Copywriting

Sloppy agree & amplify

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I’m reading a frustrating/fascinating article about Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin has been writing various blogs for close to 20 years, in which — so says the article — he advocates for shutting down the American experiment in democracy, and a return to monarchy.

You might think, so what, another Internet kook.

The difference is that Yarvin has the ear of the rich and powerful.

He’s apparently buddy-buddy with Vice President J.D. Vance, and, according to the article, he has become a kind of Machiavelli for Silicon Valley billionaires Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.

And that’s where the trouble, or rather the sloppiness, starts.

Says the article, after Thiel wrote his book Zero to One and went on a publicity blitz, he reached out to Yarvin for advice. How to handle the inevitable question he would get from journalists, about getting more women into tech?

(Thiel apparently thinks this is a misguided question, and that the numbers of women in tech are fine as is.)

Here’s Yarvin’s advice, from the article:

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Yarvin suggested that Thiel deploy a pickup-artist tactic called “agree and amplify” — that is, ask a journalist, who probably had no solution in mind, what she would do to tackle the problem. “The purpose here is not to get the interlocutor to sleep with you, but to get her to fear this issue and run away from it — and ditto for future interviewers,” he wrote.

===

I’m not sure who’s to blame for this nonsense — Yarvin, or the author of the article I’m reading, or both. But this is 100% not what agree & amplify is. It doesn’t even make sense when you think about the name:

Agree & amplify = First you agree, and then you amplify, or exaggerate, to make the whole thing absurd. For example:

JOURNALIST: Don’t you agree we need more women in tech?

THIEL: I absolutely do. I also think we need more women in coal mines, in slaughter houses, and on oil rigs, all of which are places of employment where women are vastly underrepresented.

I suspect Yarvin still hasn’t read my 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, etc. But it seems he needs to. He’s getting his commandments confused, and he’s giving out bad advice as a result.

Agree & amplify, and the strange psychology of why and when it works, is Commandment VI.

I have another commandment, Commandment VIII, about what Yarvin recommended to Thiel, to take the journalist’s question and reverse it.

Thing is, reversing a question is unlikely to have the effect Yarvin predicted, but the technique can be used to get people to work with you instead of against you, and to sell themselves on your plan, as if they came up with it on their own.

If you’d like more (properly researched and fact-checked) detail on all this, or you simply want to learn some powerful communication techniques that straddle the world of pickup artists, political propagandists, con men, and other savory and unsavory types:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

10 hacks for writing daily emails

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I’ve been writing daily sales emails, first for clients and then for myself, since 2017. In that time, I estimate I’ve written 3,000+ such emails. I have learned a thing or a thousand in the process. Here’s 10 of ’em, selected for impact and ease of use:

1. Write a 1-2-3 outline. Point 1 is your opening. Point 2 is your takeaway. Point 3 is your offer. Each point should be a few words to a sentence max. If you cannot express what you want to say in 3 points and each point in max a few words, your email will turn out a mess with startling probability.

2. Repurpose the headlines of long-running but little-known sales letters as your subject lines. One of my most successful (notorious) ones:

“Start a profitable repositioning business… with your own home as headquarters”

3. If you are ever in a horrible crunch for time or brainpower, you can always write a super basic email using the following format:

– Where you are right now

– How you are feeling

– Why you are short of time/brainpower to write a better email

– Why you’re writing an email nonetheless (and make this into a net positive for you reader)

– A link to your offer

An email like this can be just 150-250 words. It’s something you can do in 5 minutes or less, even if you’re brain-dead at the time.

4. Reuse content you’ve already written in other emails (eg. my point 3 above), or in your courses, books, blog posts, comments on Facebook, comments on Reddit, letters to your grandma.

5. The #1 most powerful editing tool is the delete key. If something isn’t quite working, take it out instead of trying to fix it.

6. If you have written a cliche, either take it out or “lampshade” it — exaggerate it and draw even more attention to it.

7. If you have written something your reader already knows, either take it out or acknowledge your reader already knows it, and explain why you are still talking about it.

8. Writing ungrammatical gets people to pay more attention, to notice and remember you more, and maybe even to be amused. It sometimes also draws replies from very intelligent people, replies which can be profitably put to work in future emails.

9. Just about anything can be a daily email topic. If it doesn’t look like it, it’s because you’re not looking close enough. Look closer.

10. It’s helpful to restrict yourself in terms of topic, style, core idea you want to get across, etc. It saves time and makes your emails more impactful and surprising day after day. For help with that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The inspiration for my concluded “Buy 5 paperbacks” promo

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This morning at 9am Central Europe Time, I concluded my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle promo, which has been running since Monday.

As a result of this promo, I sold a couple hundred paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book. I had multiple people who bought tell me they will use the books as giveaways to their own lists. I got a big jump in Amazon rankings.

Altogether, I call it a success.

I did this promo as a bit of an experiment. I wanted to see if it would work for me. I’m happy with how it went, so I will repeat it, some time down the line, with new bonuses, for my new 10 Commandments book.

Over the past few days, a few people wrote me to say this was an original and interesting promo and offer. And one reader wrote in to ask, “Are you doing a version of Daniel Throssell’s book launch?”

No, Daniel was not the inspiration for this promo. For one thing, it was hardly a book launch — my original 10 Commandments book has been out for 5+ years. More importantly, I don’t even know what Daniel’s book launch strategy is.

That said, my book promo/offer was not original. I copied it exactly from what I saw another marketer doing.

I knew odds were excellent it would to work for me also, because I saw it worked very well for this other marketer.

In fact, this other marketer got me to buy five paperback copies of his book, which are still sitting in their Amazon box, collecting dust, on a shelf right across from the couch where I’m writing this email right now.

I bought those five copies in exchange for a bonus that the marketer was offering, which got me intrigued and which I wanted to get.

And that’s my meta-lesson for you today:

Lots of people are out there sharing marketing how-tos and tutorials and ideas, including in free newsletters like this one.

Maybe all those tutorials and ideas are proven advice. Or maybe they’re not.

But there is a whole other class of marketing and money-making education, which is 100% proven, and which you’ve already paid for, so you might as well get use out of it.

I’m talking about all the offers — books, courses, back scratchers — that got you to buy, and the process by which some marketer or business owner got you to buy them.

Keep a track of those offers and those sales processes. And ask yourself, what did it? Get to the core. Then apply it to what you do. Odds are excellent it will work for you as well.

In case you’re curious, I can tell you that the marketer I imitated for my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle was Travis Sago.

Some time last year, Travis made people an offer to buy five paperback copies of his book Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You on Amazon. In return, he would give you a bonus called Shogun Traffic Method, about a source of traffic that converts for any niche or offer, starting at $50 or less.

I had a pretty good idea already of what the Shogun Traffic Method was. But I’ve learned a ton from Travis before, and I decided it was a worthwhile investment. Plus, he piled bonuses on top of his bonuses — including some that were even more intriguing than the core Shogun Traffic Method itself.

As far as I know, Travis ran this promo only within his Royalty Ronin community.

It’s another good reason to be inside Royalty Ronin. Not only is this a community of 500+ Internet marketers who are doing creative deals, often starting from nothing… not only do you get Travis’s ongoing education and inspiration and advice in the community… not only is there a library of Travis’s expensive courses and bonuses (including the Shogun Traffic Method)… but you get to see Travis running creative new promos himself.

The bad news is, that means Travis might get you yet again, so you pay him for something on top of the already expensive $299 that Royalty Ronin costs each month.

The good news is, if you do find yourself paying Travis for something new, you’ve likely just learned a valuable new way to sell (most of Travis’s promos are creative and new in some form or another). You now have a new strategy you can profit from, if you only apply it to what you do.

That’s likely to pay for that new offer you just bought, and maybe even for a few months of Royalty Ronin itself.

If you want to find out more about Royalty Ronin, or maybe give it a try yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

This kind of email drives more sales than the average

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Here’s a free marketing tip for you:

If people are buying, it makes sense to advertise the fact.

In the many promos I’ve run within this email newsletter, I’ve always found that when I write an email in which I share a message from someone who’s just taken me up on the promo offer, it drives more sales than your average sales email.

As an example:

Since Monday, I have been running a little promo, the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, for my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

That promo is ending today at 12 midnight PST.

The whole idea behind the promo has been to pile on the bonuses. The little time I’ve had to write emails has been eaten up by spelling out what exactly people get inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

And so, though people have been buying, I haven’t had time to advertise that fact. Lemme fix that now. Here are a few messages I got from readers who took me up on this offer over the past 24 hours.

First, from email marketer Logan Hobson, who lives in Japan:

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Alright John,

I got 5 copies of “Book” coming to Japan.

Yes, even though I could have ordered them from Japanese Amazon and gotten free shipping with Prime (which is cheaper here than in the US), rankings and sales on the US Amazon have more impact for you so I ordered them from my US Amazon account.

===

Second, from copywriter and marketing consultant Chuck Gibson:

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John,

Receipt attached.

I, of course, already have the book, but not printed copies. But it’s the bonus intrigue that hooked me. Very interesting offer.

And a cool way to get your Amazon sales up. Now I have copies to give to certain protégés.

===

And third, from a reader who I’m guessing doesn’t want me to share his name:

===

Alright, you got me. This is the worst possible time for me to spend any more money since I have to go on a multi-country trip in 45 days and gotta save as much as possible.

Frankly I don’t even KNOW what I’ll do with every book, Maybe leave one in every Airbnb I stay at as a parting gift? That would be funny but anyway, your bonuses are always amazing and they will be great companions for all the travels.

===

As a result of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle and of dedicated readers and customers like the above, the paperback copy of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters has jumped from an Amazon book ranking of 1,016,096 at the start of the promo to a current ranking of 75,795.

In the process, it’s leapfrogged such industry standards as Mark Ford and John Forde’s Great Leads, Brian Kurtz’s Overdeliver, and Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Direct Marketing.

So much for the education/demonstration part of this email. Now for the sales.

Like I said, the chance to get the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle ends tonight. If you have taken me up on this offer, check the bonus area I gave you access to, and you will find the following:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets (Price last sold at: $97)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which also includes my…

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters (Price last sold at: $100)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this information before as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

#4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

#5. Copy Riddles Lite (Price last sold at: $97)

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in my full Copy Riddles program. The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what Mel Martin (as well as several other A-list copywriters) wrote starting with the same prompt.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

And once you get a taste for Martin’s skill, then the next step is natural:

#6. “How to Turn Fascinations into Fortunes: Copywriting Secrets To Fascinate, Captivate, And Dominate” (Price last sold at: $97)

Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist,” once hunted down a collection of all of Mel Martin’s million-dollar ads for Boardroom, along with other control-beating ads Martin had written for the New York Times book division.

Lawrence then printed out the ads, stuffed them in an envelope, and mailed the collection to Marty Edelston, the founder and CEO of Boardroom.

Did Edelston get a kick out of seeing those old ads that helped build up Boardroom? He sure did.

Marty Edelston was so grateful for these ads that he sent Lawrence a thank-you note, along with a check for $2,000.

If you’d like to see these ads yourself, and study them, and model them for selling your own products, then Lawrence put them together into a collection he called “Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Lawrence got $2,000 as a thank you for putting together this collection of ads. He then sold this collection for $97.

But you don’t have to pay $2,000, or even $97 for “Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

I’ve made a special deal with Lawrence so you can get “Fascinations Into Fortunes” free, along with Copy Riddles Lite, as part of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

#7. “How I made an extra $1404.53/month in Amazon royalties at the push of a button”

This report outlines a hack, which involves the push of a button — literally, that’s all there is to it — and which made me an extra ~$1.5k per month in Amazon royalties. I used this hack once, over the span of a few months, or rather a few weeks. I made money with it. And I never used it again.

I’m not saying anybody else should use this hack. I’m not saying anybody else should NOT use it either.

All I’m willing to do is to tell you what this hack is, why I’m no longer using it myself, and how you can try it out yourself, if you so choose, to make easy money off Amazon.

And that’s it.

Those seven bonuses, with a real-world value of $386, counting just what they sold for previously, are what you get if you’ve already taken me up on the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

And if you haven’t yet taken me up on it, here’s how you can:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

I will then set you up with the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

The deadline is tonight at 12 midnight PST. After that, no more bonuses — I am merciless about this. To get in while the doors are still open:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

For copywriters who are almost (but not quite) satisfied with their copy chops — and can’t figure out what’s missing

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I’ll give it to you in a word:

Promise.

“Promise, large promise,” as Samuel Johnson wrote a million and four years ago, “is the soul of an advertisement.”

So obvious, right? You know how to make a promise, no?

Of course you do. You just tell people, “Here’s what you’ll get,” and you lay out what’s in it for them. You try to juice it up a bit with some John Carlton adjectives like “astonishing” or “accidental.” As garnish, you put “How to” in front of it.

Except, if this is all there is to making a promise, then why isn’t every offer, even every good offer, flying off the shelves? And why isn’t every copywriter who supposedly knows how to make a promise getting paid in heavy sacks of gold?

I’d like to propose to you that the most basic and most important skill in copywriting — making a promise — is more subtle and more involved than you might at first believe.

And as proof of that, take A-list copywriter Mel Martin.

Martin specialized in writing sales letters packed with sexy, intriguing, promise-heavy bullets.

But Martin was agonizingly slow in writing copy. It took him three to four months to write a sales letter. He could get stuck for a month on a letter opening.

Even at this snail’s pace, Mel Martin was almost singlehandedly responsible for growing Boardroom, one of the biggest direct response publishers, to $125 million a year, back in 1990s money.

Maybe you’ve seen some of Martin’s famous ads for Boardroom. I wonder what you thought?

If you’re anything like me, you might look at Martin’s copy and think, “Pff, I can do the same. So simple. So basic. Just promises and how-to’s.”

Except, there was clearly something magical and mysterious going on during those months that Mel Martin was agonizing over his copy.

That’s why his sales letters pulled in millions of dollars year after year, and that’s why he beat out all competing copywriters he was pitted against.

Maybe your promises are as good as Mel Martin’s. But if you have some doubts, if you suspect you could write better, more magical and mysterious promises, then I got two free bonuses I’d like to offer you:

#1. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at: $97)

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in my full Copy Riddles program. The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what Mel Martin (as well as several other A-list copywriters) wrote starting with the same prompt.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

And once you get a taste for Martin’s skill, then the next step is natural:

#2. “How to Turn Fascinations into Fortunes: Copywriting Secrets To Fascinate, Captivate, And Dominate” (price last sold at: $97)

Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist,” once hunted down a collection of all of Mel Martin’s million-dollar ads for Boardroom, along with other control-beating ads Martin had written for the New York Times book division.

Lawrence then printed out the ads, stuffed them in an envelope, and mailed the collection to Marty Edelston, the founder and CEO of Boardroom.

Would Edelston get a kick out of seeing those old ads that helped build up Boardroom? He sure did.

Marty Edelston was so grateful for these ads that he sent Lawrence a thank-you note, along with a check for $2,000.

If you’d like to see these ads yourself, and study them, and model them for selling your own products, then Lawrence put them together into a collection he called “Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Lawrence got $2,000 as a thank you for putting together this collection of ads. He then sold this collection for $97.

But you don’t have to pay $2,000, or even $97 for “Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

I’ve made a special deal with Lawrence so you can get “Fascinations Into Fortunes” free, along with Copy Riddles Lite, as part of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

If you’ve already taken me up on my offer from yesterday, check the bonus area, and you’ll find how to get your hands on these two new bonuses.

And if you have not yet taken me up on my offer from yesterday, the offer is this:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

I will then set you up with Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle. It includes Copy Riddles Lite and Fascinations Into Fortunes from above, plus four other bonuses I wrote about yesterday, for a total of $386 in real-world value, counting just what these offers sold for previously.

If you’d like to take me up on this now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

10 books I could not write from content I’ve created recently

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I have a habit, 10 daily ideas, that I got from James Altucher.

It’s the first thing I do each morning after turning off the meatlocker like air-conditioning in my apartment and brushing my teeth.

This morning, the topic was “10 new books I could write from the content I’ve been writing about lately.”

It’s a prompt I come back to from time to time. I go through emails I have written recently, and ask myself how I could generalize them, or combine them with other emails have written, and turn them into a book or a course or whatever.

Here’s what I came up with today:

#1. “101 Magic Words”

I already got 5: “Rosebud,” “One,” “Big,” “Black,” “Love.”

#2. “Mystery Merchants: How To Create And Profit From Curiosity”

Everything from Robert Collier to Novak Djokovic.

#3. The nature of reality

Ok that’s not a title, but it’s the core idea, and one I come back to a lot in these emails, including a few times over the past few weeks (“Amputees needed,” “The dark side of social proof”).

#4. Overcoming procrastination/avoidance/resistance to doing what’s needed

I try to distance myself from this topic and from the people who seek out such info, but the fact is I’m one of them and that’s why I find myself writing about it repeatedly.

#5. “How to be an effective teacher”

Certainly not by writing a book titled “How to be an effective teacher.” But I have written a lot, including recently, about how to get people to pay attention, to understand, to accept, to remember, to apply information.

#6. “Online Info Business Quick Start Guide”

Yeah, I won’t be writing that, but I could, since I have content that would definitely fit into such a book.

#7. “Influencers, or what really happens when somebody has a platform”

This is connected in my mind to #3 above, the nature of reality. I’ve written about the strangeness having an audience, and, when you think about it, the equal strangeness of being in somebody else’s audience. Not a practical topic, but interesting to me.

#8. “How To Choose A Niche”

Again, this won’t be happening, but it could.

#9. “Consumption & Digestion”

Related to #4 above. I have an entire training on this, which I’ve sold for good money before. But some part of that training, plus a few recent emails, could become a book as well.

#10. “Flip The Script”

Oren Klaff unfortunately already wrote a bad book by this title, which is a shame, because I find the topic very interesting. I know I could develop it with lots of examples, from different disciplines and different eras (I wrote an email once about a 4th-century B.C. greek general who “flipped the script” to keep assassins from his bedside and poison from his cup).

I don’t know what will come from these ideas. Maybe something. Maybe nothing. In any case, there’s no lack of opportunities.

The point is, if you are writing emails daily, generating a bit of content regularly, this can serve multiple purposes.

It can make you sales today.

It can build a relationship with readers so they keep reading tomorrow.

And it can be repurposed next week or month into a book that gets you lots of new subs to your list, or to a course that gets you lots of new dollars under your mattress.

That’s why my subject line today was “10 books I could not write” rather than “10 books I could write.” Because the idea is, these books will already have been written — by somebody, not me, at least not in that moment. All I really have to do, in that moment, is the editorial work of pulling together that writing and adding a cover on it. And of course, reaping the benefits.

It can be the same for you.

It happens bit by bit. Within a few weeks of daily action, you already have resources that you can do something more with.

But you do gotta take some action though. Maybe even now.

If you want my help in starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails, so you can make sales, and grow a relationship with readers, and have the building blocks of future books and courses:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

“Rosebud works”

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My friend Sam forwarded me a YouTube video yesterday with the title:

“Donald Trump Movie Review – Orson Welles – ‘Citizen Kane'”

“Oh God,” I thought. “Here comes a stupid AI mashup.”

But no. The video was uploaded to YouTube back in 2015. I checked just now — it was recorded in 2002.

Trump looks kind of the same, just younger. He is in fact reviewing Citizen Kane. The review is not tremendously long nor tremendously insightful. But Trump does say the following:

===

The word “Rosebud,” for whatever reason, has captivated movie goers and movie watchers for so many years, and to this day is maybe the most significant word in film. Perhaps if they came up with another word that meant the same thing it wouldn’t have worked. But “Rosebud” works.

===

If you haven’t seen Citizen Kane, “Rosebud” is the word with which the movie opens, and which the isolated and bitter multimillionaire Charles Foster Kane whispers as he’s dying. Nobody in the movie knows what it means. As the movie goes on, we the audience find out it’s the name for Kane’s boyhood sled, a throwback to happier times.

With that explanation out of the way, let me get back to Trump’s point. It stands, and not just for Rosebud and for film. Consider:

Would Einstein have become the gentle, frizzy-haired, absent-minded genius we all recognize 70 years after his death, had his last name been, say, Berkowitz?

Would Disney be the brand it is today if Walt Disney had been born Walt Johnson? (“Johnsonland: The Happiest Place on Earth”)

And would Citizen Kane have been as impactful if Kane, on his deathbed, were clutching a snowglobe and whispering, “Pelican Runner…”

This ties into an email I wrote a few weeks ago, about how some words really do have magic power, over and above their meaning.

Trump I guess knows this well, and that’s why he is well-known to experiment with phrasing and words in public, seeing how people react in live situations as he speaks in front of crowds.

It’s why Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert and a trained hypnotist, predicted before anyone thought it was possible that Trump would rise to power, based solely on what he, Adams, was seeing Trump doing in rallies and speeches and on the campaign trail.

It’s yet another connection between different-seeming but highly-related fields like political propaganda, and hypnosis, and screenwriting.

If this is the kind of stuff that works for you, you can find more here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The curiosity mistake

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Yesterday, I wrote an email about a course I bought via the “dark marketplace” for courses.

There was some valuable and potentially profitable point in that email, but it didn’t matter much.

Because almost all the responses I got, and I got a hobuncha, said something like the following:

===

I’m sure you’re getting plenty of replies like mine, but I can’t help it… what’s the course??

Not planning to buy it, just plain ol’ curiosity. It’s so weird thinking in 2025 that there’s still info that can’t be accessed immediately with just 2-3 clicks…

===

I didn’t share the name of the course yesterday and I won’t share it today.

Like I wrote in my email yesterday, I bought the course without knowing anything about it, based on a recommendation alone.

I can’t recommend it to others since I haven’t received it or gone through it yet. In fact, I can’t say anything more about it other than what I have, aside from its name. But what are you gonna do with that?

Legend says that near the end of his career, direct marketer Gary Halbert quizzed a protege. Halbert asked, “The best way to get a prospect’s attention is to appeal to…”

The protege thought for a moment. “Their sense of self-interest,” he said.

“No!” said Halbert, and he whacked the protege on the wrist with a large wooden ruler. “The right answer is, their sense of curiosity.”

True true.

Now here’s the valuable and potentially profitable point of this email:

Another legendary marketer, John Caples, found that pure curiosity headlines always and dramatically underperform pure benefit headlines in terms of sales.

Sure, curiosity headlines got the attention, just like Halbert said. But Caples found that benefit headlines got the money. The best performing of all were headlines with both a benefit and an element of curiosity.

All that’s to say, idle curiosity isn’t worth much, not unless you can channel it into something else.

I’m telling you this if you’re trying to sell, and I’m telling you also in case you are not.

But on to sales, specifically of my new 10 Commandments book.

I’ve tried to make this book intriguing and curiosity-baiting up to 11. I mean, that was the whole idea behind talking about con men and pickup artists and such. But as I say at the close of the book:

“Of course, the real question is, what are you going to do with this stuff? Learning new techniques is nice, as is getting an a-ha moment, a new insight into something profound about yourself. But none of it matters much unless you put it to use and somehow apply it in your life. Will you do that?”

I hope you will. The book contains simple but powerful ideas to make you more effective in communicating, whether you want to sell, negotiate, or even seduce. If you’re curious, and if you’re looking to benefit, here’s where you can find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to push-pull prospects on your list

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A few days ago, long-time reader and personal development coach Miro Skender sent me a message with a highlighted passage from my new 10 Commandments book which says:

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Expose human beings to anything constant — even incontestably good things like compliments, security, or money — and people soon stop responding. Like Macknick and Martinez-Conde say, we need contrast to see, hear, feel, think, and pay attention. Otherwise the world becomes literally invisible.

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Miro then said how he knows this fact of human psychology well. He knows how to apply it in his work with coaching clients. But he doesn’t know how to put it to use with prospects on his list. Do I have any ideas?

It’s a good question.

Prospects get bored and leave if you expose them to a constant stream of the same — even if it’s good, valuable, well-written same. But not only that. You make fewer sales with the prospects who stay, because your emails are simply less persuasive than they could be.

I thought of how best to answer Miro’s question in an email. Should I give an example from my own previous emails? Or from a sales letter written by an A-list copywriter? Or would a metaphor be needed to really get the point across?

There are benefits to doing each, I thought. So why choose among them and risk doing a sub-optimal job?

I soon realized that answering Miro’s question properly would involve a ton of work, way too much for a daily email.

Fortunately, I remembered I had done it all already, and more, inside my now-retired Most Valuable Postcard #2, code name “Ferrari Monster.”

The background on the Most Valuable Postcard is that it was a short-lived, paid, monthly newsletter I ran back in the summer of 2022.

It was short-lived because I found it was way too much work and stress to write up something as in-depth and researched as I wanted to make each of these monthly guides to be.

I pulled the plug on Most Valuable Postcard after the second issue, but not before I got glowing reviews from a group of initial subscribers that I let in.

For example, email marketer Daniel Throssell, who was one of those early subscribers, wrote me to say after the first issue:

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Seriously though, dude, I know it’s issue #1 but this program you’ve created is amazing. You’ve honestly made me pause and reconsider some ideas about how I want to do my own newsletter because this is just so excellently executed. I love pretty much everything about how you’ve done this, from the format to the content to the value you deliver in your insights. Really impressed.

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I don’t make back issues of Most Valuable Postcard available regularly. Most Valuable Postcard #2 wasn’t available yesterday. It won’t be available tomorrow. But it is available today.

If you’d like to find out more about what’s inside, and how you can use it to push-pull the prospects on your list:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp2/

The crazy things my readers buy

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running Amazon ads for my new 10 Commandments book.

One ad campaign is “automatic targeting,” where Amazon simply tries to put my book in front of shoppers on its other pages. The ad reporting shows me which of these other pages resulted in clicks and sales for my book.

I’ve also been heavily promoting my new 10 Commandments book to my own list. Since I’m using an Amazon affiliate link (this is apparently against Amazon policies, but I love to live dangerous), I can see some of the other stuff that people who clicked on my affiliate link also bought.

If you just felt a chill rush up your back, as though you’ve been stripped naked in public, calm down. I cannot tell who specifically is buying anything, only that some people who bought my new 10 Commandments book (hundreds so far) or who clicked on my affiliate link (thousands) were also in the market for other things.

As you can guess, people who ended up buying my book were also in the market for dozens of ordinary, everyday purchases such as computer cables and supplement gummies and of course a “4.4 inch fixed-blade SEAX knife with a sheepsfoot blade.”

My readers were also in the market for a bunch of books that are in some way related to my own book, such as Jim Camp’s Start With No and Henning Nelms’s Magic and Showmanship — both of which I reference in my book — as well as Made to Stick, which is one of my go-to books for effective communication.

So far, so milquetoast. But then, my readers bought some quirky things I would not have expected or even known about had I not done this Amazon sleuthing. The top 3:

#1: How To Be The Jerk Women Love — a 1991 guide to picking up women by acting the jerk, written by “F.J. Shark.” A 5-star Amazon review by a shopper who goes by “The King of Jerks”:

“Some women made fun of me for praising this book. The laugh is on them. It ended up they were dumped by bigger jerks than me. What goes around comes around.”

#2: What is Wrong with Men — a feminist social critique, I guess written in reaction to F.J. Shark’s book and its positive reviews. “What is Wrong with Men” was only published a few days ago and doesn’t have any positive Amazon reviews yet, but the NY Times called it a “kind of road map for the current masculinity crisis. Reeled me in, like Absolut and cranberry. What a pairing!”

#3, and most intriguingly: Grade 23 Titanium Externally Threaded Nipple Bar Barbell Rings. For those who are too busy living life to worry either about acting the jerk or the jerks in their lives.

I’m telling you all this as a little hack so you can safely, legally, and ethically peek into the private shopping carts of your customers.

Amazon is the world’s biggest online marketplace. An estimated 64,000 metric tons of stuff pass through their warehouses every day. I just gave you a couple of ways to see what some of that stuff is, so you can adjust what and how you sell to your audience.

If you’d like to contribute to that data (don’t worry, it’s all anonymized), or more importantly, if you’d like to read my new 10 Commandments book — about effective communication, and magic and showmanship, and one secret negotiating trick of Jim Camp that he did not reveal in Start With No — then here is my Amazon affiliate link, ready to serve you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments