Copywriting

Sympathy for the Crocodile Hunter

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I didn’t know this until yesterday, but February 22 was Steve Irwin’s birthday.

As you may know, Steve was “The Crocodile Hunter,” who went on TV to face all kinds of exotic and dangerous animals, for all the world to see.

His daredevil lifestyle eventually caught up with him, and he died in 2006 after being stung in the heart by a stingray.

Anyways, I never watched The Crocodile Hunter on TV, and I never knew when Steve Irwin’s birthday is.

But I sure found out yesterday, thanks to an inflammatory tweet by the animal rights group PETA:

“Steve Irwin’s actions were not on target with his supposed message of protecting wildlife. A real wildlife expert & someone who respects animals for the individuals they are and leaves them to their own business in their natural homes.”

Now, this PETA tweet started quite a firestorm.

Thousands of people felt they needed to come out and make their voices heard on this matter.

The gist of most responses was, Steve Irwin was a beloved guy who did tons of good and loved animals and helped educate people.

All of which might be true – though a quick romp through Wikipedia shows that while Irwin was alive, he also faced similar accusations of disturbing wildlife.

But I’m neither here to shit on the memory of Steve Irwin, nor to write a hagiography of the guy.

I simply want to point out how many people felt the need to come to his defense.

The question is why.

Probably lots of different reasons.

But at least one good explanation is something known as the “halo effect.”

That’s a well-studied human cognitive bias — or you can call it a heuristic.

In effect, the halo effect is the reason why well-behaved students get graded more favorably… why good-looking people tend to get paid more for the same job… and why dead TV personalities get made into saints.

In short, our brains take one thing we know well (“I loved watching Steve Irwin’s show as a kid”) and we transfer that to a whole bunch of stuff we don’t know (“Steve Irwin did more for the protection and conservation of animals than PETA ever will, you sick cunts”).

This halo effect seems to be an almost unavoidable part of human nature.

Which is why it makes sense to keep it in mind when you’re planning out your marketing campaigns, or when you’re positioning new products on the market. In the words of Steve Irwin himself:

“Crocodiles are easy. They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.”

Quite cynical, Steve. But true. And with that, let me get to the pitch:

If you want ideas on how to write emails that your make your prospects feel like you are a friend first before you go for the jugular, you might like my upcoming book.

You can find out more about it and even sign up for a free copy (when it comes out) by going to the following page:

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

Nobel Prize winner identifies the cheapest kind of proof

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Here’s a story from Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman talks about a time he moved to a new state.

He had to get a new driver’s license, which meant he had to pass a driver’s license exam.

He didn’t study very hard for the exam. Instead, he scanned through the booklet of rules once and hoped for the best.

When the test came, he knew some of the answers from his experience driving.

But there were questions where he didn’t know the answer. And so he did what most of us would do — he just looked over the available answers, and picked the one that seemed familiar.

In other words, just because an answer seemed familiar, his brain had a suspicion it must also be true.

Now, here’s why this might matter to you:

If you do any kind of sales — in person or in print — you know the importance of following up with your prospect multiple times.

Each time you follow up with a prospect, good things are going on:

You build more of a relationship. You have a chance to answer more objections. You can build more vision. You might even get unusually lucky — and get to the prospect at a time when he is flush with money or ready to buy.

So all of these are good reasons to consistently follow up with promising prospects.

But something else is going on as well. Something very fundamental in the way our brain works.

In fact, it’s one of the topics that Kahneman himself studied and won the Nobel prize for. In Kahneman’s words:

“Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias belief. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

In other words, familiarity, born out of repetition, is a kind of proof in itself.

It’s a particularly cheap kind of proof, because anybody can do it — it doesn’t require anything except persistence.

And while it can work for getting people to believe in falsehoods, it works even better when you have a legitimately good offer — and other forms of proof as well.

Which, in a nutshell, is why it makes sense to follow up with your prospects regularly — for example, by sending them daily emails.

If you have a good offer… And you keep presenting that offer in interesting and credible ways to your prospects… Day in and day out…

Then eventually, most of your real prospects will get convinced, and will wind up buying from you.

Of course, there’s the issue of actually writing interesting and credible emails. If that’s not your strong suit and you want some help, you might like my upcoming book. And you can even get a free copy when it comes out. For more info, check out the following page:

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

Why I’m not qualified to work in the most elite copywriting shop in the world

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During the past week, I was agonizing over a career decision.

Specifically, I was considering whether to apply for a job at Stansberry Research.

If you know direct marketing, you might have heard of Stansberry. They ran the “End of America” campaign a few years back. This was one of the most successful direct marketing campaigns of all time, responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

The point being, Stansberry Research is an elite place for copywriters.

So when I saw that they are hiring, I got a pain in my side and a bug in my head.

Should I apply?

On the one hand, I don’t want a proper job.

On the other, this would be an opportunity to perfect my copywriting skills at the very highest level.

So what to do?

In the end, I didn’t apply — because it turned out I am not qualified. They are only hiring experienced financial copywriters, and I’ve written very little in the financial sphere.

But that’s really not the biggest issue. Because, had I wanted to, I could have written samples of financial copy, specifically as a way to angle for this job.

What got me instead was an interview I saw with top copywriter and marketer Justin Goff. Justin doesn’t do financial copy, but from what I can tell, he sells to a similar audience that Stansberry Research sells to.

And that’s where the problem lies.

Because in this interview, Justin was going over the psychological triggers that motivate this audience.

Things like anger… resentment… fear… suspicion… closed-mindedness… a sense of moral superiority…

In short, these are not people I would want to spend my time around in real life.

And in the same way, I would not want to spend my whole day, every day, researching and writing to this audience. I’m afraid their bad karma would rub off on me.

Maybe it’s crazy.

Or maybe it’s just my brain coming up with excuses, because I like the freelancing life and I don’t really want an office job ever again.

Whatever the reason, the conclusion is I won’t be applying to Stansberry Research now or in the foreseeable future.

And I will continue to focus on the health space. Speaking of which, if you want my insights about email marketing in the health space (including lessons from an email campaign for an 8-figure supplement company that tripled sales for a specific funnel), you might like my upcoming book:

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

I survived a copy critique from Parris Lampropoulos

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A few weeks ago, I got a shot at a copy critique from one of the most successful copywriters active today, the great and reclusive Parris Lampropoulos.

Now, Parris can apparently be brutal in his copy critiques.

Plus, the critiques he was offering would be done in front of an audience of several hundred people.

And it would all be recorded.

So I was a little nervous about submitting anything.

At the same time, it was a fantastic opportunity. After all, Parris has written dozens of million-dollar marketing campaigns, and here was an opportunity to get personalized feedback from the guy.

So I gritted my teeth, picked out a sales letter I had written last year, and submitted it.

This sales letter was for RightBiotics, a probiotic supplement sold by RealDose Nutrition.

Anyways, when the the big day came, Parris critiqued several other people’s copy before he got to mine.

And all throughout, he was encouraging and fair — even though he told a few people to burn what they had and start over.

Finally, it was my turn.

“The body copy is good,” Parris said. But there was a serious problem, which Parris pointed out with a question:

“John, are you the first person ever on the face of the planet to sell a probiotic supplement?”

(I am not.)

“So why would you come out and tip off you’re selling something?”

And it’s true. In my headline, I announced a “clinically proven new probiotic that does XYZ.” Regardless of how this letter was formatted — even if it looked like an article — the reader would know immediately I was selling something.

Doing this might be acceptable when you’re selling something incredibly unique…

Or when you’ve already got a good relationship with the reader.

But for cold traffic, Parris said, this simply wasn’t good enough.

And with that, the critique was over.

I was still alive.

And I even had a clear plan of action. That’s because Parris gave me a simple — though not necessarily easy — way to fix this sales letter.

I’ll talk more about this over the coming days, as I implement Parris’s critique.

For now, remember Parris’s advice about tipping off the reader. It applies if you’re ever running ads and trying to sell something to people who don’t know you.

On the other hand, if you’re not trying to make sales to cold traffic, you might consider sending them daily emails to build a relationship first.

And if you want some advice on how to do this well, you might like my upcoming book. It talks about several successful email campaigns I’ve written — including one for RealDose Nutrition, which tripled sales for a specific funnel.

What’s more, you can get a free copy of this book when I finish it (in the next month or two). To sign up, here’s where to go:

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

Lethal Webinar 2

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The camera zooms in through a window of a high-rise apartment and onto the bed.

On the bed, there’s a topless blonde woman. She’s wearing white stockings and a negligee, and writhing in drug-fueled lust.

The next thing you know, she gets up.

She stumbles over to the balcony.

She climbs onto the railing.

And then she takes a dive, falling some 30 floors down, onto the roof of a parked car.

So begins the original Lethal Weapon movie.

I bring this up because Gene Schwartz, one of the greatest copywriters of all time, called this movie “the greatest training for any merchandiser in the world, especially copy people.”

He advised copywriters to see it at least three times, preferably in the same day.

Why? What could possibly be so great about Lethal Weapon?

In Gene’s own words:

“You’ve got to pick up the rhythm, and you’ve got to see how Silver, who is an absolute genius — Spielberg and Silver are the two communication geniuses of our country at this moment — every timing, every three minutes he throws another blast at you. There’s another head being smashed against a windshield. There’s another fifty people being blown out of an airplane. And then there’s a few minutes of dialogue which means nothing.”

This is the same structure that Gene advised for sales letters as well.

Explosion… Fight… 3 minutes of conversation… Another explosion…

Headline… Cautionary tale… 3 sentences of explanation… Another shocking story…

You might think this structure is just for hyped-up sales copy.

I don’t agree.

At a fundamental level, this is how humans prefer to communicate, or at least how they prefer to consume information.

This same structure works for everything from hard-core sales letters to technical webinars.

Of course, you have to adapt to your market.

For example, if you are in fact doing a technical webinar (as a friend of mine might be doing soon), you wouldn’t start with a coked-up topless hooker jumping to her death.

But you would want to shock and startle your audience a bit — in the appropriate dose. So you could start off the webinar with a dramatic case study, or a cautionary tale from one of your existing customers.

The key is to shake up and disturb your audience a bit, before you get to the more reasoned, serious, and boring content.

At least that’s my opinion.

Of course, technical webinars are not my forte. However, sales emails are. And if you want sales emails that shake up and disturb your audience, then Riggs, here’s what to do:

Click on the link below. And see whether you want to sign up for a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing, specifically for the health space. Here’s where to point your lethal weapon:

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

Stinkbug surprise

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Last autumn was the first time it happened.

Stinkbugs, invading my apartment. Flying around aimlessly. Bumping into lamps and walls.

Fortunately, stinkbugs are easy to scoop up and dispose of. As a girl I used to know would say, “They have no instinct for life.”

As stinkbugs kept appearing in my living room, I started to wonder, how can such a stupid creature be taking over the world?

It turns out stinkbugs are not always this slow and useless.

They only come inside homes when the weather turns cold. They then enter a state known as diapause, a kind of insect hibernation.

I found out about this from an article titled “Home Invasion,” written by Katharine Schulz, a Pulitzer-prize winning author.

But don’t worry. I’m not here to talk about stinkbugs. Instead, I want to talk about an interesting writing technique that Schulz used in her article.

While talking about the diapause, Schulz writes:

“It is also thanks to diapause that stinkbugs, indoors, seem inordinately graceless and impossibly dumb. But, as we all know, being graceless and dumb is no obstacle to being powerful and horrifying.”

Did you catch it?

There in the second sentence. That unresolved allusion to something “graceless and dumb.”

For reference, this article is from 2018 and was published in the New Yorker, a left-leaning magazine.

When I read the above passage, a wave of pleasant surprise passed over me.

Not because I am outraged over “graceless and dumb” creatures being horrifyingly powerful.

Instead, I was just satisfied at having solved a little puzzle. After all, Schulz didn’t spell it out who or what she was talking about.

This little puzzle spiced up the article for me. It certainly seems to be a good tactic for Pulitzer-winning New Yorker writers.

But should you ever use unresolved verbal puzzles in sales copy?

It seems crazy.

After all, you want sales copy to be as transparent and easy-to-read as possible. As copywriting coach David Garfinkel likes to say, “Either you work and get paid, or your reader works and gets paid” (ie. he keeps his money and doesn’t buy what you’re selling).

And yet, there might be occasions when posing a little intellectual challenge for your readers can work in copy.

Here’s what Joe Sugarman, who ran and wrote copy for a 9-figure mail-order business, has to say on the topic:

“If you make your copy too obvious, the reader feels either looked down on or bored. Provide a little suspense so that the reader has to come to a conclusion on her own using intuition, thought, sensation, and emotion, and you’ve got a very good force working for you.”

And sure enough, old Joe used to pepper in such bits of “mental engagement” in many of his wildly successful ads.

Something for you too to consider.

Of course, there are places in copy where you never want to leave the reader thinking or scratching his head. Such as, for example, that call to action.

That’s why, in case you are looking to make your sales emails stink less, here’s exactly what todo:

Head on down to the page below. And then make a decision whether you want to opt in with your email. If you do opt in, I’ll send you a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing — once I finish it in the next couple of months. Here’s the link:

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

Five words to get to the heart of why people don’t buy

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A true story about objections:

A chemical supplies salesman goes into a client’s office. The client used to have a big account with the salesman’s company, but about a year ago, he mysteriously withdrew his business.

“Why?” the salesman asks timidly.

“We decided to give your competitors a shot,” says the client. “They’ve proved to be perfectly satisfactory, so we will stick with them.”

Hmm.

What to say?

Well, one option is to take a page out Frank Bettger’s book How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success In Selling.

Back in the 1920’s, Bettger was a pro baseball player. He then got injured and started selling life insurance.

Very unsuccessfully, at first.

Eventually though, he became quite the salesman. In time, he even teamed up with Dale Carnegie on the self-help lecture circuit, and wrote the “How I Raised Myself” book after Carnegie encouraged him.

That book, although it’s not well-known today, had quite the following once.

Gary Bencivenga, widely believed to be the greatest copywriter of all time, and Marty Edelston, the founder of the direct response behemoth Boardroom/Bottom Line, both credit it for their massive success.

Anyways, one thing Bettger says in the book is he kept a list of reasons why people didn’t buy.

He tallied them all up, across some 5,000 sales interviews.

What he found is that around 60% of the time, the initial, logical objection that people gave for not buying was not the real reason.

Bettger advised first asking “Why?” to get this first reason.

He’d listen.

And then, he’d say, “In addition to that, is there any other reason you might have for not buying?”

In total, those five words — “Why” and “In addition to that” — were usually enough to draw out the real objection.

They worked in the case of the chemical supplies salesman above. (It turned out the client was angry that a special discount had been discontinued without notice.)

All of which is great if you can talk to your prospects.

This is something you do in direct sales. You might even be able to do with copywriting, if you can find prospects to interview.

Unfortunately though, it’s not always possible.

So how do you get at those hidden reasons when all you have is a customer avatar?

Well, you need workarounds.

I have my own — basically how I do research.

I’ll talk about this in more detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. If you want to raise your emails from failure to success in selling, you might be interested in grabbing a free copy of this book when it’s out. Here’s how to do that:

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

Ginsu knives in corporate boardrooms

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“In Japan, the hand can be used as a knife. But this method doesn’t work with a tomato…”

— Original Ginsu knife commercial, cca. 1980

In copywriting, there’s something called the “false close.”

A perfect example of this is from the famous Ginsu knife TV commercial.

After showing you how the Ginsu cuts paper-thin slices of bread, how it’s sharp enough to saw through a tin can, and how it can even be used to chop wood, the narrator asks:

“How much would you pay for a knife like this?”

That’s the setup for the false close. You might expect that the pitch is coming soon. Instead, the narrator continues:

“Before you answer, listen…”

And then he tells you about all the incedible bonuses you get if you order your Ginsu knife right now.

A matching carving fork. A versatile 6-in-1 kitchen tool. A set of 6 precision steak knives. And a spiral potato slicer.

It’s only then, once you’ve been wowed with the craziness of the entire offer, do you get to hear the price. In other words, that’s when you finally get to the real close.

So should you use a false close in your selling?

It certainly seems so.

Not only does it work for TV commercials, but you can find examples of false closes in copy from some of the world’s best copywriters, including Mark Ford and Parris Lampropoulos.

And yet, other persuasion experts strongly warn against the false close.

For example, Jim Camp.

Camp was a master negotiator, who coached corporate executives in billion-dollar deals.

According to Camp, if you ever try a false close, you’ll get kicked out of the boardroom. At best, you’ll blow the deal and you won’t be invited back.

So how to square this with the Ginsu knife commercial?

It’s simply a matter of knowing your audience and your medium.

Yes, there are fundamentals of persuasion that work in just about any situation.

But convincing people to buy a $9.99 set of precision steak knives is going to take a different approach to closing a complex, year-long, corporate sale.

This might seem obvious.

But this basic principle — know what works for your audience — is violated a lot. Particularly when people try to Frankenstein copy from one market to another.

Anyways, this is one reason why it makes sense to specialize.

And that’s why, while I do write for different markets, I’m specializing more and more in writing health copy.

And if you want some of the best insights I’ve gained about writing for the health market (including writing winning sales emails for an 8-figure supplement business), you might like my upcoming book. For more info or to sign up for a free copy:

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

The email that broke the camel’s back

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A while back, I subscribed to the Farnam Street email newsletter.

I’d seen a headline in the New York Times about Shane Parrish, the guy who writes Farnam Street. The headline read:

“How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter”

Interesting.

So I subscribed, without knowing too much about what the content I would be getting.

The first email arrived with a ton of links to important, helpful articles on the Farnam Street blog. I scanned through, but I didn’t read anything.

A second email hit me a few days later, with more helpful content.

Then a third.

And a fourth.

There was nothing wrong with any of these emails. And the content was apparently good — after all, Shane Parrish got a feature written about him in the New York Times.

But none of it clicked with me. It was too earnest, too virtuous, too positive.

Finally, I got an email with the headline “Introducing your new favorite holiday tradition” (it was around Christmastime).

I opened it up. It was about a “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” to exchange books and then spend the evening reading them together with friends and family.

That’s when I unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no beef with Farnam Street or their email newsletter. I personally didn’t find the content interesting. On the other hand, a lot of other people obviously get a lot out of the same emails that I unsubscribed from.

I only bring up my experience with Farnam Street emails to illustrate a point:

It wasn’t that last email that made me unsubscribe.

That was just the straw, or the email, that broke the camel’s back.

All the previous emails had already primed me to open up the “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” email and say to myself, “Oh, hell no.”

This is something to remember in case you do a lot of email marketing.

It’s very hard to assign blame (or praise) to an individual email.

Odds are, it’s the entire email sequence that’s driving readers away — or winning them over.

Of course, there are things (unvirtuous and unearnest things) you can do to stack things in your favor early on in the relationship, while you still have your reader’s attention and good will.

If you’d like to find out what some of those unvirtuous ways are, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info or to sign up to get a free copy (once it’s out), here’s where to go:

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

 

How to harness the reverse testimonial

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In his Adweek copywriting book, marketing genius Joe Sugarman described an interesting technique.

He called it the “reverse testimonial.”

Let me illustrate it by talking about myself. Or more specifically, about my persona on my aromatherapy website, Unusual Health.

You see, in the aromatherapy world, the man at the top of the pile is a guy called Robert Tisserand.

​Robert is extremely knowledgeable about essential oils.

​​For several decades, he’s lectured around the world about the science behind EOs and about how to use them safely.

​​He’s co-authored a massive book on the topic, filled with literally thousands of scientific citations. He has a huge following online, and he’s routinely considered to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, expert on essential oils.

So how does this apply to me?

Well, several people have recently asked me what my qualifications are to write about essential oils.

So I wrote an email to my aromatherapy list to answer exactly this question. And I started by talking about Robert Tisserand, and how great he is.

I then said how I don’t claim to be an essential oil expert, and how I never expect to have the kind of EO knowledge that Robert has. But then comes the twist, where I explain why this is actually a good thing for my readers.

You’ll have to be on my aromatherapy list to know exactly how I pull this off.

But how I pull off the twist is not the point. The point is that I used Robert Tisserand and his status as “one of the world’s leading experts in aromatherapy” to work for me.

That, in a nutshell, is Joe Sugarman’s reverse testimonial.

You start off by talking about the unbeatable advantages a competitor has over you — including testimonials and social proof — and then you turn that around to actually work in your favor.

Anyways, this might work for you as well, if you are not yet the man at the top of the pile in your market.

By the way, if you need help with sales emails, you might like my upcoming book on the topic. It distills what I’ve learned by writing for clients in the health space (and for my own aromatherapy list).

For more info, or to sign up for a free copy, here’s where to go:

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