Copywriting

How to avoid disappointing readers and burning yourself with “secrets”

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If you go on Amazon right now and look at the top 15 bestsellers in the Internet Marketing category, you will see a curious thing:

6 of those 15 books have a title of the form “[Topic] Secrets.” So there’s Traffic Secrets, YouTube Secrets, Instagram Secrets, plus three others.

Obviously, “secret” is a powerful word in direct marketing. It goes back to Robert Collier at least, who published a book called The Secret of the Ages back in 1926.

In the decades since, you had Gary Halbert with his sequence of “amazing secret” ads… Boardroom’s collection of “secrets” books… and today, Agora’s newest imprint in the IM space, which has a newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.

Like I said, secrets obviously sell. Then and now.

And yet, I’m writing this email to warn you about “secrets.”

For one thing, “secrets” can make you sound like everybody else. 6 out of 15, remember?

For another, “secrets” might attract the wrong kinds of buyers. They might also put the right kinds of buyers into the wrong frame of mind.

For a third thing, and most important, relying on words like “secrets” can allow you to coast instead of coming up with better content. For example, here are some of the secrets from one of those Amazon best-sellers:

“Secret #1: What is copywriting?”
“Secret #13: It’s all about them — never about you”
“Secret #31: Polish your sales copy”

I don’t know how chipper you would have to be to avoid getting down in the mouth when this treasure chest of secrets is opened up.

But what’s the problem? The book is a best-seller, right?

In my experience, being on an Amazon best-seller list doesn’t mean much. But even if this book were a legit best seller, putting out generic content and calling it a secret leaves you wide open to competition. Your only defense is this thin mist of curiosity, which can dissipate in a moment.

Maybe I’m digging myself into a moralizing hole. So let me finish up by telling you what I tell myself, because it might resonate:

Put in a bit of extra work to come up with unique content and a unique perspective. Once you’ve got that, if it warrants being called a “secret,” then sear that on its rump and let it run.

But odds are, once you’ve done that bit of extra work, you’ll come up with a better, more interesting title or headline for your content. Maybe you’ll even start a new naming trend. One which half a dozen Amazon best-sellers will copy for years to come.

By the way, I’ve also got a daily email newsletter. It’s called John Bejakovic’s Newsletter of Secrets. You don’t have to sign up. But if you want to read all the secrets inside, here’s where to go.

“Meanwhile, back at the copywriting ranch…”

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“The longer [the evangelist] can hold interest, the more people he can convince — and the greater will be the number who will inevitably walk forward and ‘hit the sawdust trail.’ The less able he is to hold interest for a sufficient time, the greater will be the number who will inevitably walk out.”
Victor Schwab, How to Write a Good Advertisement

The most memorable lesson I learned from my former copywriting coach had to do with keeping the reader’s interest. It was most memorable because it made so much sense. And yet, it went against all my instincts for how I normally write.

It’s actually a well-known writing trick.

I’ve come across the same idea in an episode of Every Frame a Painting, the YouTube video essay series. The episode in question actually revealed behind-the-scenes secrets — the underlying structure that made each essay so interesting.

Among other tricks, there was something called “Meanwhile, back at the ranch.” In a nutshell, each episode would have multiple story lines. When one story reached a peak of interest, it would cut out.

“Meanwhile, back at the ranch…”

… and another story line would pick up. When that reached a new level of interest, it would cut out again, to switch to another story line. And so on.

This might seem silly simple when I lay it out like this. After all, that’s pretty much how every soap opera and TV show works.

But like I said, it’s not how most people write. At least that’s not how I naturally write. I usually want to express my point in a logical, linear — and boring — order.

Which brings me back to my former copywriting coach. He likened the structure of a sales message to a spiral that winds around the linear, logical skeleton of the points you need to make. The reader should never know for sure what you’re going to say next.

If you do create that winding spiral, you will keep your prospect interested. And like Vic Schwab wrote above, the longer you can keep your prospect interested, the greater the chance he will walk the sawdust trail. That means more conversions made… and more shekels in your collection box.

No collection box here at the moment. But if you want more of this kind of evangelical content, here’s where to sign up for my email newsletter.

Story-writing tropes and worldbuilding emails

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I want to share two things with you today that can help you with writing, particularly with the structure of your stories.

Thing one:

I’m rewatching the Matrix. In one of the opening scenes, a drive-by character says to Neo, “Hallelujah! You’re my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ.”

Of course, he’s just exaggerating. But there are a ton of parallels between the character of Neo in the Matrix and Jesus in the gospels. You probably knew this already, but I’m a little thick about these things, and I take stories too literally.

Anyways, I’m talking about a trope known as “the chosen one.” Besides The Matrix and the New Testament, you can find it in such pop culture sources as the first Dune book, the “Homer the Great” episode of the Simpsons, and even Kung Fu Panda. I found all this out thanks to a useful site I discovered today, called movietropes.org.

Don’t let the name turn you off — it’s not just movies but all kinds of media. A bunch of nerd volunteers break down tons of different tropes, give lots of examples, and link it all together in a wiki. Like I said, might be useful if you write.

Thing two:

A few months back, I wrote an email about the value of “worldbuilding.” Some people wrote in to ask if I had any more resources to share on that topic. I did not. But I do now.

Right now, Andre Chaperon is sending out a sequence of emails titled “Worldbuilding.”

It’s not specifically about inventing made-up marketing worlds. Rather, it’s about how to package up everything you do into a cohesive experience for your prospects. And that’s really the structure behind what worldbuilding, in the more fantastical sense, is all about.

I’m not sure if you can still get on this email sequence because it’s already in progress, and it’s a one-time thing. But if you want to learn about worldbuilding, it might be worth following the white rabbit over to Andre’s tinylittlebusinesses.com and taking the red pill once it’s offered to you.

All right, here’s a third and final resource you might like. Or you might not. It’s my daily email newsletter, where I write about persuasion, copywriting, and story structure. The door to get into that fantastical world is here.

Opening the impossible sale

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A few days ago, after reading a terrible article in The New Yorker, I decided to stop drinking coffee. At least for the next month.

It’s not a giant sacrifice. I was never a coffee snob, and coffee doesn’t do much for my flat-lining productivity.

But I do enjoy getting up in the morning, brewing some cheap coffee on the stove, and then thinning it to hell with cow milk. It’s a small pleasure, but in my life, that means a lot.

Even so, no coffee for the next month. That article spoiled it for me. It told the history of coffee, and it explained how the powers-that-be tricked society into getting addicted to coffee for their own evil ends.

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle, “And all these years, I thought I liked coffee because it’s delicious. Turns out, I got no say in the matter.”

Besides The New Yorker, I’m also reading a book called The Catalyst. The first chapter is all about reactance, which is what happened with me and coffee and that article. But the book gives another and better example of it:

Apparently, back in the 90s, the state of Florida ran one of the rare successful anti-smoking campaigns targeting teens. The ads didn’t tell teens about the harms of smoking. They didn’t tell teens to stop.

​​All the campaign did was highlight the devious ways the tobacco industry used to manipulate kids into getting hooked. As the campaign ran, teen smoking rates dropped by something like a million percent. Eventually, tobacco companies sued the state to get the campaign to stop.

Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Something similar happens in persuasion and marketing and sales. The opposite of making the sale is usually not objections. It’s simply indifference.

Of course, the best way to deal with indifferent, ambivalent prospects is to never face them. Selling those kinds of people is almost impossible. At least that’s what I thought until I read that stuff about reactance.

People want to have a feeling of control and agency in their lives. If they feel that’s been violated, they get very motivated to change. Even to the point of doing the exact opposite of what they were doing up to now.

​​That’s reactance.

I’d still rather not face indifferent prospects. But if I do have to face them, I know what I’ll do to open the sale. I’ll simply show them how choosing the status quo is not actually their decision, but the work of some puppet master behind the scenes.

Maybe you can try the same. If you so choose, of course.

Finally, here’s some facts that are not designed to persuade you in any way. I write a daily email newsletter. It deals with topics like the one you’ve just read about. The way to get it is here. And I in no way encourage you to sign up for it.

If you’re cold and selfish, there’s always hope for you as a copywriter

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There’s an email in my inbox right now from a successful copywriter. In a nutshell, the email says,

“Don’t take Advil if you’re a marketer. It’ll blunt your empathy!”

(Apparently, Advil reduces not only physical pain, but transferred emotional pain, too.)

This is a common trope in the marketing world. “Empathy! Empathy! How else can you connect with your audience?”

But you don’t need empathy to be a good marketer. Case in point: Sociopaths, who have zero empathy, are very good at all kinds of persuasion, including marketing.

(In fact, I suspect some of the marketers who most vocally preach empathy are themselves sociopaths. If you don’t believe me, check out the Salty Droid blog.)

So if you don’t need empathy, then what?

All you need is something called “theory of mind.” That’s the understanding that other people have unique selves, unique ambitions, unique current thoughts, and unique information.

Once you accept this fact, you just have to truffle out where your prospect’s mind is at the moment. You can get there with cold-hearted, robotic research.

No empathy required.

But what if you do have empathy? Does that make you a better marketer? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it just makes you useless.

A while back I read an article about Jo Cameron, a nurse from Scotland. Cameron has a happy-go-lucky disposition and literally never feels pain, including empathetic pain.

Speaking about Cameron, a professor from Yale had this to say:

“Empathy can actually get in the way — if you are in terrible pain and I feel so much empathy for you that, being with you, I feel it, too, I may decide to stay home… [Jo Cameron is] my dream girl. She doesn’t feel the pain of others, so she doesn’t feel empathy per se. But she cares for others.”

So if you’re cold and selfish, there’s hope for you as a marketer. It might even be an advantage, as long as you care. At least about making the sale.

All you have to do is learn how to do research, like I mentioned above. This is something I might cover in more detail in my email newsletter. The way to sign up for it is here.

Spider-Dan stymies the experts and you can too

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On May 25 1981, a man dressed in a Spider-Man suit crossed Franklin Street in Chicago at just the right moment.

He had been scoping out the Sears Tower for several days. He knew the routines of the security guards. Right now, nobody would be there to stop him.

So he got out his two suction cups, stuck them to the black glass wall of the giant skyscraper, and started to climb.

It took him 7 hours, but he made it to the top. 110 floors, 1,450 feet above the ground. All the way to the roof of the world’s tallest building at the time.

The man’s name was Dan Goodwin. For his effort, he was arrested and fined $35. He also earned himself the nickname Spider-Dan.

That doesn’t seem like much of a reward. So what made Spider-Dan do it?

A few months earlier, Goodwin was in Las Vegas where he saw the MGM hotel burn down. In spite of the firefighters on the scene, 86 people died in the blaze.

The next day, Goodwin went to the fire marshal’s office. He had a proposal for how to rescue people from the top floors of burning skyscrapers by climbing on the outside.

“Have you ever climbed a building?” the fire marshal snapped back. “No? Then don’t tell me how to do my job.”

So Goodwin did a bit of thinking… a bit of practicing… and then on May 25th, he accomplished his audacious climb up the Sears Tower. Something most people, including experts like the fire marshal, would have said was impossible.

I’m not saying you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. I don’t believe that’s true, for you or for me.

On the other hand, most experts are full of mashed potatoes. An expert’s number one goal is to protect his own status and self-image.

You only have to go back 50 or 100 years to see how tons of experts in any field – whether scientists or politicians or educators — were dead sure of ideas we would find laughable or offensive today. The same will happen when people look back on today from the perspective of another 30 or 50 years.

Anyways, Dan Goodwin did all right for himself with his Spider-Dan role. But he could have been killed. And he did get fined $35.

In other words, the world can be a risky place. It makes sense to keep that in mind.

But when experts make confident predictions or prohibitions… well, my personal stance is to pay them no mind. Their job is to protect the status quo, and their own interests.

So here’s a suggestion: If you want to attempt something, don’t let adverse expert opinion stop you. You might succeed. And you might even get a cool nickname out of it, just like Spider-Dan.

By the way, I don’t pretend to be an expert. But I write daily emails nonetheless, mostly about persuasion and influence. If you want to get them, click here to subscribe.

Shorthand and shortcut in direct response copywriting

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Imagine the year is 1999. You are a dentist named Kurt, living in a small town in Pennsylvania.

One beautiful Saturday morning in May, you walk out to your mailbox, and you find a letter. You open it up to see a big headline that reads:

“There’s a new railroad across America”

“And it’s making some people very rich…”

Pretty intriguing, right? So you start to read.

The letter tells you how railroads made huge fortunes in the 19th century. But bankers were afraid to invest, so it was small, independent investors who connected America by rail — and got filthy-as-Johnny-Rotten rich in the process.

Finally, the letter explains what it’s selling:

A few companies are laying down a fiber-optic network to connect America by Internet in the 21st century, much like the railroad connected it in the 19th century. People who invest in the right companies have the chance to get rich like 19th-century railroad barons. Do you want to be among these shrewd investors?

Plenty of people did, back in 1999, when Porter Stansberry sent them this letter to launch his newsletter.

But imagine if Porter had written a slightly different letter. Instead of talking about a railroad, imagine he had used the headline:

“There’s a new goldmine in America”

“And it’s making some people very rich…”

This is pretty similar to the original. Another metaphor. Would it work just as well?

It’s unlikely. Here’s a relevant quote by one Linda Berger, a law professsor at UNLV:

“A reader who is asked to interpret a novel metaphor will be engaged in the creation of meaning, while the reader who is confronted with a conventional metaphor will do nothing more than retrieve an abstract metaphoric category.”

Stansberry’s “railroad” is a metaphor for an investing opportunity. Odds are, you’ve never seen this metaphor before.

A “goldmine” is also a metaphor for an investing opportunity. Odds are, you’ve seen that plenty of times before.

And that’s the difference Berger is talking about.

When you give people a novel metaphor, they start turning it around in their brains. They map aspects of the metaphor to their situation. So “railroad” becomes “Internet”… “tracks” become “fiber-optic cable”… “independent 19th-century investor” becomes “me.”

But what if you give a reader a conventional metaphor like “goldmine”? If Berger is right, and I suspect she is, then the reader says, “Oh, they must mean this is a big investment opportunity.” And if that turns your reader on, then he continues to read.

In other words, a novel metaphor is a shortcut between where your reader currently is… and where you want him to go mentally.

A conventional metaphor is shorthand. It can be useful to quickly express a concept in a few words. But it’s not gonna create any new insight.

Remember my post from yesterday? It turns out both Gary Bencivenga and Mark Ford were right. Cliches have their uses, and their limitations. And now you know why — and when to use shorthand, and when to create mental shortcuts.

Speaking of shortcuts, I write a daily email newsletter about persuasion. The way to sign up for it is here.

Cliches: Shooting fish in a barrel? Or yourself in the foot?

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Here’s a tough nut to crack:

Gary Bencivenga was a collossus of direct response copywriting. His sales letters made his clients hundreds of millions of dollars. On the topic of cliches, Gary had the following to say:

“I love clichés, and you should too! They are clichés precisely because everyone already believes them, so using them gives your copy greater credibility.”

Now here is a second quote, this one by Mark Ford. Mark is also an expert copywriter and a very successful marketer. Among his other ventures, Mark helped grow Agora from an $8-million-a-year company to a billion-dollar company. About cliches, Mark once wrote:

“Although everyone can relate to these expressions, they’ve been said so frequently that they’ve been stripped of their power. They no longer communicate profound ideas. And they don’t inspire people intellectually. And that’s why cliches are killers in direct mail. They make your copy seem obvious and predictable. […] Remember, as a copywriter, you’ve always got to keep your prospect from getting ahead of you. If he can anticipate what you’re going to say, he’ll assume he knows what’s coming — and you’ll lose him.”

So who’s right?

The most successful direct response copywriter of all time?

Or the direct response marketer who has overseen more promotions than probably anybody else?

Not to beat a dead horse… but like most things in the universe, the question of cliches is not simple or one-sided. Cliches have their place. But they also have their limitations.

I know that’s clear as mud. So I’ll give you the latest research on what cliches can do — and cannot do — in my email tomorrow. If you want to get that info before anybody else, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.

The hottest girl on an empty beach and other ways to sidestep competition

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I went for a walk this morning next to the sea, and I saw the most amazing girl.

Let me set this up by saying the tourist season hasn’t started yet. The town I’m in is empty except for the locals. There were a few people walking dogs in the morning, but there was nobody, absolutely nobody, on the beach.

Except her.

The early morning sun lit her up from the side. She was in a bikini, standing in the water up to her ankles. She seemed to be testing out the temperature and questioning her resolve to dive in.

I walked by, spellbound. A man coming towards me seemed equally absorbed — he was staring and his jaw was hanging open.

Now if you asked me what this girl looked like, I’d have to say she was between 15 and 35 years of age. She had hair on her head. She was not visibly obese.

Beyond that, I can’t say much. For one thing, I couldn’t see her all that well. For another, I was so blinded by the fact that she was the one and only girl for a mile up and down the beach, and probably, in the entire town.

The point of this is the value of being in a marketplace of one.

Of course, one way to be in that lucky position is to find a group of people who aren’t being served by anybody else — the equivalent of an empty beach town before the season starts. That definitely works, but there might be drawbacks. There’s a good chance your prospects will be slack-jawed oglers. And there will be inevitable competition as the season heats up.

But there’s an alternative. It allows you to create a marketplace of one for yourself, even in the face of ostensible “competition.”

I’ve talked about this already a few times. It’s a trick known as helping your prospects experience a moment of insight.

There’s a lot more to be said about this topic. So I won’t do that here. But I am putting together a book about it. If you want to get notified when it comes out, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.

Making more money without adding a single thing

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A couple days ago, an on-and-off client contacted me with a possible new job.

He’d hired another copywriter first (big mistake). No surprise, he wasn’t happy with the outcome. So he wanted me to rewrite the worst parts of the other guy’s work. How much would it cost?

It would cost a lot. But let’s take a moment and imagine a hypothetical scenario:

You go to a friend’s house. He offers you some ice cream and he says, “I forgot it out in the sun last week. It melted to shit. But after a few hours, I remembered it and put it back in the freezer. It’s all yours if you want it!”

I don’t know about you, but I’d find a way to politely refuse. Eating refrozen ice cream doesn’t sound appealing. And it could cause serious digestive regrets.

That’s how I felt about the rewrite offer. But there was something else clanging around my brain-pan, too:

“You can make a lot more money if you stop doing the things you’re doing now, without adding a single thing.”

I heard a guy named James Schramko say this in a presentation a few months back. James’s advice was to look at your current clients and get rid of the least profitable ones. Somehow, James promised, you’d make more money this way.

This might sound like “law of attraction” fluff. It’s not. It’s specific business advice.

James laid out much of his system in the presentation I listened to. This is stuff that allows James to surf most of the day while making several million dollars a year. It’s also worked for his coaching clients — guys like Ryan Levesque and Kevin Rogers.

In short, this presentation was real valuable. If you’re a copywriter and you want to work less but somehow make more money, it’s worth your time. Here’s the link:

https://copychief.com/ep-164-james-schramko/