrish and his virtue signalling… or of yourself and your cold Grinch heart, two sizes too small.]

I only bring up my experience with Farnam Street emails to illustrate a point:

It wasn’t that last email that made me unsubscribe.

That was just the straw, or the email, that broke the camel’s back.

All the previous emails had already primed me to open up the “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” email and say to myself, “Oh, hell no.”

This is something to remember in case you do a lot of email marketing.

It’s very hard to assign blame (or praise) to an individual email.

Odds are, it’s the entire email sequence that’s driving readers away — or winning them over.

[This point is worthwhile. But it could be developed further. An easy way to do this would be with another, positive example. “I was on Ben Settle’s list in two separate bursts, for 3 years in total, before I subscribed to his paid newsletter. The last email I read before I subscribed had the subject, “The Myth of Security”… but you can be sure it wasn’t that email alone that made me subscribe. It was those 3 years of cumulative reading.”]

Of course, there are things (unvirtuous and unearnest things) you can do to stack things in your favor early on in the relationship, while you still have your reader’s attention and good will.

If you’d like to find out what some of those unvirtuous ways are, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info or to sign up to get a free copy (once it’s out), here’s where to go:

[A couple of points to wrap this up for you and for myself both:

1. Even though this email is weak from a copywriting standpoint, that’s ok. Sometimes these daily emails come out a little undercooked, other times they are dry and flavorless. But the more you write, the more of them turn out fine.

But even if not, so what? A weak daily email still has value. It strengthens your relationship with your list… it cements the central idea in your mind… and it can form fodder for your future emails, two years down the line. So keep writing, or if you haven’t started yet, then start.

2. When you tease something at the end of your email, make sure you write down what you had in mind for the payoff. I’d like to know now what info I was teasing back then… but two years later, I have no idea any more. Time to head over to Farnam Street and see what advice Shane has about improving my failing memory.]

Look at your copy… it should make you cringe

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“‘Bild’ car tester Peter Glodschey compared the new Panda to a ‘shoe box.’ But shoe boxes look nicer.”

In 1999, Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro was named “Car Designer of the Century.” Giugiaro designed such icons as the 1961 Aston Martin DB4… the 1966 Maserati Ghibli… and the 1981 DeLorean, which would time-travel once it reached speeds of 88 miles an hour.

But Giugiaro also designed some ugly ducklings. There was the 1988 Yugo Florida… the 1985 Hyundai Excel… and the initial Fiat Panda.

Back in 1980, when the Panda came out, Giugiaro called it the “most enchanting work in my life.” But reviewers weren’t buying it. German magazine Der Spiegel likened the Panda to a “tin gnome,” while Bild called it a “shoe box” (quote above).

You can’t win ’em all, right? But you can learn from your flops, and see how you can improve.

I don’t know if Giorgetto Giugiaro ever did this. But I decided it was a good idea for myself. Because I remember hearing somewhere that if you look at your copy from a few years earlier, it should make you cringe. That means you’re improving.

So I just went through an email I wrote exactly two years ago. My face didn’t lock up from cringing… but the email could definitely be better. So I wrote up a cold and nasty critique to myself, about what needs to be changed, cut, or made sexy instead of grandmotherly.

It was a good exercise. And if you’re interested, I’ll share my results with you tomorrow. Maybe these insights, which come after 2+ years of non-stop daily emails, can help shorten your own learning curve. Maybe they can help you get from “shoe box” to “enchanting work” a bit more quickly.

Learning from my hurt sense of importance

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I had a run in with the police two weeks ago.

They stopped me on a dark and abandoned road. They frisked me. They rifled through my wallet. They opened my box of takeout food and sniffed at the dumplings inside.

In the end, they gave me a fine. “Would you like to pay now?” they asked.

I said no.

They seemed surprised. “Then you have five days to pay at the police station. Otherwise you won’t be able to travel or leave the country.”

I’m telling you this story because it illustrates Dale Carnegie’s first rule of dealing with people. Carnegie says, never criticize, condemn, or complain.

When the policemen stopped me, I was pretty sure I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But when they gave me the fine, I became 100% sure I wasn’t doing anything wrong. The policemen were being arbitrary and stupid, and I could prove it. Or as Carnegie says,

“Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself.”

But that’s not all.

Because I never did pay the fine. “What can they do to me?” I reasoned.

I pictured the two cops checking their police computer, day after day… seeing my fine not being paid. In my fantasy, they shook their heads in frustration. “All that work we put in… for nothing!” A smile spread across my face.

But I also imagined getting stopped at the airport when it was time to fly out. I imagined being taken to a small windowless room, with those two same policemen waiting for me.

It made me nervous for days. But no matter. I would spite myself and not pay the fine — just to spite the stupid and unjust police.

And that’s part two of Carnegie’s argument against criticism:

“Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”

This applies if you’re talking to people one-on-one. And it applies to your copy also.

Some copywriters — particularly when starting out — try to be edgy and insult or mock the prospect. Like this weight loss ad that started:

“ATTENTION ALL FAT PEOPLE! DOES YOUR GARBAGE MAN DELIVER INSTEAD OF COLLECT, AND THEN YELL ‘CHOW TIME!?'”

Don’t scoff. That radio ad was written by a young and cocky Gary Halbert. It pulled in a grand total of 3 sales after thousands of dollars of ad spend.

Of course, your prospect might really be in the wrong. He might be the one to blame. But if that’s what you want to make him see, don’t say so.

Only do it indirectly. For example, by telling him a cautionary tale of somebody else making a similar mistake. Otherwise, your prospect might spite himself — even if he might want your product otherwise — just to spite you.

Hopefully your sense of importance is still in tact. And if you’d like to subscribe to my email newsletter, here’s where to go.

Exclusive “Bejakovic livery service”

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Here’s a quick foray into big-brand marketing, which might be relevant to you even if you’re a complete non-brand:

To start, imagine the year is 2008. Skinny jeans have just become non-negotiable… M.I.A.’s Paper Planes is playing everywhere… and the biggest question on everyone’s mind is, “Was that really Sarah Palin, or was it Tina Fey?”

You, a young and stylish traveler, have just landed in New York City. So you check into your hotel — the hip and modern W Hotel on Lexington Avenue. You’re starving, and you’re ready to hit the town and get some Sbarro’s.

But Uber hasn’t been invented yet. You don’t want to walk all the way to Times Square… so you ask the concierge to call you a cab.

“A cab?” the concierge chuckles. “Oh no, sir. We have something better for you. Something much better. We have a luxury livery service… an Acura MDX SUV to chauffeur you around town.”

It turns out back in 2008, Acura (Honda’s premier line of cars) teamed up with W Hotels to offer something called the “Acura experience.”

Acuras were supposedly good cars, but nobody knew that. Back then the Acura brand of luxury cars was about as desirable as the Flint brand of bottled water.

So rather than plowing more money into ads, the marketing team at Acura created an exclusive “livery service” to anybody staying at any W hotel. You could be chauffeured around town in the new Acura SUV… or if you’re the controlling type who doesn’t want anybody else touching the steering wheel, you could take the MDX out for a test drive yourself.

According to Jonah Berger’s Contagious, the “Acura experience” resulted is millions of rides… tens of thousands of new car sales… and 80% brand switching.

I think there are two lessons here.

The first is that demonstration is much more powerful than bloviation. But you probably knew that.

The second is an illustration of the central idea of Jay Abraham’s marketing philosophy:

“Any problem you have is the solution to a much bigger problem somebody else has — they just don’t know it.”

Jay’s idea goes way beyond what you might think of as joint ventures or affiliate marketing. Instead it’s the insight that, whatever you’re trying to do, somebody out there would love to help you, because it serves their interests also.

I’m not sure what problem W Hotels had back in 2008. But I guess if you’re trying to position yourself as fancy and hip, it’s a constant race to keep ahead of expectations. That’s how Acura helped W Hotels… and made a bunch of car sales as a result.

Like I said, I believe this can help you even if you’re a complete non-brand. Wherever you’re trying to go, there’s somebody out there who has a stable of horses… and will lend you one for free, if you just deliver a package along the way.

I’ve been taking this attitude since the start of this year, with several projects I’ve taken on.

Is it working? Well, I’ll let you know (in the next week or so) if my exclusive “Bejakovic livery service” has produced any result. And if you like, you can decide then if Jay’s idea is something you should adopt as well.

Final point: I have an email newsletter where my updates go first. If you’d like to subscribe so you find out how my livery service experiment goes, you can do so here.

A simple 3-hour “trick” which 100% makes your bullets better

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Today is the last day of the bullets course I’ve been running. We will wrap it up with an important lesson. Let’s start with a bullet by David Deutsch:

“Restore night vision — with a berry. See page 76.”

Which berry? Here’s what it says of page 76 of the book David was selling:

Night Vision

* Eat blueberries when they’re in season. They can help restore night vision.

* You know the old joke about carrots being good for your eyes? Well you’ve never seen a rabbit wearing glasses. Eat two or three carrots a day (raw or cooked) and/or drink a glass of fresh carrot juice. It’s excellent for alleviating night blindness.

* Eat more watercress in salads and/or drink watercress tea.

David’s bullet is an example of the teaser mechanism I wrote about yesterday. But that’s not the point I want to make today.

Instead, look at all that other stuff in the source material.

Why did David choose to focus on the berry? Why didn’t he highlight the proven “Bugs Bunny cure” for night blindness instead? And why didn’t the bullet read,

“Restore night vision — with this delicious tea. See page 76.”

Who the hell knows. But I can take a guess. Let me set up my guess with two facts about two other expert copywriters. First, here’s Gary Bencivenga, writing in the royal “we”:

“When it comes to strong copy, we’ve seen again and again that the most persuasive ads arise from thorough research. We’ve established this general rule — accumulate seven times more information about the product than we can use.”

Second, there’s Parris Lampropoulos. I heard him say in an interview how he also follows Gary’s 7x research rule above. But from what I understand, Parris takes it one step further.

Parris will also write 7x the bullets he can use in his copy. This means that for a magalog with a 100 bullets, Parris will write up to 700 bullets.

So now we get back to those night-vision blueberries.

It’s very possible that David did write up bullet with a “Bugs Bunny cure,” or something like it. But when comparing it with the berry mechanism, he simply thought the berry sounded better.

The fact is, in any decent book or course or other info product, there will be a bunch of problems that are addressed… a bunch of solutions offered… and a bunch of factoids you can twist and highlight about each of these solutions. Each of those can make a new bullet.

You don’t really know which combination will sound the best until you try it out. And you also don’t know which one will work the best once you have it in the actual promo, surrounded by other bullets. Which leads to today’s bullet lesson:

Lesson 11: “Write many more bullets than you need.”

How many more?

That’s up to you. David and Gary and Parris wrote copy where millions of dollars were on the line. In that case, it makes sense they put in 7x extra work.

But what if you’re just starting out? Well, it might make sense even in that case. Here’s a quote by another master of bullets, Gene Schwartz:

“This is what makes success. There’s nothing else in the world that makes success as much as this. I will take the best copywriter in the world who is sloppy and careless, and match him against a good copy cub, and two out of three times, the sloppiness of the great person will be beaten by the carefulness of the other person. […] The person who is the best prepared and the most knowledgeable makes the most money. It’s so simple!”

I can tell you this personal tidbit:

For my lesson yesterday on teaser mechanisms, I wanted to feature three examples. And so I took my own advice, and I dug up 21 examples of teaser bullets, and the source material behind each of them. It took me about three hours of work to do all the research and analysis.

So was it worth it?

I think so. It’s how I could see the (now obvious) lessons I found yesterday.

But like I said, today’s is the end of this bullets course.

This doesn’t mean there are no more bullets lessons out there… or that I’ve stopped researching and writing them up. Quite the opposite.

The fact is, I want to create a new version of this course, which actually gets you practicing these lessons instead of just reading what I write. This new course won’t be free and it might be expensive… well, at least when you compare it to free.

Anyways, I’ll write up an offer page for this in a few days. And I’ll send it out in an email so you can see for yourself — assuming you’ve been eating your carrots — whether it’s something you’re interested in or not.

And if you want to get that email when I send it out, you can subscribe here to my amazing email sending service.

A-list teaser bullets

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Here are three workhorse teaser bullets, written by three A-list copywriters:

“Best exercise to improve your potency. Just 3 or 4 minutes, twice a day. Page 150.”

“Put an end to cold feet — with an old skiers’ trick that makes one pair of socks feel like two. Page 86.”

“How to increase the power of the beneficial bacteria in your gut without yogurt or probiotic supplements. The secret is this delicious drink. Page 247.”

The first of these was written by Arthur Johnson… the second by David Deutsch… and the third by Parris Lampropoulos.

I tracked down the original source material from which these A-listers wrote these bullets. And thanks to this, I managed to extract three lessons, or rather three ingredients, that anybody, A-list or not, could use to write more powerful bullets.

What are these three ingredients?

That’s something I reserved for people who are signed up to my free bullets course, which is going on right now. For more information, and less teasing, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/bullets-signup/

Genuine weird payoff bullets

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Sometimes, the book or course you’re trying to peddle has some advice that is so bizarre, so unusual, that all you have to do in your copy is report exactly what it says.

This gave rise to today’s lesson in my bullet’s course:

Lesson 11: “If your mechanism is so strange and unbelievable that the reader has to find out more, then reveal it in your bullet.”

I had three examples of such weird mechanisms in today’s lesson, taken from a David Deutsch promotion. In each case, ​​there was little that David had to do to take the source material and turn it into a bullet.

So is there any copywriting lesson to be had here? Well, I think it’s more of a marketing lesson. Because when there’s no genuine weird mechanism in your product, then you create your own product… all around a weird mechanism.

In the lesson, I also gave an example of a clever offer, which has been running successfully for years, which did exactly this. The name of this offer — in fact the entire positioning — is basically a revealed bizarre mechanism bullet.

And here’s a quick copywriting lesson after all:

If you do reveal a bizarre mechanism in your bullet (or in the name of your offer), make sure it’s easy, something the reader already has or can easily and cheaply get.

​And of course, don’t reveal the whole recipe, or the reason why it works. Because you’ve got to hold something back. The point, after all, is to get the reader to buy the damned product.

Which is why I’ve held back the actual bullets I used as examples in today’s bullet course lesson… as well as that offer that’s basically a bullet in disguise. That’s something that only went out to people who joined the course. If you’d like to join them (it’s still free):

https://bejakovic.com/bullets-signup/