Copywriting

Do you sell info products?

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If you sell your own info products — courses, ebooks, big boxes of DVDs and workbooks to go with them — then I’d like to share a genuine secret to help you sell more of what you’ve created.

This secret has nothing to do with writing more emails, or creating promotions, or running ads to get more leads, or affiliate marketing.

My guess is this is a method of selling info products that you’ve never heard of or thought about. At least that’s how it was for me until about a week ago.

​​This method requires almost no work on your part, and yet it could bring in hundreds or even thousands of new sales of your info products each month.

So here’s the deal:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you this secret. I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

The world’s simplest, most powerful conversion tool

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This past Saturday, I got hypnotized by a master hypnotist.

One minute, I was just watching a free video inside the hypnotist’s free Skool group.

The next minute, I found myself rooting through the hypnotist’s website and skimming through his sales pages.

A few minutes after that, I had gotten out my credit card and paid for a $2,900 bundle of digital products.

The master hypnotist in question is Travis Sago. I’ve written about him often in these emails.

Travis would probably claim he’s not a hypnotist. Instead, he would claim to be just a marketing guy.

He’s even modest about his skills there. But if that’s true, then I don’t know how he got me to give him $2,900, without asking. I was even happy and excited about it.

Anyways, that’s all a preamble to the fact that, earlier today, I was watching one of Travis’s videos inside that $2,900 bundle I bought.

Travis promised to reveal the world’s simplest, most powerful conversion tool.

​​He put out up his index finger and held it level. And he said:

“It all goes back to this simple, diabolically redneck, Arkansas, best conversion-tool-ever index finger.”

Travis was saying you have to be able to point to your prospect’s problem. Or rather, to your prospect’s present pain.

In other words, Travis was just repeating the standard advice to be specific, concrete, visual in your copy. Except none of those words are actually specific, concrete, or visual. An index finger is.

Another example:

Your cart software. Imagine it right now. How many sales came in yesterday?

A couple?

​​Just one?

​​Zero?

You might have great offers. You might have a great relationship with your list. You might even have great copy. Bit if your cart software is showing just a couple sales yesterday, or one, or zero, there’s some “act now” magic that’s missing.

And on that note:

Tonight at 12 midnight PST is the last moment to raise your hand, or at the very least an index finger, to indicate your interest in my Secret Demand live training this Friday.

I will close off signups for that training tomorrow. But before I send anyone to the sales page, I want to talk to them, or rather exchange one email to see if could be a fit or not.

​​Since that emailing is going to take a bit of time, the last time to actually express interest is tonight. ​​After tonight at 12 midnight PST, the doors to the front lobby of the Bejakovic theater will close. If you want to see the show, you’ll have to be inside before then.

So ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email.

I’ll have a couple questions for you. And if it sounds like a fit, I’ll send you the full details about this training. You can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

Sophistication, awareness… what’s missing?

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Last night, I was walking around my neighborhood, listening for the third time to a talk by Internet marketer Jeff Walker, of Product Launch Formula fame.

Jeff’s talk is incredible. Each time I have come at it, I’ve found new valuable things inside. Such as, for example, the following oddity:

Jeff once created a completely new offer, unlike anything else in his market.

He first launched this new offer to his own list.

He opened that launch with a video of himself in the woods, on his property up in the Colorado mountains. He has a private tennis court there. Every Friday, he and his buddies play tennis there and drink margaritas afterwards.

This campaign opened with zero promises and zero hype. The implied message of the opening video was simply, “This is how life and business are really meant to be.”

​​This first campaign was a big success.

Later, Jeff launched that same offer to JV lists.

Again, he opened the launch with a video of himself in the woods. Except this time, there was no tennis court, and no margaritas. Instead, straight away, Jeff jumped into hype and promises, about making a ton of money without a list and without a product.

This second campaign was also a big success.

Strange, no?

Because back during the Cold War, direct marketing legend Gene Schwartz told us there are exactly two factors for figuring out how to position and open up a marketing message.

One is sophistication — how many ads/claims people have seen before in your market.

The other is awareness — how much time people in your market have spent thinking and researching this particular problem or desire.

But these two Jeff Walker campaigns say different.

Both of these campaigns sold a completely new offer, unlike anything else in the the market.

​​Both went out to audiences of fiending internet marketing junkies.

​​In other words, the sophistication and awareness were exactly the same for the audiences of both campaigns.

And yet, one campaign opened with zero hype or promises… while the other opened with 100% hype and promises.

My point being:

Sophistication and awareness are not the only two factors for figuring out how to position and open up a marketing message.

There’s a third, equally important factor. You can probably guess what this factor is. I won’t belabor it here.

​​I’ll just say:

Get this factor working in your favor, ​​and not only will you be able to make marketing messages that are less hypey… but your sales will come more easily… and price resistance will largely fly out the window.​​

And if you want some help with that:​​
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https://bejakovic.com/sme

I got a hot date tonight HONK

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Yeah, about my hot date… I’ll get to that in a second.

First, here’s a scene from the animated TV show The Simpsons. The scene illustrates a valuable/funny point about influence. But hold on.

I grew up watching The Simpsons. If you didn’t, that’s no problem. You don’t need to like The Simpsons or even to have ever seen a single episode to get what this scene is about, or to understand the underlying point.

Scene:

Moe the bartender is being interrogated by the police for shooting the local billionaire, Mr. Burns.

Moe is hooked up to a lie detector machine. He’s asked if he ever held a grudge against Mr. Burns. He answers no. But the lie detector machine HONKS to indicate he’s lying.

“All right,” Moe says. “Maybe I did. But I didn’t shoot him!” Sure enough, the lie detector machine DINGS to confirm Moe’s statement as true.

“Checks out,” says the cop. “Ok sir, you’re free to go.”

So far, so conventional. But then, Moe executes the following rapid-fire descent into humiliation, to the sounds of the lie detector machine:

“Good,” he says. “Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

“A date.” HONK

“Dinner with Fred.” HONK

“Dinner alone.” HONK

“Watching TV alone!” HONK

“All right!!!” Moe says. “I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue!” HONK

Moe hangs his head. “Sears catalogue.” DING

“Now would you unhook this already please! I don’t deserve this kind of shabby treatment!” HONK

That’s the end of the scene. Maybe you found it funny even in my transcript above. But if you didn’t, trust me that it’s funny in the original version.

The question is… why?

Is it just funny to find out Moe is a loser? That’s part of it. But would it have been as funny if the scene simply went:

“Good. Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

[Moe hangs head] “Actually, I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Sears catalogue.” DING

My contention is no. That wouldn’t be nearly as funny. Which brings me to the following valuable point that I promised you:

“We build interest by adding more: more movement, more color, more sound, more light, more people, more intensity, more concentration, more excitement. In short, anything whatever that the spectators regard as increasing will also increase their interest.”

That comes from a book about magic and showmanship. In other words, the above advice about adding more is how expert magicians build the audience’s interest.

But it works the same for comedy.

And in fact, it works the same for copywriting.

Stack a bunch of moderately interesting, or funny, or insightful stuff on top of each other… and the effect is multiplicative, not additive.

And with that punchline, we conclude today’s episode. DING

But if by any chance you want more simple tips on building interest and desire in your readers, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts

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At the start of this year, I got a message from Matt Cascarino. Matt is the chief creative officer at FARM, a marketing agency that’s had among its clients the American Cancer Society, the SPCA, New Era (the company that makes Major League Baseball’s official caps), and Kelley Blue Book.

Matt had been going through my Copy Riddles program. And he wrote to say:

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Hey, John…

Bluntly, Copy Riddles is kicking my ass. But in a good way.

Despite my bullets missing the mark in the first nine rounds, I’m learning a ton and referring back to the material to craft sneaky-good bullets for my own communications.

It wasn’t until Round 10B that things began to click. See my three bullets below and the A-listers’ efforts after that. I laid an egg by overthinking #3, but I’m pretty happy with my first two.

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Below this message, Matt had pasted three of his sales bullets that he had written recently.

I took a look.

His bullets were great. Whatever he was doing to learn how to write bullets — hmm, I wonder what that could be — it was working.

For a while now, I’ve been beating on my tin pot and saying to anyone who would listen that sales bullets are the essence of effective sales copy. I’ve also been saying that bullets are as relevant today as they were when Gary Halbert and John Carlton wrote entire sales letters that were really just a pileup of sexy, bizarre, fascinating bullets.

But you might be skeptical when I promote the idea of learning to write bullets, since I sell a program on writing great bullets.

Fortunately, just yesterday (thanks to Thom Benny) I came upon a relevant passage from a well-known guy in this field, Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy. Eddie wrote:

“If you can write great bullets, you can also write great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts.”

So there you go. Learn to write great bullets, and most other copywriting skills simply fall out as a side-effect.

As for how to write great bullets:

Copy Riddles is in all immodesty the best program to learn to write great sales bullets.

That’s not because I created Copy Riddles.

It’s because Copy Riddles doesn’t just tell you stuff.

Instead, Copy Riddles can do to you what it did to Matt. Get you practicing in a safe and controlled environment… correct you when you are not doing well enough… and within a matter of a few weeks, have you writing bullets that Halbert himself would be proud of.

For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Will Simple Money Emails be available after I finish traipsing around the U.S.?

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My travels around the U.S. continue. Today I left Palm Beach in Florida and arrived to charming and moss-covered Savannah, Georgia.

The next few days are supposed to be something like vacation for me — as vacation as it gets while having to deliver two weekly coaching programs, and writing one weekly newsletter and this daily newsletter.

Fortunately, I have a stockpile of interesting reader comments and questions to help me out with these daily emails. Yesterday, a reader and recent taker-upper of one of my offers wrote in to ask:

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Idk if you remember me, but a few weeks ago I purchased Kieren Drew’s HIW through your affiliate link. Your age of insights videos came as a bonus offer.

Within three days I watched all the videos and went through the supplemental material. Now, I apply the FREE framework to all my content writing. It’s a game changer. Thank you for putting it out there.

But that’s not why I’m emailing you. I’m wondering if your simple money emails will be available in April?

You see, I’m on a budget and spent my monthly “education” budget on HIW. I’d love to buy your course, but I can only do so in April. If you’ll still be offering the course in April, I’d love to become a happy paying customer again.

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The answer in short is yes, Simple Money Emails will be available in April, after I finish my trip across the US. It will also be available in May, and June, and onwards, just as it is available now.

I only ever ran a deadline-based promo around Simple Money Emails once, and that was for its launch last July.

​​I might create some kind of disappearing bonus for SME in the future — but as long-time readers might know, whenever I do offer a new bonus to an existing offer, I make it available to all previous buyers as well.

All that’s to say, if Simple Money Emails is not in your budget now, you will be able to get it later.

But if it is in your budget now, and you want to learn how to stamp out your own profitable and simple emails on demand, day after day if you so choose, even while traveling and not having a ton of time to work, then there’s no sense in waiting.

Simple Money Email will never be a better deal than it is today, and by getting it today, can apply it and profit from it sooner. For more info on SME:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

What’s the problem with retainers?

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I woke up this morning to a bang.

I’ve been staying at my friend’s Adams-family-like mansion in the Bolton Hill area of Baltimore.

I have an entire floor of the house to myself.

It’s been great. Except each morning I’ve been here, I’ve been woken up in the same way.

Bang. Against my window. Then a few seconds later, another bang. On and on and on.

A robin – a strange, possibly idiot bird — keeps flying against the window all morning long. After it hits its head against the window, it flies to a nearby branch. It resets. And then it flies at the window again.

And like that until I wake up, get up, and leave the room so I don’t have to listen to him any more.

This week, in fact ever since I got to Baltimore, I’ve been promoting Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments from readers who have good things to say about Shiv, and who are happy to hear I’m working with him.

I’ve also gotten a few questions, including the following from Dr. Liza Schermann, formerly the Crazy Email Lady, now a full-time copywriter with an ecommerce brand. Liza wrote:

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So cool you are now one of the coaches in Shiv’s programme!

I was actually considering his retainer coaching a few years ago because I figured that if I was going to quit my job at the time, it would have to be for a retainer or retainers. Which is pretty much what I ended up doing without him, only a couple of years (and a lot of sweat and blood) later.

Out of curiosity: what’s the problem with retainers? (If it’s public info.)

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The answer to Liza’s question is really Shiv’s territory, and he goes into it in detail in his video in which he makes the case for the Performance Copywriter Method.

That said, here’s a few possible issues with retainers:

From the copywriter’s side, it’s typically a lot of work, for not all that much money…

​​It’s a lot of stress because the client could decide at any moment to sack you…

​It’s not too scalable because you can only have so many of these retainers before you run out of hours in the day…

​​Plus it’s hard to sell clients on the retainer agreement to start with.

On the other hand, from the client’s view, it feels like an ongoing expense and a need to find stuff for the copywriter to do to make it worth while. And that means they keep wondering whether they should keep it going or sack you before the next retainer payment.

I’m sure not all retainer deals end up like that. Liza has a retainer-like gig. And it’s going well for her.

At the same time, I’ve had a couple retainer-like deals myself. I could never make them work, so I can believe retainers do go bad often.

And yet, for many copywriters, retainers remain some kind of enchanted castle, a magical destination they keep hoping to reach.

Perhaps i could tie that up to that robin beating his head against my window each morning.

Or perhaps I can just tell you there is a legitimate new opportunity for copywriters, a way to make great money, in a scalable way, without the storm and stress of retainers.

It’s called the Performance Copywriter Method. If you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

My confessions as Shiv Shetti’s hot-seat coach

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Last Dec, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote me an email asking if I wanted an intro to Shiv Shetti, who was looking for a new coach for his program.

I had no idea what being a coach inside somebody else’s program entailed, but I was willing to find out.

It turned out Shiv has a new program to coach copywriters, called Performance Copywriter Method.

Normally, I would not be interested. For the past year, I have been consciously working to move away from coaching, selling, or marketing to copywriters.

But this was something different.

Shiv was looking for a “hot seat coach.” Each week, I would have to give a different copywriter a strategy for a new email promotion. The copywriters were working with solid, successful clients, and were writing email promos for them on performance-only deals.

I told Shiv I am interested in this. So we agreed I’d start a 2-week trial period at the end of January.

In the meantime, I got to work preparing.

I bought Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror course, because Shiv was explicitly looking for someone who knew how to do promos in that style. I went through Campaign Conqueror twice.

Second, I went through Shiv’s trainings inside PCM. They talked about mindset… about Shiv’s system for finding these PCM clients… about writing promos themselves.

Third, I looked over previous hot seats that Shiv had delivered himself, all of which surprised me in how thoughtful and thorough they were.

Fourth, I joined the PCM Skool community, where I first started lurking and then contributing bit by bit.

Long story short:

I was impressed by Shiv’s program… impressed by the copywriters inside… impressed by Shiv and his team.

I guess they liked me as well, because my trial period came and went, and now we continue to work together.

My main job is, as I said, to take in a bunch of info each week, and come up with the strategy for a new email promo, much in the style of Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror. The strategy includes a promo offer, a theme, and email hooks.

For example, tomorrow I have call set up with an Australian copywriter who’s working with a music coach. He’s supposed to send emails over 5 days to promote the coach’s $2,800 offer to the coach’s list of 12,000 names.

I will prepare the strategy. I will go over it with the copywriter over Zoom. He will then go off and write the implement the strategy some time in April.

If all goes well, the client will make a bunch of money without doing any work. The copywriter will end up getting paid much more for those emails than he ever could if he were getting paid up front. And then next month, he and the client will do it all again, with a new offer and a new theme.

So far, I’ve done five or six of these hot seats, one per week. Most of the promos are set to run in the next few weeks, so I can’t report on any impressive wins yet. I imagine those will come.

The other part of my work as a hot seat coach is participate in the PCM Skool community, fielding questions every day.

Those tend to range from technical questions to client acquisition questions to copy and promo questions.

Fortunately, this community is nothing like r/copywriting or the various Facebook copy groups. The people inside are all normal, are all looking for results, are all actually working copywriters with solid copy chops.

All that’s to say, i continue to work with Shiv and his PCM community.

I can tell you from the inside that this program is 100% legit.

​​Not only is it well-designed and well-delivered, with care and effort, but the copywriters inside are getting these performance deals going with quality clients, and from what I’ve seen of the results so far, they are making bank.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about PCM below.

But before you go there, you might notice the curious fact that I am not in any way creating a promo out of this offer.

There’s no deadline.

There’s no disappearing offer, or a bonus, or a discount.

That’s because I don’t want to create any additional urgency about this, beyond what you might already feel as a copywriter dissatisfied or worried with the status quo.

But if you are dissatisfied or worried, and if you’re looking for a new way to work as a copywriter, then PCM is definitely worth a look. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Announcing: Exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters

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Over the past two weeks, I’ve teased on a few occasions that I will tell you about and exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Today, I will finally tell you what this business opportunity is.

I will just tell you about it today, and I will then work to sell you on it tomorrow, Wednesday, and over the weeks and months to come.

This business opportunity is Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

Shiv, as you might know, was once the “retainer guy.”

He was very successful in coaching copywriters to land clients who would pay healthy monthly retainers.

Thanks in part to his success getting copywriters set up with retainer deals, Shiv realized in time that retainers are a raw deal both for copywriters and for clients.

To Shiv’s great credit, he didn’t ignore this reality. He was both honest and proactive about it. And so he figured out a new and different way for copywriters to work with clients.

That’s the Performance Copywriter Method.

The promise of PCM is that it’s a scalable way for copywriters to work with clients, make $20-$30k per month, while working just 4 hours a day.

Another way to look at PCM is as a coaching group or mastermind, which is led by three experienced coaches who guide things — me being of these three coaches.

You can find out more about PCM at the link below.

There’s no deadline to do so.

Joining PCM is a big decision, and it won’t be right for anyone.

That’s why I don’t want to create any urgency about this, fake or real, beyond telling you about this new way to work as a copywriter, which is likely to be entirely different from what you’re doing now.

Tomorrow, I will give you my inside view on PCM, and what exactly what I do as a coach inside it.

But if you’re intrigued by what you’ve heard so far, you can sign up to watch Shiv’s presentation about PCM below. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Is the daily email marketplace glutted?

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I’m on the Amtrak from New York to Baltimore, sitting the wrong way, away from the direction of travel, bouncing up and down as trees and warehouses zoom by me. It’s not a great time to write a daily email.

​​Fortunately, a long-time reader fed me a good email prompt a few days ago. He wrote:

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For a while now, I’ve been feeling like I’m inundated with emails from copywriters, marketers and direct marketing companies.

Until a few months ago, I took pleasure in reading everything.

Now I don’t anymore.

[…]

Lately, I enjoy reading newsletters about what is happening in the world, novels, history books, detective stories, and business history textbooks.

I hope this metamorphosis of mine is normal.

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My reader’s message sums up the concept of the sophistication of the marketplace, as described by legendary marketer Gene Schwartz, in the experiences of one person.

A man will enter a specific marketplace. He will be new, interested, and engaged by just about everything there.

In time, he will become more selective, more skeptical, or even leave that specific marketplace altogether.

Is this a problem?

​​Is it a vote against ever starting a business in general?

​​Or is it a vote against starting a daily email newsletter right now?

Of course not.

The fact is, there are uncountably many humans alive on the planet right now. You only need a tiny number of them to be interested in what you are writing or selling right now to do very well for yourself and your business.

It’s much like a direct mail sales letter, which will typically only get a 2% response rate, even when mailed to a highly qualified list of prospects.

98 out of 100 targeted, pre-selected prospects won’t get the sales letter… or won’t bother to read it all the way to the order form… or won’t be persuaded to buy.

Only 2 out of 100 will actually respond and send in any money.

And yet many big fortunes over the past century have been built on those 2%.

The same applies to you today, with even more extreme numbers.

That said, it is undeniable that different formats – email newsletters as opposed to video courses as opposed to books — will attract different kinds of people, and in different mindsets and stages of sophistication.

In my experience, he more serious and successful people are, the more likely it is that they read books.

So if you do write a regular newsletter, it makes sense to adapt your best content, and turn it into a book. You will often reach great prospects who might be among the 98 out of 100 who would never read your newsletter, at least not today, before they really know you and trust you to have something worthwhile to say.

That was one of the motivations for my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters book.

​​That book was quick to write. And yet it’s one of the best thing I’ve ever done for my standing in the industry and for attracting quality readers to my newsletter — readers who might never have read otherwise.

For more info on this quick and yet worthwhile book:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments