Copywriting

No need to confess all your sins or virtues in a sales letter

by

When I was a kid I got convinced that if I swallow a piece of chewing gum, it will get stuck in my appendix where it will fester until it causes an explosion that kills me.

For years, I was careful to chew gum only in the front of my mouth, to minimize risk. And then one day I accidentally swallowed a piece of gum. After hours of tense waiting — no explosion.

My point is that it’s easy to convince yourself that there are some things that you simply must or must not do — without any basis in reality.

Let me give you a copywriting example.

​​Last week I delivered a VSL to a client. He just got back to me to say he thinks it’s great. But he had a question. The course the VSL is selling contains more techniques than the single technique the VSL focuses on. Shouldn’t we change this?

It’s a valid question. In fact, earlier in my copywriting career, I would have believed it’s one of those “musts”: “If it’s in the product, I must talk about it in the sales copy.”

The thing is, in this specific case (a real estate investing product), people don’t really want a complicated, full-blown system. They want an opportunity — some concrete, sexy thing that sounds easy to implement, and that feels like a secret to help them get around the usual ways of doing things.

Which leads me to a bit of wisdom I heard from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos:

“Does it hurt my case, help my case, or is it neutral?”

That’s what Parris asks about every line, fact, and argument in his sales letters. If something hurts his case, or is neutral, it gets kicked out. Because there’s no need to confess all your sins or all your virtues in a sales letter. Nobody asked — and there will be no explosion if you don’t do it.

Nobody asked me to create a daily email newsletter, either. But I did. I write about copywriting and marketing. If you’d like to see what this newsletter is like, you can sign up here.

A sexy technique for writing bullets that leave other copywriters green with envy

by

I was at the gym today when I saw a guy getting ready to do squats after me. I watched him nervously as he stacked a few plates on the barbell. And then I took a big sigh of relief. I realized he will squat less weight than I was just squatting.

Like the other 7.8 billion people on this planet, I shrink with envy when I lag other people in some measure. I swell with pride when I am better than them.

You might know pride and envy as two of the seven deadly sins. Which brings me to a sexy copywriting technique I just heard copywriter Chris Haddad talk about.

Chris says most people write boring bullets. I know I do. The fix, according to Chris, is to take your boring bullets and marry them to the seven deadly sins.

Let me give you a few examples. Here are three sin-lite bullets I quickly wrote for the description to my soon-to-be-published book, The 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters:

II. A simple guiding principle that’s almost guaranteed to bring you into the top of the copywriting game (and it’s not just to work harder).

III. A 5-minute way to transform your copy so it sucks in your reader all the way to the sale, without him realizing what happened.

VII. A technique to convert even the most jaded, skeptical, and hostile prospects (some copywriters say this is the biggest breakthrough of the last five years).

Not awful, but not good either. So let’s soup it up by appealing to perennial human failings:

II. [WRATH] Hate losing, and hate yourself when you lose? Follow this commandment, and you will be able to crush competing copywriters, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.

III. [SLOTH] The easiest commandment of the lot. It takes just 5 minutes to do but it can suck your reader all the way to the sale, without him realizing what happened.

VII. [PRIDE] How to “get one up” on jaded or even hostile prospects who think they are too smart to believe your marketing or to buy from you (some copywriters say this is the biggest breakthrough of the last five years).

These sinful bullets still have a way to go, particularly in the way of mechanism or proof. But I think they are better than what I started with. So if you too work for the Satanical Church of Direct Response… then try appealing to lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, sloth, envy, and pride the next time bullets are on your plate.

Speaking of lust:

My daily email newsletter can help you get laid tonight. And then you can brag about it to your friends… while you aggressively chew on a large leg of mutton, paid for by all the easy money you earned by taking my push-button copywriting recommendations.

Click here to subscribe. Or don’t — and be left in the dust as other, younger copywriters catch up to you and then overtake you.

How to avoid email copy that’s like a sack of wet eggs

by

A UK supermarket named Morrisons became the target of Internet bullying yesterday after shoppers tweeted photos of a bizarre item on sale there.

“This is the most wretched and cursed item I have ever witnessed,” one person wrote.

The item in question is a purse-sized plastic bag of hard-boiled, peeled eggs, swimming in a preservative liquid. Each bag says it has only 5 eggs, but actually has more than 40 — and you can catch ’em all for just 1 GBP.

Morissons tried to joke away the sacks of wet eggs on its shelves. But what can you say? The bags look wretched and cursed. No amount of twitter fiddling can fix that.

These days, along with the Daily Mail, where I read the above story, I’m also re-reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.

One idea that Zinsser beats into your head is that “writing is rewriting.”

No. I don’t agree.

You can rewrite to make your writing tighter… to clean it up… to do away with cliches or vague words.

But if you start out with a sack of wet eggs, no amount of rewriting will get you a final product that’s anything but wretched and cursed.

You have to have something to say at the start. And more importantly, you have to have the right mood to sell it. Matt Furey, who pretty much invented the daily email format, put it this way:

“It isn’t just the words that do the selling. It’s the emotion behind the words. Remove the emotion and you don’t have great copy. So it makes sense to me that you spend as much time learning how to raise your level of vibration as you do learning marketing and copywriting strategies.”

Speaking of daily emails:

I’ve got an email newsletter, and I email daily. No cursed or wretched items here though. At Bejakovic supermarket, we make sure all our emails are fresh and appetizing. If you’d like to try a sample, you can sign up here.

Stripping off for better paying copywriting jobs

by

I read a news item that said Las Vegas is like a ghost town these days. The neon cowboy is pointing to nowhere… the fountains of free booze have been turned off… and even the strip joints have a sign on the marquee which reads:

“SORRY, WE’RE CLOTHED”

Here’s another thing I read today:

A technical and creative and digital marketing copywriter, with five years of experience warming a chair at different offices, was asking with a touch of frustration where all the good jobs might be. He even wrote the following:

“yeesh, do I need to go straight DR and start my own business to make any real money?”

My thoughts on this:

If you are a “creative” copywriter, then going direct response or selling your own offers are both good paths to making more money.

But so is getting better at what you do, specializing, charging higher rates, and working on attracting higher-paying clients.

Because you can’t stay clothed, call yourself a “stripper,” and expect people to throw one-dollar bills your way.

In the same way, you can’t just declare you are a “copywriter,” and expect people to line up and pay you the big simoleons.

​​Sure, there are a few naked and gyrating copywriters are out there, making really good money. But if you want to get paid more, then like with those other guys… some of that warm and insulating clothing is gonna have to come off. And you’re gonna have to put on a show.

The good news is, getting better at copywriting, specializing, charging higher rates, attracting better clients… while it takes time… is definitely possible.

And if you want my take on how to do each of those things, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

The ABT’s of writing persuasive stories

by

“I was sitting in a park today when I spotted a leggy girl in a blue dress, walking with a certain sashay. And so I ran after her. I stopped her, ready to give her a compliment. But once I was there, face to face, I was no longer sure she was a girl. I wasn’t even sure she was a she. She was taller than I was, and stronger in the shoulder and jaw department. When she started to speak, my suspicions deepened. Therefore, I started looking for ways to gracefully exit from this situation — not so easy to do, because my new blue-dress acquaintance seemed pleased with me and ready to talk.”

I did eventually get out of there and get to the apartment I’m staying in, where I started to read about copywriting. Specifically, I started to read about a way of structuring your stories so they keep readers reading. It’s a simple technique called ABT:

AND – that’s your setup of the story

BUT – that’s where the conflict or complication happens

THEREFORE – that’s the outcome or resolution

If you’re a diligent duck, you can go back and see how I ham-fisted those conjunctions into my park story above. Or just take a look at this next short story:

“An immigrant from a developing country arrives to the US, learns basic English, AND decides to become a professional copywriter. BUT his initial results are underwhelming and he doubts whether he can succeed. THEREFORE he develops his own unique copywriting system, which causes his sales jump 10x, making him the most successful copywriter at a major direct marketing publisher.”

Like my blue-dress adventure above, this immigrant story is true. It is the story of Evaldo Albuquerque, who over the past few years has been the most sellful copywriter at Agora Financial.

I read about the ABT technique in Evaldo’s short book, The 16 Word Sales Letter, in which he lays out his unique copywriting system.

​​I haven’t finished the book yet, so I won’t give you my opinion. ​​But Bill Bonner, the founder of Agora, says, “This is the book I’ve been waiting for.” And Mark Ford, a master copywriter who helped grow Agora to the size it is today, says, “I’m going to recommend this as a must-read to all my copywriting proteges.”

And that’s that. But maybe you don’t know where to find Evaldo’s book so you can see if it’s for you. Therefore, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/evaldo

Weird but effective pattern interrupts in current VSLs

by

Perhaps you’ve seen those videos of hypnotized sharks.

They usually involve a guy on a boat, reaching like an idiot into the water where a massive great white shark is licking its chops. But the before the shark has a chance to rip off both hand and arm, the man grabs the shark by the nose.

The shark is stunned by this audacity. It won’t bite, it won’t move, in fact it looks entirely focused and absorbed on the tip of its nose.

From then on, the idiot in the boat can do whatever he wants with the shark.

I’ve noticed the same principle at work in a bunch of recent financial and investing VSLs.

Of course, no hand reaches out of the screen to grab you by the nose.

But at the very start of the video, instead of jumping into the promise or the pitch or the proof, all these recent VSLs do something weird. Literally weird.

Like showing a disembodied hand holding a mysterious document.

Or showing a standard deviation curve — “Probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but…”

Or showing $32 million in cash laid out on a table.

As you probably know, in any market, and in particular in markets hardest-hit by heavy advertising (like financial and investing newsletters), people will get jaded. Prospects become like that great white shark — ready to rip apart anything that smells familiar.

So marketers have to keep innovating and inventing.

Right now, these kinds of bizarre pattern interrupts, preceding an otherwise standard sales message, seem to be working very well. That might be something to keep in mind if you too sell in dangerous, shark-infested waters.

On a non-shark note:

I write a daily newsletter. If you’d like to get on it to keep your copywriting teeth sharp, click here.

Super germ ideas for profitable ad formats

by

3 years ago, an astronaut on the International Space Station bounced his way outside of the calm and protected interior so he could set up a little experiment in open space.

He left some bacteria on the outside of the station, in the cold, in the dark, only occasionally to be pummeled by murderous space radiation.

It turns out these resilient bacteria survived. I bring this up for two reason:

1) Scientists say this means life COULD have come from somewhere else than Earth, which would certainly explain how the platypus got its beak, and

2) Because I learned about this super bacteria from a stock footage, subtitled video on the BBC site today.

That was interesting to me. I realized this is where the format came from for the Facebook ads I’ve been writing a lot of.

These Facebook ads look and feel the same as the BBC videos. They are made of stock footage, with overlaid subtitles that tell a story. Except the story is not about space-riding bacteria, but about bamboo kitchen towels or silicone freezer bags.

And here’s why this might be relevant to you:

These stock footage video ads are doing very well on Facebook right now. They are outperforming other ad formats my clients are trying (and these guys do a lot of trying and testing).

So if you do any Facebook advertising, it might be worthwhile going on the BBC site and checking out some of these science videos to see what makes them tick, and how you can mimic the same.

And there’s a deeper message I want to leave you with:

If an editorial format is working for a massive site like the BBC, it’s a good idea to try to adapt it into an ad.

Regular articles and these stock footage videos are not the only formats that work for news sites. I can think of other ways that places like CNBC and CNN deliver content, which might be relevant for Facebook advertisers.

The point being, it makes sense to pay attention to your own news consumption. You might find the germ of an idea. That idea can start to spread and multiply… until it forms a colony of money-making ads for your business.

For more biologically inspired marketing ideas, you might like my daily email newsletter. In case you’re interested, put on your space suit, unlock the hatch door, and sign up here.

Getting comfortable copybragging on Facebook

by

Speaking on a podcast recently, marketer and copywriter (though not freelance!) Chris Haddad had the following harsh truth to share:

“If I was a freelance copywriter, I would be posting on Facebook about copy all the time. And I would be posting all of my testimonials and all of my successes. Because that’s the gig. And if you can’t do it, you need to go out and do something else.”

Chris was saying how back in the day, what made him successful as a freelance copywriter is he was willing to go out and shout, “Hey I’m Chris Haddad and I’m fucking great.” But that kind of bragging causes a discomfort in his seat these days. It’s also one of the reasons Chris doesn’t offer any copywriting training.

What if you’re the same?

​​What if you have a fear of the spotlight, and you cannot imagine bragging about yourself on Facebook? And what if, unlike Chris, you haven’t yet reached the levels of success that allow you to say, you know what, I’ll do something else instead?

Well, I think you’ve got several options. Such as creating your own product in a non-marketing niche… or writing a daily email newsletter in hopes of establishing your credibility without bragging… or taking a page out of Sasha Fierce’s book.

Yes, Sasha Fierce.

​​Maybe rings a bell. Maybe no? It’s the alter ego that Beyonce created for herself in her early days. Here’s Beyonce:

“Usually when I hear the chords, when I put on my stilettos, like the moment right before when you’re nervous… then Sasha Fierce appears, and my posture and the way I speak and everything is different.”

Psychologists agree. By conducting experiments on children and the weak-willed, they have shown how inventing an alter-ego for yourself (or at least asking yourself, “What would Chris Haddad do?”) works wonders in changing your perspective, your resolve, and your behavior. Search online for the “Batman Effect” if you want to know more about this.

But for now, maybe it’s time to start inventing a braggartly Facebook alterego for your copywriting business. It might not be what you like to hear. But as Chris says, that’s the gig.

Some personal bragging:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s fucking great. If you want to see what all of my raving readers are swooning over, you can sign up here.

Why don’t people like salesmen?

by

I was walking through the streets of an Eastern European capital this morning, when I heard a pleasant melody.

Keep in mind today is Saturday, and this morning at 9:51am there was practically nobody out and about.

But among some sycamores in the center, I heard an accordion playing. An old man had taken a bench by himself in an otherwise empty park, and was playing a nostalgic tune. He wasn’t playing for money. Just for himself.

I found this very pleasing. Better to sit outside in a warm and sunny park than to play your accordion in a tiny apartment with the neighbors banging on the wall to get you to quit.

But here’s the dark thought that occurred to me:

It wouldn’t be so quaint if the guy were playing for money. Then it would be desperate. Right? ​​Sitting in abandoned park, while everyone else is having breakfast at home, playing an accordion in the hope somebody will pass by and like your squeezing and buttoning enough to drop a few coins in your leather case. It’s like a scene from some 1950s Italian melodrama.

So what’s the moral of this story?

I’m not sure. But I think it has something to do with how people see you if you are in the position of selling yourself or your services, and in particular, of appearing needy.

Because selling something and appearing needy are not the same. But for many people and in many cases, they seem identical. That’s why salesmen are often so unpopular.

But you can get rid of the neediness and the stigma of salesmanship, while still continuing to sell.

There are lots of ways to get to this desirable place. The easiest in my opinion is to introduce standards — who you sell to, what you sell, how much you charge — and to not deviate from that. Suddenly the aura of desperation lifts from you, even if you could use a few extra coins in your leather accordion case.

For more tips for selling yourself and your services, you might like my daily email newsletter. It’s free. It’s for freelancers, copywriters, and business owners. And you can sign up for it here.

A VSL lead idea from the Harmon Brothers Agora ad

by

I watched the Harmon Brothers Agora video today.

​​You might know what I’m talking about. It’s a humorous, viral-style video by the same people who made the one for Purple Mattress — except this one is selling an Agora stock-picking service.

This video is deadpan because it moves so quickly. I counted 17 jokes — visual, verbal, and physical – in the first 60 seconds alone. That’s a joke every 3.5 seconds, and I might have missed some.

When I first saw this video, I thought it was mostly a ripoff of Will Farrell movies. But I now realize it’s actually inspired by The Simpsons, which had the same rapidfire sequence of jokes.

​​Each joke might not be spectacular in itself. But the jokes are staggered in such quick fashion and edited so tightly that your brain starts to play along.

Unfortunately, the type of humor in the Harmon Brothers video is hard to replicate in writing. Instead, this might be a good way to write a lead, particularly for a VSL in gotta-wow-em markets like bizopp or weight loss. Here’s the recipe:

Take everything you want to say, all your promises, open loops, proof, objections and rebuttals, and write an obnoxiously long lead. Don’t be shy. Then boil it down through merciless editing by at least 10%, preferably much, much more.

The resulting copy will have so much momentum, that even if none of your individual claims or promises is all that unique or impressive or believable, you will simply blitz your reader’s brain into sticking with you through the first few minutes. And that, as they say is, 50% of the battle.

For more rapidfire copy ideas, you might like my daily email newsletter. If you’re interested, sign up here.