Copywriting

For those who are less successful than they will be

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Several years ago, I was at a bar with a friend and we started talking to two Welsh sisters.

After a few minutes, one of the sisters stopped and turned to me. “Wait a minute,” she asked, “how old are you?

I had just turned 36 and I told her so.

“No way! I would have said you are 26, not 36!”

I shrugged it off. But it was cowin’ lush of her to say. However, if she had  instead told me,

“Pack it in! You are so much older than you look!”

… even though the content is basically the same, I probably wouldn’t have been as pleased. And I guess it’s not just me. Case in point:

In Victor Schwab’s How to Write a Good Advertisement, Vic goes over 100 successful headlines. One of these is,

“For The Woman Who Is Older Than She Looks”

This, says Vic, stopped thousands of women and got them to read the ad.

On the other hand, the more straightforward (though equivalent) “For The Woman Who Looks Younger Than She Is” didn’t perform nearly as well.

And there’s a fundamental rule of copywriting embedded in that short example. In case you don’t see it yet, let me give you a few more examples:

“71-Year-Old Man Has Sexual Congress Five Times a Day!”
“The Unique World of Gay Rodeo”
“Get Rich Slowly”

Of course, each of these headlines has multiple things going on. But I think you’ll agree they also have something in common.

I’ll spell this out another day in another post. (If you have a guess and you want to see if it’s what I have in mind, write me and I can confirm it for you.)

For now, if you have a business, and you want to be more successful with it by ramping up your sales copy, then you might get some value from the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Copywriting and creativity lessons from a B.S. photographer

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I took a 6-hour bus ride today, and sitting in front of me was a very alert Argentinian male.

He had a little digital camera with him — my guess is it was 15 years old — and he took dozens or possibly hundreds of pictures during our trip together.

Most of these photos were of the side of the highway — a blur of bushes and trees.

Occasionally, he would hold the camera above his head and take a picture of the inside of the bus.

And at one point, a rival bus pulled up to us, and he took multiple shots of the sleeping Chinese tourists inside it.

The entire ride was hot and long and I was irritated.

So each time the Argentinian man took another B.S. photo, I wondered what he will do with all these uninteresting, blurry, low-resolution photos.

But what do I know?

Perhaps he is a designer or a movie editor or a cartoonist.

And maybe when he needs graphical inspiration, he opens up a random blurry photo he took while traveling through eastern Europe, and this stimulates a creative new idea for him.

After all, I do something very similar, only with words and ideas. I keep lots of lists:

Of marketing lessons (“Put your strongest proof first”)…

Of entertaining stories (“Man-tax cafe set to close”)…

Of unique phrases (“Hit the sawdust trail”)…

Of memorable characters from books, movies, and TV shows (“Majikthise and Vroomfondel”)…

And of interesting facts (“Color blindness was only noticed in 1794”).

Then, when I sit down to write one of these emails — or any other piece of copy — I have a ton of material to jog my lazy creative mechanism.

This process also naturally makes my own voice and opinions come through — because these are my own bizarre stories and observations, or facts that caught my own jaded attention.

It might work for you as well if you start collecting your own lists today. And if you’re looking for more ways to come up with good sales copy — specifically emails — check out the following:

Last chance to send $1

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Legend says that, once upon a time, in various Midwestern states, an enterprising carny pitchman took out ads in local newspapers that read:

LAST CHANCE TO SEND $1
to PO Box 210, 60611 Chicago, IL

There was no reason given why the reader should send in $1 or whether he would get anything for it.

And yet, the ad supposedly drew in many dollar bills before the postal service guys caught on and put a stop to it.

The great 20th-century copywriter Vic Schwab called this ad an example of how effrontery can be successful in advertising. Other people claim it simply shows how gullible and sheep-like the masses are.

I personally like this little ad because it’s got so much going on in it. In just a few words, it conveys:

1. Urgency
2. Specificity
3. A clear call to action

And these three ingredients were enough to draw money in. A success that many other ads don’t achieve.

Which makes me think that, often, all the stuff copywriters agonize over is only giving people reasons not to buy.

And it reminds me of an important truth I read today, from another great 20th-century copywriter, Robert Collier:

“It is not the copy that counts so much as the scheme back of it.”

Speaking of the scheme back of this post:

I am officially done with my 3-week trip around the US and I’m back to work.

Only, what with continuing projects, with work that built up while I was traveling, and with a few new clients coming in, I’m almost booked up for the month of June.

Which means that, if you want me to write sales copy for you in June, now is your last chance to get in touch and see if I would indeed be good to write for you (I most likely won’t be).

To find out, simply send me a postcard to PO Box 210, 60611 Chicago, IL. Or alternately, write me an email at john@bejakovic.com.

The Red Shoe Diaries advertorial structure

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A man, his heart broken after a tragic love affair, is searching for answers.

So he puts out an ad in the newspaper:

“Looking for women who keep a secret diary. I want to know your stories of love, passion, and betrayal. Write me at PO Box 903, New York, NY, 10276.”

For some reason, week after week, a new letter arrives in response to this ad.

The man goes to the postal box, picks up the letter, and then, walking along desolate train tracks with his dog, he starts to read a new story of love, passion, and betrayal.

So opens each episode of the 90s erotic TV show Red Shoe Diaries. (The forlorn man was played by a young David Duchovny, before he starred in the X-Files and Californication.)

I bring this up not because I am reminiscing about my adolescent days and the significance that an occasional TV nipple had in my life.

Instead, I want to tell you about a successful advertorial I wrote recently.

This advertorial is for a pet safety product (I won’t say exactly what as a courtesy to my clients, because the campaign is still running profitably).

While I was doing research for this advertorial, I came across lots of horror stories that all tied into the product.

Any one of these stories would have made a good lead for the advertorial.

And I was sorry to let any of the stories go.

So what I did was a kind of Red Shoe Diaries structure.

I opened with one horror story, told in the first person by the purported author of the advertorial.

But then, rather than moving into other sales arguments, I told other horror stories, one after the other.

And to do this, I brought in a kind of David Duchovny narrator (in this case, a police officer who showed up to the scene of the original horror story).

This narrator reeled off 2 or 3 more horror stories.

Now, I can’t say for certain, but I believe this multi-story structure is one of the main reasons this advertorial has been so successful to cold Facebook traffic.

In case you are selling something that lends itself to lots of good — i.e. chilling — stories, maybe you’ll find this approach valuable.

And if you want to get me to research and write up such an advertorial for your product, then hit reply, write me a sultry yet short email, and we can take it from there.

Are you Joe Hepp to the real con game?

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Yesterday, a friend and I spent a lot of time tracking down the phrase “Joe Hepp.”

It appears in A House of Games, a David Mamet film about con men.

“Are you Joe Hepp?” is apparently an old circus saying that means, “Are you a know-it-all?” It later morphed into, “Are you hep?” — meaning “are you in the know?” — and later hip, hippy, hipster, etc.

But here’s something you might find more interesting.

It’s the etymology of another phrase from A House of Games. It comes up when the main con man, Mike, talks about what a con game really is.

It’s short for confidence game, says Mike.

You might have already known that.

But do you know why it’s called a confidence game?

Not because the con man gains your confidence in order to cheat you. Instead, it’s because he gives you his confidence. And this makes you trust him, and makes you susceptible for manipulation and persuasion.

In other words, it’s the old reciprocity principle from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence.

Except, not as it’s applied in the lame and ineffective way of most marketers (“If I bombard my prospects with free pdfs and hard-teaching emails, then they will feel obliged to eventually buy from me”).

No.

There are much better, more subtle, and more effective ways to apply reciprocity — AKA the con game — to copywriting and marketing.

I won’t lay them out here.

But if you’d like to know what I have in mind, you might find some answers here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Silent stories run deep

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Yesterday, I walked into an unfamiliar room and got naked.

I took a warm shower, tiptoed over to a large, clam-like apparatus, and climbed in.

I closed the clam shell behind myself.

All around me was warm, salty water and complete darkness and silence.

I was in an isolation (or sensory deprivation) tank.

For the next hour or so, I lay there in the darkness, waiting for the visions to start.

At least, that’s what I’d read would happen. I got this idea from Paddy Chayefsky’s novel Altered States, in which a scientist starts experimenting with sensory deprivation and psychedelic drugs, and winds up transforming into an ape-like creature who runs amok in Central Park.

The story in the book is less kooky than this quick summary makes it sound.

And kooky or not, this story was enough to make “sensory deprivation” something I very much wanted to try.

Which is a lesson to keep in mind if you are trying to convince people of anything — particularly anything unusual, or something they might not know they want.

Just consider:

Had I read a sales letter, an advertorial, or a blog post with a headline like, “How to induce safe, drug-free hallucinations,” odds are the message would have just bounced off me.

In the best case, it might have gotten me interested, but it would have caused all sorts of objections and doubts to pop up as well.

But a story, in an obscure novel from 40 years ago, was enough to get me to seek out a “float” halfway around the world, without inquiring about the price, safety, or effectiveness of this experience.

And this all happened without even a call to action. Speaking of which:

If you are selling something to an “unaware” audience, and you want to try a story-based approach in your sales emails, then you might find some valuable pointers here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

How to outguess “America’s greatest copywriter” for $100

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During his famous farewell seminar in 2006, Gary Bencivenga ran a “Pick The Winner” contest.

He’d show two different headlines or magalog covers and ask the audience to choose which one did better in a direct test. (Example: “HE PROVED IT to millions on PBS television…” vs. “Deadly artery plaque dissolved!”)

The interesting thing was that Gary himself admitted he wasn’t good at picking among these competing headlines.

Let me repeat this:

Gary Bencivenga, who has been called “America’s greatest copywriter,” admitted he can’t pick a winning headline from two solid but very different appeals.

​​So what hope do you have?

And if you can’t even hope to pick out a winning headline, how can you write a good ad?

After all, the headline often determines whether the rest of your ad will get a reading at all.

Before I answer this, let me switch gears for a second. And let me tell you about an interesting bit of research I came across in psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahneman and another psychologist, Gary Klein, had very different attitudes about expert intuitions (such as the ability of a top copywriter to pick a winning headline).

Gary Klein was all for expert intuition.

He studied decision making among firefighters, and he had many reports of how firefighters would make gut calls that turned out to be the right call.

Kahneman, on the other hand, didn’t believe much in the power of expert intuition.

That’s because he spent his time looking at decision making in fields such as finance, where he found that expert intuition was often negatively correlated to the actual outcome. (In other words, once you hear what an expert stock broker advises, you should do the exact opposite.)

So Kahneman and Klein decided to collaborate and answer the following:

When can you trust experts? And how can you develop expert intuition that you can rely on?

It turns out there are two conditions.

First, the domain needs to be predictable enough. Emergency room cases are predictable — but the stock market is not.

Second, you need an opportunity to get feedback, and preferably a lot of feedback, relatively quickly.

So let’s get back to writing copy.

Looking at the two criteria above, you can see why even a top copywriter like Gary B. might not have great intuition when it comes to picking headline winners.

Even if you think an individual market (say, the market for weight loss advice in 2019) is more or less predictable…

It’s hard to get enough feedback on what the market would respond to if all you’ve got is one direct mailing every six months, like Gary used to have.

Fortunately, that’s not the situation we’re in any longer.

With $100, you can promote an offer on a PPC network like Google display, and perform dozens of different (and statistically valid) copy tests.

This way, you can get almost immediate feedback.

You can learn which appeals work.

Plus you will start to develop a world-class copy intuition, which will soon outstrip even great copy masters from earlier generations.

Which goes back to something I read from another top copywriter, Dan Ferrari:

“Winning at direct response is mostly a matter of taking as many swings as possible. The C-level marketers that test 50 promos per year will beat the A-list marketers that test 5. Over longer periods of time, as variability compounds, this will become even more pronounced.”

Anyways, maybe this is valuable if you’re looking to write good copy.

And if you want to see some “Pick The Winner” contests I’ve run with several email lists I manage, you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Fear and loathing in Facebook advertising

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I listened to a webinar a few days ago put on by two big name marketers.

The webinar was all about how to squeak more out of your marketing on Facebook, now that Facebook is cracking down on direct response ads.

The answer that these two big marketing guns had was to water down your copy. To change the main triggering words. To replace disgusting images with generic ones.

To me, this was code for more of the same, disguised in a way to make it palatable to Facebook.

And, again to my mind, underlying this new marketing approach was a continued emphasis on the emotions of fear and greed — and a bit of contempt for the customer.

Don’t get me wrong.

This marketing approach obviously works, and it’s definitely one way to get rich as a marketer. It’s also something I’ve been guilty of myself as a copywriter.

And yet, this is not the only way to succeed.

You can appeal to other emotions than fear and greed.

You can choose to make a good product rather than hyperactive marketing the core of your business.

You can look out for your customers rather than treat them with contempt.

And none of this has to be driven by altruism. As Mark Ford has written:

“Proponents of the fear-and-greed approach often argue that the smart thing to do is to follow a fear-based lead with an appeal to the prospect’s greed.

“But I have found that if you do that, you wind up attracting the kind of customer you don’t want: someone who is gullible and greedy.

“You can’t build a business by selling to the gullible and greedy. You can make scores, sometimes big scores. But you will never have a sustainably profitable business.”

This quote of Mark’s is something I keep coming back to often recently, and a kind of sign post I keep working my way towards.

And if you are a business owner or a copywriter, I think it’s a worthwhile idea to consider.

Anyways, if you have a business selling a good product and you want some help in marketing it — using copy that works in the interest of your customers — then you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Naked yoga for lonely, bearded old men

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Taking a naked yoga class is not so much about stretching.

Rather, it’s more about ogling the naked female instructor.

For example, a typical naked yoga class culminates in a pose known as “bird of paradise,” where the (naked) instructor stands on one leg and holds her other leg at a 180-degree angle.

I read about this in an article about bizarre courses you can now take around East London.

Along with naked yoga, you can also sign up for rope bondage classes, cuddle parties, and tantra workshops.

According to Samantha Rea, the author of the article, most of the interest is from men, typically “older, usually single, left-leaning middle-class guys who sometimes sport a man-bun and a big, bushy beard—lubricated with artisan beard-oil—along with loose cotton trousers.”

Samantha writes that, to her mind, these classes are not much different than getting a lap dance. The only real difference is “paying for a lap dance is a more honest transaction.”

And that brings me to the topic of selling in marketing.

Occasionally (though less often as I’ve continued to raise my copywriting rates), I still come across a business that would like to “increase engagement” with their prospects or customers.

Often, this is code for pumping out well-meaning content, without in any way trying to make the sale or promote the offers the business has.

It’s not the kind of job I take on.

For one, I focus on sales copywriting, which always aims to clearly get an action from the reader.

I do this because it gets clients results, which is good for me in the long term.

On a more astral plane, I feel that aiming to “increase engagement” without selling is much like lap dancing for the woke (as Samantha puts it).

If you ask me, it’s better to have the sales honestly out in the open.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to drum your prospects on the head with your sales pitch. It’s true people do not like to be sold to. That’s why your prospects should feel like they are buying because they want to, rather than because you have sold them.

The good news is, it’s not hard to get a grip on this skill.

Assuming you write to your prospects regularly about things they care about, in a fun and entertaining way. And if you want to find out in more detail how to do this, you might like the following:

The productivity benefits of dirty hostels and shared bathrooms

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Ben Settle wrote an email today with the subject line, “Why airports are the devil.”

Ben’s email is all about how he hates travel — the bacteria-infected airports, the dirty hostels, and the horror-filled lifestyle of a digital nomad.

Now, I hate many of the same things that Ben’s pointing out.

And yet, I still travel frequently and willingly.

And I think traveling is important — whether I like it or not.

That’s because I’ve noticed that when I sit at home and develop a daily routine, my brain slowly and imperceptibly starts to get slow, stupid, and depressed.

After a while, it simply refuses to work very well. It refuses to be active, creative, or engaged — because everything around me is too familiar.

The upshot is it starts to take me longer and longer to get work completed… Small obstacles become overwhelming… And I find it hard to stay motivated or positive.

Going for a trip clears all those cobwebs quickly and amps me up with energy for when I get back home. And that’s why I’m willing to submit to uncomfortable airplane seats or to bacteria in dodgy restaurants or embarrassment when having to deal with strangers in a strange land.

I’m sure there are many people who are like Ben, and who can thrive in their own home fortress, with a regular, familiar routine, day in and day out.

But I suspect many people are also like me.

The thing is, not everyone has a free and flexible lifestyle.

Many people who do get depressed and bored and inactive in their daily lives cannot travel and get new experiences whenever they want.

And so they seek novelty, stimulation, and entertainment wherever they can get it.

Usually through TV shows. Or social media. Or even in the marketing they are exposed to.

Which, in case you’ve got a business, is a great opportunity.

If you send marketing emails entertaining and challenging your audience, you can help your prospects make up for the fact they have routine and staid lives.

And if you want to see how I write such emails — even as I sleep on friends’ couches and expose myself to dangerous airport bacteria — then you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/