Copywriting

The practice to become a skillful copy-fancier

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“Not one man in a thousand has accuracy of eye and judgment sufficient to become an eminent breeder. If gifted with these qualities, and he studies his subject for years, and devotes his lifetime to it with indomitable perseverance, he will succeed, and may make great improvements; if he wants any of these qualities, he will assuredly fail. Few would readily believe in the natural capacity and years of practice requisite to become even a skillful pigeon-fancier.”

I’ll tell you in a moment who wrote that quote. But first, let me admit how foolish I was.

Many years ago, in my first three months of writing copy for money, I thought I’d learned everything there is to know about copywriting.

After all, I’d read Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book and a bunch of Gary Halbert’s newsletters. I’d learned you’re supposed to get attention and turn features into benefits. In the end you had to include a call-to-action. Oh yeah. Also open loops, like I used above. What else is there?

It was a serious case of newbie blindness.

That’s when you know just enough to explain everything away, without seeing the subtle detail that divides failure from success. Take the following headline for example:

The 7 Deadliest Crimes Against Yourself
Are You Guilty of Any of Them?

“A listicle with a warning.” That’s what I would have said back then. “I could write the same, without being so melodramatic. There’s nothing special here.”

Well today, I can see many special things in this short headline.

For example, how it sets you up to expect the 7 deadly sins — and then subverts your expectations. Or how it says deadliest instead of deadly. Or how it sneakily uses “crimes against yourself” rather than ” causes of your anxiety.”

And by the way, I don’t think any of those things are accidental.

The guy who wrote this headline was Gene Schwartz. He was an eminent copywriter, one in a thousand, really. He devoted a lifetime to writing copy with “indomitable perseverance.” As a result, he made great improvements in this field.

Maybe that’s more than your ambition right now. Fine. It’s also more than my ambition. But you might still like to hear the following:

If you want to become a good copywriter, and make yourself a lot of money as a result, then it doesn’t have to take unusual “natural capacity.” I’ve managed, and my natural capacity is common.

But like Charles Darwin says in the quote at the top, it does take practice to become a skillful copy-fancier. It can take you years, like it took me. Or maybe you can do it more quickly, if you don’t waste your time like I did, thinking that I already know everything.

Which brings me to my question for you:

Have you gone through any copywriting course or training in 2021? Anything you would recommend? Anything you would warn others against?

I’ll be transparent about why I’m asking. I’m nearing the halfway point of the trial run of my bullets course. And I am thinking about the next run, which will kick off probably in early June.

So if you’re interested in taking this course down the line… then write me an email and tell me about any copy training you have or have not liked. It will help me make my course better — and more useful to you if you do ever decide to take it.

But bullets course? Maybe you don’t even know what I’m talking about. If that’s the case and you’re curious, take a look at this post, which basically gives you a free sample lesson:

https://bejakovic.com/surprise-how-to-make-your-copy-more-appealing-by-saying-less/

How to sound smarter

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There’s a well-known guy in the copywriting space who loves to use million-dollar words. He does it a lot in writing. He does it even more when giving a speech.

I’ve always wondered at this. It seems out of place in the quick-cheap-easy world of direct response. Like some kind of insecurity. Like he’s trying to prove he’s educated and smart.

If so, then bad move, at least if you go by a study I just read.

Back in 2005, a scientist at Princeton University jiggered a bunch of texts. He put in longer words into some. He put in shorter words into others. And then he put these texts in front of Stanford undergrads, to see what they would say.

I’m sure you can guess one part of what the students said. The texts with the longer words were harder to read. No surprise there.

But get this:

Students also said that longer words made the author sound less smart. And vice versa. Shorter words made the author sound more smart.

Of course, if you like, there are holes you can poke in this study:

It was only done on Stanford students, an unusual bunch. And it’s only about written texts, and not about speech.

But to my lazy mind, the conclusion is clear:

Use short words. Make your writing and speaking simple. Not because you want to sell more. That’s a nice side effect. But the real benefit is that short and simple will make you sound smarter.

And now the punchline:

Are you impressed by my 1- and 2- syllable words? Then you will love, I say love, my email news-letter. It’s full of short words. You can sign up for it here.

Tom Cleveland continues his productive NYT snooping

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How do veterans of #vanlife feel about all the newbies? Can you make a statement about your gender, when there’s no one there to watch you? And is that “maskne” on your face, or is it plain old acne?

In case you want answers to any of these questions, head on over to the New York Times website. As I write, these stories are all up on the home page.

A guy named Tom Cleveland has been snooping on the Times. I wrote about him a few weeks ago. Through his snooping, he discovered how the NYT makes its headlines more dramatic through A/B testing.

Now Cleveland has put out a part two to his research. It’s about which stories linger on the Times digital front page. And the breakdown is this:

News: 46.6%
Opinion: 22.2%
Feature: 31.1%

“Categories and numbers, huh?” Let me translate what I think this means.

“News” you’re probably familiar with. “U.S. Adds 916,000 Jobs in Sign of Surging Labor Market.” No thrills there.

“Opinion” is a little more fluid. It includes hard-hitting editorial such as “The unsettling power of Easter” (also on the NYT front page right now) as well as the “If a gender falls in the forest” piece above.

And then there’s “Features.” This is apparently an industry term for pure fluff — your typical #vanlife and maskne pieces.

So adding up Opinion and Feature, we get that the NY Times shows this type of content 54.3% of the time on its front page. In other words, this is most of what they show — because it’s most of what people want to see.

Please believe me:

This is not my ant-sized attack on the elephant that is the New York Times. Instead, I just want to point out that people always want human-interest stuff, first and foremost.

If you’re in the business of feeding people whatever, just to sell subscriptions and ads, they you might as well stick to fluff or tabloid content.

On the other hand, perhaps you have an important message to share with the world. But you worry that your topic puts people to sleep. Or gives them a headache.

Don’t worry. It’s an easy problem to fix. Just wrap your dry, complex topic in a thick human-interest sandwich. People will happily devour it, all the way to the end. ​​Here’s an example from an email I wrote last year:

“It’s a story of family betrayal… of breakthrough ideas, conceived in prison… of a small group of desperate visionaries who took an almost occult science… and combined it with a strange, untested new technology… to create the foundations of an industry worth over a quarter trillion dollars.”

Do you know what that paragraph was about? It’s about dry, technical topic. Namely, direct marketing, told through the colorful characters who dun it — Claude Hopkins, Gary Halbert, Ken McCarthy. And if you want to know how that story developed, you might like to sign up to my very human-friendly email newsletter.

Persuasive vemödalen

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I’m staying in a beautiful coast town these days so I just went for a walk along the shore. The sun was shining, the trees were doing their thing, and the sea, a few cliffs below where I was walking, was shuffling restlessly from side to side. I got tempted — for just a moment — to take out my phone and take a picture.

“But what’s the point?” I told myself.

Because I realized a long time ago that the only time I think to take a picture is when I come across a scene that looks like pictures I’ve seen before.

“Gee, this looks just like a postcard. Better create another postcard myself!”

If you love to take pictures with your phone, my point is not to razz on you. Instead, I just want to point out, in case you feel like I feel — that so much photography is repetitive and redundant — that there’s a word for this.

The word was coined in 2014 by a guy named John Koenig. ​Koenig called this vague intuition many of us have probably had — he called it vemödalen.

​​So now, when you and I talk to our friends, we can call this feeling by its name and we can communicate it to others. We have a handle on it, and it’s much more real in our minds. (Well, it would be, if we could only remember the word vemödalen and know how to pronounce it.)

Before you start thinking I’m getting sentimental, let me turn things around to hard-core direct marketing. Specifically, something marketer Travis Sago shared once in a podcast, about how he does email marketing:

What’s different and what I found works really well and takes a lot of lifting off the writing is bringing out what symptoms do they have, what symptoms are they seeing or feeling or hearing in their life? What is he saying? What’s happening in their life and starting out with the symptoms.

[…]

I’ll have to admit, some days I’m just brain dead and I’ll just go with the problem. But it’s way more powerful to go with the symptom.

What Travis doesn’t say in this quote is that when he talks about a symptom, he will often focus on a “new” symptom. Not new in the sense that it just popped up… but new in the sense that nobody else has talked about it, and even his prospect might not have a conscious awareness of it.

​​Even better if you can give it a name. Kind of like vemödalen. That’s what Travis does — and he manages to convert something like 25% of his list over time.

But speaking of unnamed symptoms:

Do you know that feeling when you’re nearing the end of a novel, and you start to feel a bittersweet angst, knowing that the characters you’ve made friends with over the past weeks will disappear from your life? I checked, and it’s called lithatonophobia.

The good news is, you never need to feel lithatonophobia at the end of one of my blog posts. Because I write a new email each day with new marketing and copywriting content. And if you’d like to keep that in your life, here’s where you can join my newsletter.

The trouble with selling to late 50s white guys with money

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Brian Kurtz sent an interesting email today about list selection, with the following thought:

The question I wanted an answer to, in living color, although a black and white copy would do:

‘What was the promotion that got the name.’

I believe the logic behind this kind of list research applies to all media today even though most of the lists you use online don’t have data cards attached to them.

Lists are people too… and finding out as much about them — how they think, how they respond, how they read, what they read — are components you can find out before you ever send a promotion to them.

Like Brian says, this is still relevant today, as long as you’re selling anything to anybody.

Because the standard advice is to do a bunch of research on your customers or prospects. Who they are. What problems they have. What language they use.

Not bad. And certainly much better than just pulling your advertising out of your own head.

Better still is knowing what these people bought. (If they bought one copywriting course, there’s a good chance they will buy another.)

But what’s best is what Brian says. Find out “how they think, how they respond, how they read, what they read.” You get that from the type of advertising these people bought from — or didn’t buy from.

Some people respond to hype- and intrigue-filled direct response copy. Others respond to quick and brandy TV-style commercials. Others still might not respond to either, but will respond to independent recommendations, or stuff that they find through their own research.

Because lists are people too. And two people can have the same demographics… the same buying history… and yet still be very different, in the kinds of things that get them stirred to action.

James Hetfield (of Metallica) and George Clooney (of ER) are both late 50s white guys with millions of dollars in the bank. They are also both Tesla owners.

And yet, I imagine it might take a whole different appeal to move George than to move Papa Het — and vice versa. It’s something to be mindful of, if you run any kind of advertising, and if you don’t want to go bankrupt.

The trick behind the magic in Gary Halbert’s unbeatable copy?

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Do you believe in magic? Maybe you will after the following story:

After Gary Halbert died, a former client of his approached Dan Kennedy. The client wanted Dan to try beating a control that Halbert had written.

To Kennedy’s eagle eyes, Halbert’s control certainly looked beatable. There were obvious things that Kennedy could see to attack. Besides, the control was written years or decades earlier, and was starting to fatigue.

So Dan Kennedy, expert copywriter that he is, tried to beat Halbert’s control — and he failed.

Looking back on it, Kennedy said there was some magic in Halbert’s copy. You couldn’t see it… but it was there, and customers responded.

Do you believe that? The magic part? In case you do, let me tell you a second Halbert story, which might shoo the magic away:

Back in the 2000s, Halbert got into daytrading. He was making money daytrading online. And being a direct marketer, he naturally started selling his expertise to people who wanted to learn daytrading also.

And get this:

Halbert went to daytrading school. Even though he already knew what they would teach him. In other words, he paid some guy a lot of money and went day after day… month after month… to hear stuff he already knew and was already doing.

Why would he possibly do something so silly and wasteful?

According to Caleb O’Dowd, who apprenticed as a teenager under Halbert, it was an act of undercover copy detective work. Halbert went to daytrading school so he could hang out with all the other would-be daytraders, and talk to them, and hear their stories and fears and motivations. Day after day after day.

Maybe that’s how the magic got into his copy.

Caleb said this 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.

Anyways, this was one little snippet I heard during Caleb’s segment in this month’s issue of Steal Our Winners. Caleb’s segment was about how he goes into markets where he has no business being, and how he quickly rises to the top in spite of established, bloodthirsty competition.

If you want to know how he does it, I’ll tell you:

Caleb comes up with offers that overcome his lack of credibility, and which can compensate even for poor advertising.

If you want to know the full details of the offers Caleb makes, I suggest you check out his Steal Our Winners segment. From what I understand, the issue is still available, for a grand investment of exactly one (1) of your dollars.

You can find out more at the link below. But first, a warning:

The link below is an affiliate link. That’s because last month, I wrote an email promoting Steal Our Winners with no affiliate link, since I think what they’re doing is so great.

And then Rich Schefren and the good people at Agora got in touch with me and offered to give me a cut of your $1, should you choose to wager it.

​​Perhaps take that into consideration when deciding whether you truly want this information. In any case, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sow

This blog does not exist

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Or rather, this blog might not exist very much longer.

Perhaps you’ve seen the trend online. Websites with names like thiscatdoesnotexist.com… thispersondoesnotexist.com.

You go there and see a photograph of a cat or a woman. Who does not exist. Who was conjured up, in pixel-perfect lifelike detail, by some kind of computer jiggery-pokery. When you refresh the page, the computer mind creates another fake cat or fake woman for you to be confused by.

Well today, I saw more progress in this direction, thismusicvideodoesnotexist.com. It’s just what it sounds like. The music is generated by computer. So is the video. And it’s watchable, much more watchable than a lot of shit made by humans.

As you probably know, there’s been a surge in AI copywriting tools over the past year or two. Some industry insiders look at these new tools and say, “Hahaha, never-ever will this work.”

I’m not so sure. But I’m even less sure it will matter one way or another.

I had this idea a while ago, a science-ficition scenario. Artificial intelligence gets good enough to generate content — TV shows, music, books.

But good enough for what?

Good enough for each of us. Each of us gets a custom stream of entertainment, based on our previous preferences… based on how our eyes dilate… based on whether we keep watching.

Each of us is served with the perfect content, just for us, just for that moment. Familiar enough… with the right amount of surprise to keep us fascinated and perfectly pleased.

In my sci-fi scenario, you won’t be able to communicate your interests to anyone else. Nobody else will share your tastes so exactly. Why would anyone listen to your perfect song or watch your perfect movie… when he has his own perfect song and movie available, without even a click of a button, just served up, non-stop, 24/7?

Anyways, that’s the future I’m thinking of. And with this video site, it seems like it’s on its way. When it arrives, we will have bigger social problems than a lack of work for copywriters.

Fortunately, we are still not there yet.

That means you can still talk to your friends about a great movie you saw, and that they might like. And you can still make money persuading people to buy stuff that they didn’t know they wanted five minutes ago.

Speaking of which, and motivated by my post from yesterday:

I’d like to point you to a little book I wrote on the topic of copywriting. It collects 10 lessons from 10 of the most successful people to ever put shocking secret to paper.

It’s not a big book… but at least it exists. For now. To find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

You, your own copywriting secret weapon?

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Here are two flexible factoids, and a suggestion you might find valuable:

1. A-list copywriter Gary Halbert said curiosity is the most powerful human motivating force.

2. Another A-list copywriter, Parris Lampropoulos, keeps a “Didn’t know that!” file. This is where Parris puts new and interesting facts he comes across during research for copywriting projects.

​​But Parris has spent hundreds of hours doing research on dozens of big projects… so when he comes across something new and interesting to him, you can bet it will be new and interesting to his audience.

So I’d like to suggest you do something similar.

Invest $3 in a notebook… or invest two seconds to create a file on your computer desktop. Write “Hm, I didn’t know that, or, that’s interesting” across the top.

​​And you’re pretty much done. From then on, as you come across something that fits that heading, you just add it to your notebook or file.

The longer your list grows, the more interesting and valuable it will become, by process of elimination.

Eventually, you will have a list of things that stimulate curiosity for almost everyone in your audience. And if Gary H. is right, you will have the most powerful tool in motivating people to action.

​​In effect, you make your own curiosity and capacity to be surprised into your copywriting secret weapon.

I do this exact same thing, and it’s been valuable to me. In fact, it’s how I write these emails each day. Which brings me to my self-serving reason for telling you about this:

A reader named Glenn wrote in to challenge me on some sloppy self-promotion I committed recently.

Glenn pointed out that in the email I sent out announcing my bullets course… I didn’t feature a single Gary Halbert-style bullet.

Fair point.

My answer to this is that emails like the one you’re reading are basically the modern version of sales bullets. The only difference is you’re not restricted by space (like in a sales letter or print ad)… or by having only one shot to make the sale (like when paying for cold traffic).

Other than that, bullets and sales emails are the same.

​​You find some information that your audience might want. You condense it and sexy it up.

​​If it’s really cool and interesting information, you can choose to give it away in your copy… or if it’s meh information, then you might choose to tease it endlessly in your email or bullet, and hide the payoff in your product for sale.

In other words, if you can learn how to write sexy sales bullets… you will be a long way to being able to write emails people will want to read day after day. Particularly if you add in something new and interesting to tell your reader, which is what your “Hm, I didn’t know that” list is all about.

Anyways, that’s part of my pitch for joining my bullet writing course, which kicks off this Monday. If you’re interested in joining, then the first step is signing up for my email newsletter, which you can find here.

Free bonus: Storytelling for sales

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Here’s a shameful confession:

My only ambition in life was to be a novelist, but I’m largely cured. An article by Robin Hanson, titled Why We Fight Over Fiction, does a good job explaining why:

We tell stories with language, and so prefer to tell the kind of stories that ordinary language can describe well.

[…]

Stories that take place in modern settings tend to focus on personal, romantic, and family relations, as these remain to us relatively familiar moral universes. Or on artist biopics. Or on big conflicts like war or corrupt police or politicians. For which we have comfortable moral framings.

In other words, we almost always tell the same stories, reinforcing the same mores we’ve been reinforcing for a long-ass time, dealing with the same types of characters we are already all-too familiar with.

This might be bad news if you had hopes of being a novel novelist… but great news if you want to influence and persuade people. Because even though we’ve heard the same stories over and over, we keep craving more. Storytelling remains a powerful way to persuade and get attention. And yet it’s as formulaic as making a soft-boiled egg.

Which brings me to the bullets course I am launching next Monday. Bullets happen to be great for mastering most of what copywriting is about. But one big piece is missing, and that’s telling a story.

So to fix that, I’m including a free bonus along with the course. It will be a special presentation, delivered by me, on how to tell a story in copy or your other sales messages. And for the record, this is something I know pretty well.

Over the past several years, I’ve written dozens of front-end advertorials — basically mini sales letters — all following the same “horror story” structure.

By my estimate, these advertorials have made several million dollars worth of sales from cold traffic, mostly Facebook and now YouTube. I think a big reason for this success is the stories right at the top of each of these advertorial — they grab prospects and keep them reading, all the way to the point where they are wondering, “What the hell did I just buy?”

So in this bonus presentation, delivered over Zoom so you can ask me questions, I will tell you how I come up with these effective stories… how I organize them and present them… and how you can do the same.

Again, this is a free bonus that you get if you sign up for my bullets course by Sunday. If you’re interested in signing up for the course, or just to learn more about it, then the first step is simple and risk-free. It’s to sign up for my email newsletter. You can do so here.

Looking for 7 beta-testers to pay an unthinkable amount for my copywriting knowledge

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I’m looking for 7 beta-testers for a trial run of my bullets copywriting course.

Bullets? Yes, that’s the mechanism. But the goal is to get you better at writing copy all around.

If you’re already writing sales copy, even if you’re advanced, I think this course will make you better. That’s what it did for me, even though I’ve been writing copy for money for years.

On the other hand, if you’re new, this course will implant the basics quickly and thoroughly into your brain, including the stuff that everybody talks about (“just make a big promise!”) but nobody really gives you the fine points of.

Like I said, mastering bullets is the mechanism to do this. My argument (in fact, not mine, but Ken McCarthy’s and Gary Halbert’s) is that bullets are what sales copy is all about. That’s not because you should write sales letters packed with bullets (“so 1997…”). It’s because if you can write a great bullet, you can create curiosity, you can rev up desire, you can control attention.

But the point of this post is not to sell you. If you’re not sure you want this course, no problem. It probably makes sense to skip the rest of this email.

​​But if you’ve been reading my blog for a while… or if for some other reason you already know that you do want in… the first step is to get on my email newsletter. That’s where I will share the full details of this bullet course, and make it possible for you to join.