Copywriting

Jumbo PT Barnum writing tip from me to you

by

Many people like to start off their emails with categories and abstractions. They say stuff like…

This past Thursday night, I hosted the weekly Write & Profit coaching call. Around 7:15pm Barcelona time, I was in the middle of copywriting feedback to a business owner, Jeff, on an email he wrote. His email started by saying:

“I have heard many stories of…”

Whoa there. That word many is a trigger. It triggered me to think of a passage from Joe Vitale’s book about P.T. Barnum, There’s A Customer Born Every Minute.

In chapter 8 of that book, Joe sums up 17 copywriting lessons to be drawn from Barnum’s massively effective advertising. Lesson #10 is “Say Jumbo.” Joe explains:

===

Whenever you write something vague, such as, “they say,” or “later on,” or “many,” train yourself to stop and rewrite those phrases into something more concrete, such as “Mark Weisser said…” or “Saturday at noon” or “seven people agreed.” Don’t say “dog” when you can say “collie.” Don’t say “elephant” when you can say “Jumbo.” Don’t say you have a “midget” on display when you can have “General Tom Thumb.”

===

In completely unrelated news, my promotion of Newsletter XP is nearing its climax.

Newsletter XP is an expensive and valuable course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter. It’s put on by Alex Lieberman and Tyler Denk, the founders of Morning Brew and Beehiiv, respectively.

I’ve managed to claw out a $200 discount for you from the usual price that Newsletter XP sells for. That discount is good until tomorrow night, Monday Feb 26, at 12 midnight PST. If you’d like to take advantage of this, here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Boring copy beats interesting copy

by

Yesterday, I wrote about the value of being clear in email copy. I got a curious reply to that from a business owner who has been on my list for a while.

​​This business owner gave his personal experience with two email lists he’s on, by two marketers I will codename Jeremy and Gavin. My reader wrote about these two marketers:

===

Jeremy’s emails are interesting, full of personality, and always something going on.

Gavin’s emails are super simple, clear, and direct to the point. Almost boring.

If I had to choose a better writer, it would probably be Jeremy.

But I’ve bought about 4 products from Gavin over the past 6 months, and none from Jeremy.

I also tend to read all of Gavin’s emails, because I know they are going to be easy to read, while I often just save Jeremy’s emails for later and end up not reading them.

===

The point being:

If you write simply, clearly, and make a valuable point, you don’t need to be clever or impressive. You can even be boring. And you will still be effective.

That was why I created my Simple Money Emails training the way I did, and why I named it like I did.

Simple Money Emails shows you how to write simple emails, that make a clear point, and that lead to a sale.

I’ve used the approach inside this training to write emails that sold between $4k and $5k worth of products, every day, for years at a time.

If you’d like to do something similar:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

How to stop readers from skimming your emails

by

I’m working on my new 10 Commandments book, and so I’ve been going through the archive on my website, in search of old emails that I could use in the new book as-is.

There are literally hundreds of these old emails.

Most I skim across without reading at all. But from time to time, some of the emails catch my eye.

I noticed that there’s one characteristic among the emails in my archive that do make me stop, read more carefully, nod my head.

The emails that made me do that are clear.

Being clear goes beyond getting a good Hemingway-app score.

You can write at a 3rd-grade level and still not have a clear message. If you don’t believe me, think of former U.S. President George W. Bush, who said:

​​”I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the soil of a friend.”

The key thing for a clear email isn’t the word choice. It’s actually having something clear to say.

I’ve personally started forcing myself to write each of my emails in just three bullet points. Here’s an example for today’s email:

1. been reading my old emails
2. good ones are clear
3. sme: don’t need quirks or style

Which brings me my Simple Money Emails training. As I say inside that training:

===

Your email doesn’t need to be perfectly written or polished. It doesn’t need to use clever language or have your own “unique voice.” It doesn’t need to have any particular character or surprising, breakneck transitions.​​

Just because you saw some unique quirk in an email guru’s personal email, don’t think you have to do the same to make sales.

You don’t. I know because I have written super basic emails, without any “flair” to them other than an interesting story that I dug up somewhere online, and they did well. In fact, simple, clear, interesting emails will often do better that clever, unusual, or flowery emails.

===

You can write clearly. And you can write in an interesting way. And you can write in a way that makes you sales today, and tomorrow, and the day after.

Simple Money Emails can help you get there. ​​For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

An incredibly powerful email hook

by

Oh boy.

Yesterday’s email, about scarcity as a performance art, brought the replies pouring in.

I feel like I’m in the courtroom scene in Miracle on 34th Street, with postal workers bringing in satchels of mail for proof of how strongly people feel on this issue.

The issue, in case you missed my emails over the past couple days, is an upcoming livestream by marketers Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson.

During the livestream, which is set to happen in a couple weeks’ time, Russell will interview Dan, from Dan’s sacrosanct basement workspace. The topic will be Dan’s mind-boggling decision to shut down new subscriptions to his No B.S. print newsletter, starting March 3 of this year.

Real? Fake?

Some of my readers turned detective and wrote in with their findings.

They spotted a detail on the optin page for this upcoming livestream. An image shows Russell, with a mild look of panic on his face, holding a fax from Dan to demonstrate how real this decision is.

The fax has a headline in huge font that reads “SHUT ‘ER DOWN!!!”

Only problem is, the fax also has a small date in the upper right corner, and that date reads 10/24/2022.

Other readers acknowledged that Russell does go for fake scarcity, but defended the man. Some called him a marketing genius. Others just said he does a great job distilling marketing concepts and makes them usable quickly — and it’s up to you to decide what to do with them.

My main takeaway after this whole experience is that industry gossip is an incredible powerful email hook. If, like me, you needed any reminding of that, then let me remind you:

Industry gossip is an incredible powerful email hook.

The only problem I have with anything that’s incredibly powerful is that I bore quickly.

As I said recently on my “How I do it” presentation, I look at this newsletter first and foremost as a sandbox, a playground.

It’s kind of a miracle that it’s turned into a nice source of income and a fountain of good opportunities.

But once something stops being interesting for me, it stops being a topic for this newsletter. So I won’t be writing about this bit of industry gossip, as Dan himself might say, for the foreseeable future.

That said, my playground attitude is not an attitude I encourage anyone else to take.

So if you want to see how two professionals who take their jobs very seriously do it, then check out Dan and Russell’s current “SHUT ‘ER DOWN!!!” campaign.

I continue to promote it with an affiliate link, even though I don’t know if I’ve made any sales, and even though, given that it’s Dan Kennedy, I would promote it without getting paid, simply because I’ve learned so much from the man, and I think you can too.

If you’d like to sign up for that free upcoming livestream, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity

Today only: Stage Surprise Success

by

Here’s a fun story about thieves:

Penn Jillette is a famous magician. He was once sitting at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, holding court.

Among the people around him was a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins. Robbins had been working in Las Vegas casinos as a performance pickpocket — stealing wallets and watches for show, and then giving them back to their owners.

Penn rates pickpockets “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole” — and God knows stage hypnotists rank low.

Penn braced himself to be unimpressed, and he challenged Robbins to steal something.

But Robbins shrugged his shoulders. He shook his head. He doesn’t like to perform in front of other magicians, he said.

Jillette repeated his challenge.

But Robbins said no again. Penn was wearing just shorts and a sports shirt, and Robbins said this wouldn’t be much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”

Robbins smiled and said no one last time. Instead, he offered to perform a magic trick for Jillette.

By this time, a large audience had formed around the two.

Robbins told Jillette that the trick would involve tracing a circle on a piece of paper around the ring Jillette was wearing.

Jillette took off his ring. He put it down on the table on a piece of paper. He reached for a pen in his shirt pocket. He brought the pen down to the paper and clicked it to start writing.

Suddenly, his face went white. He looked up at Robbins.

“Fuck. You,” Jilllette said.

Robbins was there, standing with a small plastic cylinder between his fingers. It was the ink cartridge from Penn Jillette’s pen.

There are lots of possible morals from this story. But let me focus on just one particularly valuable one. It is this:

For the next 24 hours, until 8:31pm Tuesday, Feb 6, to be exact, I have a special offer if you buy my Most Valuable Email course.

I will tell you the particularly valuable moral from the above story, which I am calling Stage Surprise Success.

​​Stage Surprise Success will give you step-by-step instructions for creating surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence.

If you want this disappearing bonus:

1. Get a copy of my Most Valuable Email training at https://bejakovic.com/mve

2. Then reply to this email and say you want the disappearing bonus offer.

3. I will then reply with a brief writeup explaining Stage Surprise Success.

4. This disappearing bonus offer is good until tomorrow, Tuesday, February 6, at 8:31pm CET.

5. And of course, if you’ve bought MVE already, this is open to you as well. Write in and ask away, and I will send you Stage Surprise Success also. But the same deadline applies.

I shot a moose

by

“I shot a moose once,” says Woody Allen. The audience at the comedy club starts chuckling.

“I was hunting upstate New York,” Woody explains, “and I shot a moose.” It’s the beginning of a 3-minute routine. But it’s already funny.

The question is why.

If you don’t want me to kill this joke for you, then stop reading now. But if you’re curious why “I shot a moose” is already funny in itself, and how this can help you write better stories, then read on.

Still here? Let’s dissect this:

“I shot a moose once,” says Woody. The audience chuckles.

Partly it’s the improbable setup. Woody Allen, small, city dweller, nebbish, hunting in upstate New York.

But partly it’s the moose itself. The same improbable setup would not be as funny if Woody said, “I shot a deer.”

Why moose and not deer? A few possibilities:

Moose look funny. They have the round muzzle, the cauliflower antlers, they are oversized and look ungainly.

Also, moose are less common than deer. Maybe that makes the story less likely to be real, and therefore more absurd.

Finally, the word moose is funny for some reason to English speakers. Perhaps it makes us think of “moo” as in cow. Perhaps it’s the unexpected unvoiced “s” at the end. If the animal’s name were pronounced “mooze,” it might not be as funny.

In good comedy routines, as in good stories, the comedian takes you down a meandering garden path. What’s important is not the destination – the punchline — but the journey along the way.

So how do you organize a meandering stroll for the greatest effect?

Like a fountain in a real garden, some things are guaranteed to please during a comedy show — mockery, mimicry, slapstick.

Other times, it’s just important to stroll and take surprising new turns. What exactly lies around the corner doesn’t matter too much, as long as it’s new.

And then, there’s the unimportant detail that’s actually important. The cabbage patch instead of the flower bed… or the moose in the Woody Allen routine.

So why the moose?

We can guess, but ​​nobody knows for sure, not even Woody Allen. Whatever it is about the moose, the fact is this seemingly unimportant detail is actually important.

The point of today’s email is not the moose. It’s that fascinating gardens, like great stories and funny comedy routines, rarely spring forth fully formed.

They are the work of careful craftsmen.

Comedians like Woody Allen will deliver the same routine hundreds or thousands of times, each time perfecting the delivery and testing out small variations, including all the unimportant details. It’s the collection of all those details that ultimately “get the click.”

So that’s my takeaway for you.

If you have a story to tell, but it’s not clicking, maybe it’s not the story. In fact, it’s almost certainly not the story.

Retell it again, tweak it, add in stuff, take out stuff, polish it.

A new audience will keep thinking that it’s new. An old audience will need to be reminded. And to both an old and a new audience, the final walk down the garden path that you deliver will be more fascinating and stimulating than what you started with.

I wish I had a storytelling training to sell you right now. I don’t have one. But I’ve actually written quite a lot about storytelling, and experimented with storytelling techniques myself.

You can learn and profit from my experiments. They are one part of what’s documented inside my Most Valuable Email course, specifically in the Most Valuable Email Swipes #13,#16, #17, #18, #19, #20, and #22.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Sell the summer, not the seed

by

I’m making my way through an old issue of The New Yorker, from Mar 2023. I’m reading an article about seed and garden catalogues, which offer different strains of cabbage or beet for purchase by mail.

Fascinating, right?

Well, hold on. These seed and garden catalogues are mail-order businesses, and some have survived since the 19th century.

If you’re doing any kind of online marketing today, there’s probably something fundamental and (ahem) perennial to learn from businesses that have sold in a similar way for 100+ years.

So I pushed through the first page of the article. And I was rewarded. I read the following passage about what these seed catalogues really sell:

===

Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. Trade your last cow for a handful of beans to grow a beanstalk as high as the sky. They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box. Also, you can buy seeds from them.

===

This is a great though unexpected illustration of something I read in Dan Kennedy’s No. B.S. Marketing of Seeds And Other Garden Supplies:

===

As a marketer, you have a choice between selling things with ham-handed, brute force, typically against resistance, or selling aspirations or emotional fulfillments with finesse, typically with little resistance.

===

Perhaps you will say that’s obvious.

Perhaps it is.

But how many businesses insist on selling seeds, or even the promise of large or fruitful plants, when in reality what their customers want is a village mystery, the coming of spring, or the tang of summer?

It’s all gotta mean something. Whatever you sell has got to go in a gift-box, and I’m not talking about cardboard or paper.

And now it’s time to sell something.

My offer to you today is my Most Valuable Email training. The seeds inside this training are a copywriting technique you can use every day to create more interesting and engaging content than you would otherwise.

But what I’m really selling is something else — a path to mastery. The feeling of growing competence with each email you write… the joy of looking and seeing patterns others don’t… the ability to transform yourself at will, from what you are right now into anything you want to be, in an instant, like Merlin in Disney’s Sword in the Stone.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

“No-fooling” secret to writing opening lines that get read and copied

by

Yeah, I bet you want the secret. I’ll tell you, but it won’t make sense unless you read the following first.

Last Friday, I sent an email about a photo I found on Twitter of a guy hand-copying my emails. To which I got a reply from an online entrepreneur with a 200k-strong audience, Kieran Drew. Kieran wrote me:

===

Guilty confession: I handcopied a fair few emails from your bonus doc in SME.

When I write my emails, I always go back to my inbox to see how you started your last few too. I still find the opening lines hard and I’m yet to see anyone do them as well as you do.

===

I heard something similar about my opening lines from a friend who runs a successful niche magazine (hi Radu). He told me he keeps my emails for their opening lines, as inspiration for openers when he needs to write something.

I never thought writing an opening line was some special superpower of mine. But like they say, once is an accident, twice is a positioning statement.

So I thought about what I do with the opening line of each of my emails. Really, it’s the millennia-old advice from legendary direct marketer Joe Sugarman:

“The purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence. Nothing more, nothing less.”

You probably knew Joe Sugarman’s advice. You probably even follow it, and think you do it well. And maybe you really do it well. But maybe you don’t, not as well as you could. The trouble is, it’s easy to fool yourself.

I thought a bit more about my opening lines.

The only other secret that came to mind, besides the Joe Sugarman advice, is that I’ve spent a good amount of time learning to write sales bullets.

​​I’ve analyzed how A-list copywriters start with factual and dull source material… give away the relevant parts of it in their bullets… but leave out just the right thing to make you pull your hair out from wanting to know the secret.

It’s transformed how I write. Because it means there’s a way to learn to write copy in a way that you cannot fool yourself:

You start with the same source material A-list copywriters used to write their own bullets… write your own bullet… compare it to theirs… and see just how much tighter, more specific, and more intriguing theirs is.

The good news is, you don’t have to despair for long. Repeat this process, and soon enough, the A-listers tricks and tactics and skills start to seep into your own head, and people start saving what you write as examples of intriguing and specific and tight copy.

And on that note, I will remind you of my ongoing offer for Copy Riddles Lite.

The full Copy Riddles program teaches you how to write sales bullets, using the no-fooling process I described above.

Copy Riddles Lite is a tiny slice of the full Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced.

Copy Riddles Lite gives you a taste of this process, and gives you an opportunity to try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace. That’s a valuable experience whether or not you choose to upgrade to the full Copy Riddles program.

I’m making Copy Riddles Lite available until tomorrow, Thursday, at 8:31pm CET. If you’d like to get it, it’s available here (no sales page, just an order form):

https://bejakovic.com/crl

Announcing: Copy Riddles Lite

by

Starting today, and ending this Thursday, I am offering something I’m calling Copy Riddles Lite.

Before I tell you the what of Copy Riddles Lite, let me tell you the why:

I realize that $997 — the price of Copy Riddles — is a big investment. Even if you have the money, it can be an obstacle. And if you don’t have the money, then it’s a real obstacle.

So my goal is twofold. First, to show you the Copy Riddles way, so you can experience it yourself, and see for yourself that Copy Riddles is a worthwhile investment, if you have any ambition of owning high-level copywriting skills.

Goal two is that Copy Riddles Lite is supremely valuable as a standalone training. If you cannot afford the full Copy Riddles course, or you can afford it but you decide for some unfathomable reason that you do not want it, then Copy Riddles Lite has value on its own, and much more than what I am charging.

Now we get to the what:

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in the full Copy Riddles program.

I specifically chose a round that comes early in the full Copy Riddles program, on a copywriting topic that most people know of… but very few do well.

The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what an A-list copywriter wrote starting with the same prompt.

In the first part of the round, I also give you my analysis of the fine points of how A-list copywriters do their magic.

In the second part, I show you this aspect of copywriting in real practice, in real live ads, headlines, body copy, emails, content.

Two more things inside Copy Riddles live:

The full Copy Riddles program also includes 3 bonus lessons. I included one of those bonus lessons in Copy Riddles Lite as well.

The full Copy Riddles program also includes references to some of the best places I’ve found for the A-list sales letters and the source material they were selling. I’ve included that in Copy Riddles Lite as well.

So if after going through Copy Riddles Lite, you don’t wanna pay me for the full Copy Riddles program, and you want to cobble it together yourself, you can.

I only want to sell you the full Copy Riddles if 1) you experience the value in Copy Riddles Lite and you want more and 2) you value your time and my expertise enough to pay me the remainder, rather than attempt to replicate it yourself.

And now for the price:

Copy Riddles Lite contains a little less than 10% of the total content of the full Copy Riddles program, so I’ve priced it at a little less than 10% of the total price.

You can get Copy Riddles Lite for $97 today, tomorrow, or on Thursday.

If you go through and decide you want the full Copy Riddles program, I also include a coupon code, good for a limited time, for the full value of Copy Riddles Live to apply to the full Copy Riddles program.

I’m launching this offer today on a whim. I will close it this Thursday, Feb 1, at 8:31pm CET.

​​I have no idea if I will ever open it again. I may or I may not. That’s not just a bluff. If you’ve been on my list a while, you’ll know I have had plenty of one-off offers, never to be repeated, for reasons of my own.

All that’s to say, if you’re interested, you can buy Copy Riddles Lite below. The link will take you to a bare order form, and no sales page. If that don’t deter you:

https://bejakovic.com/crl

Double up and triple up

by

As this email goes out, I will be hosting the training on how I do it, meaning how I write and profit from this newsletter.

I had to cut a lot of possible content from this training.

​​A bunch of worthwhile ideas didn’t make it because I wanted to keep the training tight. I wanted to share only the absolutely most core, valuable advice I would give myself five years ago at the time I was starting this newsletter.

But what about the rest of the content? What about the stuff that I had to cut out?

Let me tell you one idea I won’t talk about on the training, but which has been something valuable I do unconsciously, and should be something I do a lot more of consciously:

Everything you do should serve double or triple or quadruple purposes.

I think this is a good life philosophy in general. But since this newsletter focuses on marketing and making money via writing, let’s talk about that, with the example of this “How I do it” training:

1. I announced this training two weeks ago.

2. Since then, I’ve been collecting ideas to talk about on the actual training. I’ve also been collecting examples, case studies, illustrations to bring up on the training.

3. Some of those ideas and examples made it into my daily emails over the past 10 days.

4. On the other hand, some of the ideas from my daily emails over the past two weeks will go into this training, even though I hadn’t planned it initially.

5. Once it’s over, this training will be relevant and useful to me as a kind of business checklist, because it’s helped me crystalize my thoughts on many things I had been doing well without being aware of them, some I had been doing poorly while tolerating.

6. This training might become a lead magnet down the line. I might turn into text or keep it as is, give it away, in whole or in part.

7. Or perhaps I will turn this training into a paid product, or a bonus for some other offer. I’m sure to take ideas from it… or stories that I tell… or questions that come up… or the format itself, or even topics that I planned but didn’t end up including… and use those in the future in a different format.

That’s what I mean when I say double up or triple up the uses you get out of everything you do.

Emails become courses… and courses become books… and books become podcast appearances… and podcast appearances become emails… which in turn become live trainings, which become bonuses…

I think you get the idea.

I’ll leave you here for tonight. Because I gotta go. I still have lots to do before the training tonight.

In the meantime, if you want to see doubled-up or tripled-up content in action, check out my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

That book was motivated by an email I wrote in this newsletter… some of the content first appeared as emails… some of the book content was later repurposed to emails. And all of it has been driving high-quality readers to my list for the past three years. Like a reader joined my list a few days ago and wrote me to say:

===

I’m writing to tell you that I absolutely loved your book 10 Commandments Of A-List Copywriters.

I found it so captivating that I was hooked page after page and just couldn’t put it down without completing the entire book in one sitting.

And I came away wanting so much to be able to write like you. So much that I caught myself being even a little jealous (sorry!).

So I’ll go about incorporating the many ideas that I have learnt from your book.

===

To get this doubled-up, tripled-up book:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments​​