Copywriting

The questionable hazing of “The Temp”

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“Michael always says K.I.S.S. — keep it simple, stupid. Great advice. Hurts my feelings every time.”
— Dwight Schrute, Dunder Mifflin Inc.

There’s an episode of The Office where Dwight, the top salesman for the Scranton branch of the failing paper company Dunder Mifflin, takes out Ryan “The Temp” for his first sales call.

Except, they don’t go to straight to the sales call. Instead, Dwight takes Ryan to a beet farm for a kind of bizarre hazing ritual, involving a beet seed, a wheelchair, and a wrestling match with Dwight’s cousin Mose.

Not very useful.

And neither is the sales advice that Dwight gives to Ryan when the hazing is over:

“Ask a lot of questions that all have positive answers.”

Sure enough, Ryan takes this advice and bombs during the sales call. The clients even personally tell him they don’t like him. The only thing that’s left for the two Dunder Mifflin salesmen to do is to throw eggs at the client’s corporate headquarters and go get drunk. ​

So what’s a better alternative to asking yes-seeking questions such as “Couldn’t your company use a stronger, lighter, cheaper stock of paper?”

I can personally think of four different strategies, each of which would probably work better than the questionable yes-seeking sales advice that Ryan got.

I’ll go over each of these four approaches in separate posts over the next few days.

For now, just a quick public service announcement:

I’m almost finished with my “How to become a $150/hr, top-rated sales copywriter on Upwork” book. Once it’s done, it will go up on Amazon, and will even be available for free during a short promo period. If you want to get notified when this happens, head over to the page below and plant your beet seed over there:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

Dog runs half marathon by accident, finishes seventh

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Two years ago, a Canadian bloodhound by the name of Ludivine successfully completed a half marathon.

He was let out in the morning to pee. He saw a mass of runners about to start up. And he decided to join in.

Despite a lack of proper warmup and even with a couple of detours (one to investigate a dead rabbit, one to deal with a herd of cows), Ludivine managed to complete the race. In fact, he was at the top of the pack, and came in seventh. The organizers rewarded him with a finisher medal before his embarrassed owner came to pick him up.

So why am I bringing this up?

Because it’s funny and interesting. And if you are selling information products, then you’ve got to have novel ideas to pique readers’ interest. In other words, benefits alone won’t do it.

So for example, today I had my first paid webinar for my aromatherapy website.

Basically I went on YouTube and talked for an hour about how to use essential oils safely.

When I was promoting this event, I could have come out with benefits blazing: this webinar will teach you safe use, where to buy quality oils, how to dilute them to avoid skin reactions.

Instead, I wrote a bunch of bullets like the following:

What zebra stripes can teach you about diluting essential oils safely. An English mathematician cracked the code of how zebras get their stripes some 70 years ago. Surprisingly, this has a bearing on everyday essential oil safety that we’ll cover in Part I of the webinar.

Does this approach really work? Well, people signed up for the webinar, and in bigger numbers than I expected.

Would the same approach work for you? I’m not sure. But if you want to find out more about how I write these kind of copy — whether in the form of bullets or emails or blog posts — you might like my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. The book is not out yet, but if you want to get a free copy when I finish it, here’s where to go:

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

Why you should personally care about Michael Dell’s net worth

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I’ve been reading a bit about Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers.

Dell was quite a precocious kid.

For example, in a bid to get into business early, he applied to take the high school equivalency exam at age 8.

In his teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.

He then started a business selling upgrade kits for personal computers. In May 1984, he incorporated this business as “Dell Computer Corporation.”

In July of that same year, the company’s first financial statement showed a profit of $200,000. Dell used this statement to convince his parents it was ok for him to drop out of college. He was 19 at the time.

Over the years, Dell kept growing Dell Computers, getting it to the position of the largest manufacturer of PC’s in the world.

He also started MSD Capital (MSD being his initials), an investment firm to manage his own wealth.

As of today, after taking Dell (the company) private and then public again, Michael Dell’s net worth is estimated at $27 billion, $17 billion of which comes from his stake in Dell Computers and the rest from his other investments.

All of which raises the question, what have you been doing with your life?

After all, Michael Dell was just a kid from Houston, born to a solidly middle-class family. And look at what he’s done.

Seriously though, I hope all this talk of the hyper-competent Michael Dell has managed to depress you a bit.

After all, I wanted to illustrate an important point. It’s something I read in Maxwell Maltz’s self-help tome Psycho-Cybernetics. Says Dr. Maltz:

“An inferiority complex can be made to order. All you need to do is set up a norm or average, then convince your subject he does not measure up.”

And you know, once you’ve got somebody feeling inferior, you can then sell them your product as a cure for that lousy feeling they have.

You might think this is a terribly cynical way of doing marketing.

You might also decide it’s not for you.

And that’s a perfectly legit stance. On the other hand, you could take the attitude of Brian Kurtz, former VP at the direct marketing behemoth Boardroom. It’s something Brian calls “congruent marketing”:

“Think about how valuable the product or service you are selling is to your audience and how much you believe that getting it into as many hands as possible is a game changer for them… and that you have almost a moral responsibility on your part to get it to them.”

In this view, it can be ok to disturb, shock, or hype up people with your marketing, as long as what you’re selling is worth it to them. Speaking of which:

If you need help growing your business through some seemingly interesting, emotionally disturbing copy, you might find some good ideas inside of my upcoming book on email marketing. The book isn’t out yet — but if you sign up, you can get a free copy when I do finish it. Here’s where to do that:

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

Headline secrets of gay rodeo

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Last October, the World Gay Rodeo Finals happened in Mesquite, Texas.

​​This is the culmination of a season of rodeo events, specifically welcoming gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender participants.

I gotta say, I didn’t even know gay rodeo was a thing.

But I found out about it this morning, thanks to an article with the headline,

“The Unique World of Gay Rodeo”

I had to click on this thing and read more. The question is why.

After all, if the headline had read “The Unique World of Gay Gardening,” I doubt I would have clicked on it.

And if instead it had read, “The Unique World of Texas Rodeo,” I would have found something better to do with my time.

So what’s going on? Perhaps it’s best expressed by Wade Earp, a gay rodeo contestant with possibly the most cowboy name ever. Says Wade:

“It’s kind of like an oxymoron. Gay and ‘rough, tough cowboy’ doesn’t go together.”

The fact is, “gay rodeo” is a great illustration of the power of contrast, paradox, or oxymoron in headlines. But smart marketers have been on this for a while. Here are a few classic headlines using the same principle:

“How a Bald-Headed Barber Saved My Hair”

“The Amazing Secret of a One-Legged Golfer”

“Marketing Heresy from the World’s Greatest Copywriter”

All right, the last one isn’t a classic, it’s just something from my blog.

But you get the idea: Using a paradox is like sticking a branch between the spokes of a fast-moving bike. Except, instead of a bike, it’s your customer’s brain that’s racing across dozens or hundreds of different headlines and bits of information. The paradox jams their brain up, and it forces them to resolve the mystery before they can move on with their life.

Of course, as with all good headline templates, paradox is not something you want to do every day. But it’s surprisingly useful and versatile, and now that you’re aware of it, you’ll probably start seeing it all over the place.

Anyways, back to business. If you want some help getting started as a copywriter on Upwork, then pardner, you’re in luck. I’m wrapping up my guide on just that topic, and I’ll publish it soon.

If you wanna get notified when this steer’s out the gate (and on free promotion for a few days), simply click the link below, and sign up for my email newsletter:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

How to get readers to drool like fifth-grade schoolgirls with Bieberfever

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I follow tennis closely, and I spend a lot of time reading the latest news and gossip on the r/tennis subreddit.

Every time a grand slam starts up (like the Australian Open right now), one particular redditor pipes up.

His handle is -Rainman500.

And he always writes the same kind of fictional joke post (AKA “shitpost”). They always feature a cast of current tennis stars, with lots of cryptic references to recent tennis news, and they always end the same way: Rafael Nadal gets demolished/decimated/decapitated.

Now here’s why I bring this up.

Whenever Rainman does one of these posts, it shoots up to the top of this active subreddit, with hundreds of upvotes and dozens or hundreds of comments.

This happens in spite of the fact that the posts aren’t very funny. Or particularly valuable in any other way.

In fact, one other redditor complained that the community drools over Rainman like fifth-grade schoolgirls with Bieberfever.

So what gives?

Why is Rainman so popular?

And is there a lesson here to help you inspire Bieberfever in your audience?

There might just be.

And if you look at how I described Rainman’s posts, you’ll probably guess what I have in mind.

In case you don’t get it right away, here’s another example to help you out.

It’s from my current best friend, Joe Sugarman, who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling BluBlocker sunglasses.

Joe did pretty well before BluBlockers, too.

For example, he once sold some kind of physical spell checker with an ad in the Wall Street Journal (this was back in the 1980’s I believe).

There was a clever gimmick in this ad:


Joe purposefully misspelled some words in the copy. And when you put in your order, you could also add in a list of misspelled words you found. For each misspelled word you found correctly, you got 2 bucks off the spell checker.

The promotion was successful. The spell checkers sold well.

But more impressive was that Joe kept getting calls and letters from people who didn’t even want the stupid spell checker. They just wanted to make sure they had gotten all the misspelled words from the ad. Some of them had even spent hours poring over the ad over and over.

By now, I think it should be obvious why Rainman generates Bieberfever.

And like I said, this is something you can easily apply to your copy as well. If you want to see how, you’ll want to get a copy (free, if you sign up now) of my upcoming book on email marketing in the health space. And if you want, you can even use this book to confirm that you’ve identified Rainman’s secret correctly. Here’s the link to sign up for a free copy:

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

 

5 marketing lessons from the most boring writer who ever lived

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I advise you not to read this post.

It’s long, and it deals with a very boring topic. And that’s the poet Kenneth Goldsmith.

Goldsmith practices something called “uncreative writing.”

For example, he’s written a book called “Day.” This is a typed-out edition of the New York Times from September 1, 2000. “Day” is 836 pages long, and it took Goldsmith a year to type.

Goldsmith then wrote “Weather,” a transcript of a year’s worth of weather reports from a New York City local radio station.

After that, “Traffic” followed. And then “Sports.” You get the idea.

So is Goldsmith just a boring crank?

Maybe so.

But he’s definitely a successful, well-paid crank.

He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He read to Obama at the White House. He gets paid $500 for 30-minute readings of his works. And in 2013, he became the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art.

But who cares about all that?

Instead, it turns out there are a bunch of instructive parallels between what Goldsmith does and what marketers and copywriters should do. Let me tell you about the top 5:

#1 Format rules

Speaking of his book “Day,” Goldsmith wrote:

“When you take a newspaper and reframe it as a book, you get pathos and tragedy and stories of love.”

Very true, in poetry as in direct-response copy. That’s because changing the format of your sales message — a sales letter vs. a video vs. a book — tends to have a much bigger impact on conversions than changing your headline, your offer, or any other aspect of your copy.

#2 Repulsion marketing

Goldsmith calls himself “the most boring writer who ever lived.”

He honed his boring chops working as a disk jockey for a radio show called Unpopular Music. That’s where he learned that challenging someone not to listen (or read) makes the person pay closer attention. And then your content either drives them away, or drives them more closely towards you.

Nothing new, you might say. This is a well-honed positioning strategy in the marketing world as well — email marketing guru Ben Settle being one well-known proponent.

#3 Branding done right

Goldsmith makes a personal spectacle out of himself. He wears paisley-patterned suits, sometimes with a long flowing skirt over his pants. “Every time I’m in public, I’m a persona, and people really hate that.”

Mind you, this isn’t traditional branding.

But exaggerating his natural tastes makes Goldsmith noticeable and memorable, and it’s something anybody (including internet entrepreneurs) can use as well.

#4 Troll management

The article I read about Goldsmith was full of comments by detractors, who were complaining about various aspects of his work.

Meantime, Goldsmith was off somewhere, busily devising the agenda for his upcoming projects — which will no doubt draw more criticism and negative reactions.

And there’s more.

When he was widely condemned of misappropriating racially sensitive material (the autopsy report of Michael Brown) for one of his readings, Goldsmith responded with his own thoughts — but didn’t apologize.

What better way to deal with online trolls as well?

#5 Moving information

Goldsmith says about his work:

“Moving information is a literary act, in and of itself […] How I make my way through this thicket of information — how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize it and distribute it — is what distinguishes my writing from yours.”

Well, moving information is a sales act as well. In fact, Goldsmith’s attitude above echoes something copywriting genius Gene Schwartz said:

“Copy is not written. Copy is assembled.”

In essence, Gene was saying that sales copy is simply a collection of good sales arguments. And those sales arguments don’t come from introspection. Instead, they come from research, deep into your market. In other words, much of your copy can come straight from forum posts, Facebook comments, and testimonials written by your target audience.

And on that note, I’m signing off from today’s episode of Unpopular Copywriting.

If you want more unpopular ideas, sign up for my newsletter by using the page below. I’ll even send you a link to a free promo of my upcoming Upwork book (ETA 1 week):

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

 

Mystery PUA offers product marketing advice

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Once upon a time, “pick up artist” Mystery made a rather objectifying comment about women:

“Treat a six like a ten, and a ten like a six. You won’t go wrong.”

What does this have to do with copywriting?

Nothing probably.

Except it mirrors very closely the product marketing advice of direct response genius Joe Sugarman. Says Joe:

“A rule of thumb is to explain a complicated product in a very simple way and explain a simple product in a very complex way.”

For example:

When Joe was selling the first electronic blood pressure unit back in 1980, many people were still intimidated by computers. So Joe didn’t harp on the circuits inside or the assembly code that made this gadget work.

Instead, in a one-page ad, he devoted a total of 3 sentences to how the electronic beast works (wrap it around your arm, inflate it, listen for the beep).

No technical jiggery-pokery, no intimidation through jargon.

But sometimes, jargon is just what you want.

For example, a student of Joe Sugarman, named Frank Lewis, was selling grapefruit through direct mail.

Grapefruit. A pretty simple product.

So in a one-page ad, Lewis devoted five paragraphs to describing the unique features of his “Royal Ruby Reds” — everything from their color (“rich red”), taste (“natural sugar”), acid balance (“low”), juiciness (“high”), meatiness (also “high”), smoothness (can’t be “wind scarred”), and shape (can’t have a “sheep nose”).

​​He really sold this thing.​

Mystery would be proud.

Anyways, this advice can be directly applied in case you’re a freelance copywriter, offering your services on online platforms such as Upwork.

For example, it influences how you structure your description of the services you offer — and how you convince clients that you’re worth hiring.

I lay out all the details of this in my upcoming book on how to become a highly paid, top-rated sales copywriter on Upwork.

If you’d like to get notified when this book goes live on Amazon (and when there will be a short free promo period), sign up below:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

Honeymoons on Hog Island

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There’s a tense scene early on in the James Bond film Casino Royale.

Jimmy, dressed in khakis and a black button-down shirt, sits down at a high-stakes poker game.

He keeps winning. By the end of the night, he even wins himself the keys to the bad guy’s Aston Martin, and indirectly, to the bad guy’s sexy wife.

Exciting stuff.

And set in a beautiful location, on an unnamed tropical island.

The real-life location of this scene is a private island in the Bahamas, currently worth about $2 billion. The island features exclusive casinos and some of the world’s most expensive hotels (including the The Atlantis, which offers a room for $25,000 a night).

Merv Griffin owned the island at one point, and reality-TV star Donald Trump was a major investor. All of which begs the question:

What’s the name of this magical place?

Why, I’m surprised you don’t know it. It’s none other than…

Hog Island.

Ok, it’s officially Paradise Island now, since around 1959.

But it certainly was Hog Island originally, until big tourist development started up, and the then-owner decided it was time for a rebranding.

Come to Hog Island — your wife is already here

The point being that names matter.

It’s hard to imagine James Bond paying a trip to Hog Island, even if it were packed with dangerous women and beautiful cars. It’s equally unlikely that even with the fanciest hotels and most romantic beaches, Hog Island would ever seem like an acceptable destination for a honeymoon.

But here’s something else to notice:

“Paradise Island” isn’t a terribly creative name. Yes, it’s good enough to sell an island in the Bahamas. But it wouldn’t do much to promote a rocky, rainy, wind-swept isle off the coast of Scotland.

All of which, I think, has some practical applications.

For example, if you are starting out as a freelancer on Upwork, you may be tempted to spend a lot of time on your profile page. Which title should you give yourself? What should you say in the description?

Sure, those things matter, just like the name “Paradise Island” matters. But they are only one part of the total picture of Upwork success and they won’t win you jobs by themselves.

So what to do?

I’ve got lots of advice on the “positioning” part of getting on Upwork. But I can also tell you about the entire process of becoming a $150/hr freelance copywriter. In fact, I’m putting together an entire book on the topic right now.

It will be out in another couple of weeks. And then I will put it up on Amazon.

If you want to sign up to get notified when it’s out, mix yourself up a Vesper martini, unholster your Beretta, and take aim at the deadly link below:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

How not to disappoint “The Agent”

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It’s hard catering to international spies.

For example, back in the early days of my freelancing career, when I was a barely hatched duckling fresh out of the freelancing egg, I got a job writing for a woman who called herself “The Agent.”

She was basically a personal assistant, but she aimed to cater to high-powered businessmen, so she positioned herself with a bit of 007 mystique.

Need connections to Fortune 500 CFOs and CEOs? Or a party on a chartered plane flying around the world? Or a seat in a VIP box at the Monaco Grand Prix?

No problem. Talk to The Agent, and she’ll take care of you.

Anyways, The Agent hired me to write a sequence of emails, telling her story and explaining her unconventional services to a list of potential clients.

So I interviewed her.

Looked over her website.

Made an avatar of her ideal customer.

And then I wrote a series of emails in the Andre Chaperon SOS style, really selling her as a female James Bond who gets problems solved, doors opened, and connections made.

I honestly thought I did a good job.

Until I delivered the copy.

The Agent didn’t have any specific complaints. But she thought the emails weren’t really what she was looking for. And honestly, I can’t blame her.

Not because i didn’t do a good job.

But because I failed to do something important.

Something that’s become a pillar of the way I deal with clients these days.

And also something that almost guarantees that clients always wind up happy with the copy I write.

I’m talking about setting expectations. Expectations of what the copy will look like. How long it will take the client to get it. What kinds of results they can expect from it.

I make sure all these things are perfectly clear to a potential client before I choose to accept the dangerous mission of writing copy for them.

The thing is, this is just one part of a 4-step process for making sure clients get what they want. And important as it is, it’s not even the most important of these 4 steps.

For the remaining 3 pillars of continuing client satisfaction, you might want to look inside my upcoming book. It deals with becoming a successful sales copywriter on Upwork.

I’ll be launching it soon on Amazon. And if you want to get notified when it’s out (and when it will be on free promotion, for a short while), then sign up below:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

Parris’s big thing

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Yesterday, I mentioned a big and important principle that A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos uses to guide him in his work. In Parris’s own words, that principle is:

“What do I need to do to weight the odds so heavily in my favor that I know before I’ve even run the ad that it won?”

“Thanks, Parris,” you might say. “If I knew how to weight the odds in my favor and write a killer ad, I would simply do it! I wouldn’t need this stupid principle.”

Easy, friend.

This principle is very valuable.

And its value will become clear once you see it in action.

You see, in the same interview where he revealed this principle, Parris also told a story illustrating how he uses it in practice. Namely:

One time, he was trying to beat a control for a book on tax loopholes. The control made a giant promise as the headline: “Pay no taxes in 1997.” It was written by some unspecified brilliant copywriter, and it was running successfully for many years. Trying to beat it seemed like a suicide mission.

So what to do? Parris started digging through the research.

It turned out that, on average, readers of this book saved $10,731 on their taxes. So he came up with a new headline,

“How to Save $10,731 on Your Taxes Next Year”

This new headline was more specific than the original. People like specifics, sometimes even more than big promises. So does this mean this angle would perform better than the control?

Possibly.

Possibly not.

In other words, it wasn’t a sure shot. Which means that Parris’s big and important principle still wasn’t satisfied.

So Parris kept digging and digging into the research, until he found a second interesting tip: The IRS allows amended tax returns. In a nutshell, you could go back and change your previous year’s tax return with updated data.

Interesting.

Especially when combined with the first, specific numbers. Because now he had the new headline/subhead:

“Bombshell from top tax attorney: The IRS owes you $10,731. Here’s how to get it in as little as 60 days”

That’s a pretty intriguing statement, and those are some heavily weighted odds. And sure enough, Parris used this one-two punch to beat the long-running control.

Fortunately, most of us don’t have to go up against the world’s best copywriters and their long-running controls.

For example, I work with a lot of clients on Upwork. Most of them simply need well-written copy, delivered on time.

The thing is, many copywriters on Upwork can’t even do this. Which means that there’s a good opportunity for anyone who wants to jump in and start offering sales copy as a service on Upwork.

If you want a guide for how to do this, you’re in luck. I’m putting one together right now, and I will publish it on Amazon soon. It will even be on free promo for a few days after it goes live. To get notified when this happens, you can sign up below:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/