Copywriting

I get bullied on Facebook, woman comes to my rescue

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About a week ago, a woman named Alexis came to my defense on Facebook.

The back story is that a growing number of people had started calling me out as a scammer.

I had been running an ad to promote The Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams, a free lead magnet for Unusual Health, my aromatherapy mailing list.

The ad was running successfully for a long while.

But eventually, people started accusing me (yes, me!) of being the scam. They said I was trying to charge $10 for The Little Black Book, which I claimed to be giving away for free.

The real issue was that I had a “thank you” page after people opted in for the free lead magnet.

At the top of the page, I had instructions (in regular font) that explained the ebook will be sent by email.

Below that, I gradually worked my way into a sales letter (including a proper, large headline) for another aromatherapy book I am selling, Essential Oil Quick Start Guide.

Now last Friday, I was on a webinar offered by copywriting legend Parris Lampropoulos.

And Parris explained exactly why I was getting bullied and called out as a scammer (and no, he wasn’t talking about me specifically).

Said Parris, people’s eyes are drawn to large text on the page. That’s why he’s against using pre-heads (text before the headline) if they have any kind of critical message. People simply won’t read them.

And that’s what was happening with my thank-you page — the pre-head was effectively the download instructions, and many people weren’t reading them.

Easy enough to solve.

I kept the exact same message, but upped the font of the first sentence of the download instructions to make it clear that is something people should read.

Voila.

The complaints stopped immediately.

And several people, including Alexis, even came to my defense against the angry mob, saying how people should read the instructions and how I’m not trying to scam anyone.

So the lesson is to avoid pre-heads.

And more broadly, it’s to realize how design and overall marketing can completely dominate the copywriting message you might have.

This is something I’ll talk about in more detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info on this book, or to get a free copy when it’s out, here’s where to go:

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

How to abuse your customers into buying from you

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There’s a lot you can learn from chick flicks.

Take for example, the evergreen romantic comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary. It’s about a 30-something single woman, a bit fat, a bit messy, not too successful.

Throughout the movie, Bridget is searching for a nice, sensible boyfriend to go out with. She eventually succeeds — by not becoming bitter, by putting herself out there, by picking herself up when she’s down. At least that’s the surface script.

But there’s an underlying script as well.

After all, the guy that Bridget winds up with — Mark Darcy — starts off by cruelly and unironically insulting her:

“I do not need a blind date, particularly not with some verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother.”

Ouch.

Mark keeps this up for much of the movie.

Of course, it turns out he’s not such a bad guy after all. This makes it ok that Bridget winds up with him before the credits roll.

It gets better —  we hope

And that’s the underlying script.

It seems to say, even when somebody verbally or emotionally abuses you, there’s hope that they might actually like you.

I think many people subconsciously hope for this in real life as well. And that’s why abuse can help you make sales — as long as you keep it subtle and ethical.

As an example of this, take Joe Karbo’s famous ad, The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.

I’ve been talking about it for the past few days.

In one part of this ad, Joe says something like, “I will ask you to send me ten dollars for something that won’t cost me 50 cents.”

That’s borderline insulting.

And then he twists it further by calling you a “darned fool” if you don’t take him up on his offer.

At this point, you might be ready to boil over with indignation.

So Joe stops the abuse. He tells you how his offer is so valuable that you shouldn’t care if he is making a profit, because you’ll make a lot more.

This abuse-then-soothe pattern is something you can use on different levels.

At the sales argument level, like Joe did. Or to structure an entire sales letter. Or even across different sales messages — for example, within email campaigns.

Speaking of which, if you want info on how to structure email campaigns, you’ll want to read my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.

You’d be a darned fool not to do it.

After all, I’ve written successful sales emails for some very big businesses, and I’ll be sharing my insights within this book — which you can get for free, if you sign up now. More info here:

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

How to overcome being nervous, with Neil Strauss AKA Style

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I once listened to an unusual Mixergy interview.

Andrew Warner, the guy who runs Mixergy, typically interviews successful entrepreneurs for his show.

This time however, his guest was Neil Strauss.

AKA Style.

AKA the guy who wrote The Game, the book that exposed the underground pick up community and made it a mainstream phenomenon.

The strange thing was that Andrew, who had probably interviewed hundreds of people up to then, was nervous during this interview with Neil.

Neil, who is a very experienced interviewer himself on top of being a high-performing pick up artist, had this advice for Andrew:

“If you’re ever feeling nervous, call it out.”

Neil was saying that, in business as well as socially, you always want to beat someone to their objection.

If you raise the objection before it occurs to your adversary, then the objection loses its force.

This relates to what I was talking about yesterday. It was about Joe Karbo’s price argument in his famous ad “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.” Joe wrote something like:

“I’m going to ask you to send me 10 dollars for something that’ll cost me no more than 50 cents. And I’ll try to make it so irresistible that you’d be a darned fool not to do it. After all, why should you care if I make $9.50 profit if I can show you how to make a lot more?”

That first bit, about the 50 cents, serves multiple purposes.

One of them is to raise a possible objection.

Try to imagine the ad without it:

You tell the prospect how you’ll ask him to send you $10, and that he’ll be a darned fool not to do it, because this information is worth way more than $10.

Maybe the guy will buy it. But maybe he’ll also say,

“Sounds good, but why $10 exactly? And how much are you making off this? It sounds fishy.”

So that first sentence, about the 50 cents, makes a small but significant difference — it diffuses the objection before it arises in the prospect’s mind.

And this isn’t the only reason to use this argument.

It’s not even the main reason, in my opinion.

I’ll talk about why tomorrow.

For now, if you want more copywriting advice, you might like my upcoming book. It deals with email marketing for the health space, including writing the actual copy. You can find out more about it here:

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

The lazy man’s way to addressing price concerns

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Have you ever heard of the 1970’s version of Tim Ferris?

His name was Joe Karbo.

Like Tim, Joe started with a successful direct response business.

And like Tim, Joe then wrote a book teaching a mass audience how they too could use modern marketing techniques to get rich.

It sounds a lot like Tim’s “4-hour Workweek.” Except, Joe’s version came out about 40 years earlier, and had an even better title:

“The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches”

Joe sold this book through a full-page, all-text ad he ran in mainstream magazines. The ad is worth tracking down because it’s full of good lessons. The one I want to focus on today is how it addressed the price of Joe’s book.

Very soon into the ad, Joe announced that he will be selling something (without saying what). And he immediately said it will cost $10 (about $60 in today’s money).

What’s more, he freely admitted that it won’t cost him more than 50 cents to make this thing. And then came the kicker. In Joe’s own words:

“And I’ll try to make it so irresistible that you’d be a darned fool not to do it. After all, why should you care if I make $9.50 profit if I can show you how to make a lot more?”

Obviously, Joe was successful. He managed to sell 3 million copies of his book using this approach.

​So what’s going on behind the scenes of this sales argument?

I think there are two crucial parts to it.

One is the provocation (“It won’t cost me 5% of what I’ll charge you, and yet you’ll pay”).

The other is the chance to lay out the benefits (“You get something more valuable than the price because XYZ”).

Now I see a lot of marketers today using just the second, benefits part of this sales argument. They ignore the first, provocation part.

I think that’s a mistake for two reasons. I’ll talk about each of these two reasons in more detail in upcoming emails.

For now, if you need a lazy man’s way to get your sales emails to actually make money, you might like my upcoming book. It deals with email marketing for the health space, and it covers how I’ve written emails that actually tripled sales for big direct response companies.

For more info about this book,  check out the ad on the following page:

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

The yellow balloon sales principle

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I saw a tense dog-man standoff at a park near my house.

The dog, a German boxer, was on top of a little hill. The man, the dog’s owner, was at the bottom of the hill, calling to the dog to come down.

The dog stared and didn’t move. The man called again. The dog continued to stare.

Eventually, the man started to walk away. The dog still kept his spot on top of the hill, and didn’t budge.

And then, as the man was walking away, he slowly took out a bright yellow object from his pocket. The dog started charging full speed down the hill. The man put the yellow object to his lips and started to blow. (It turned out to be a balloon.)

The dog was there in a second, bouncing up and down as the man held the balloon just above the height that the dog could reach.

Now for the past few days, I’ve been writing about alternatives to asking yes-seeking questions. So far, I talked about vision-building questions and no-seeking questions — both of them based on what negotiation expert Jim Camp used to teach.

Well, today I have something out of the playbook of email marketing guru Ben Settle. In fact, it’s something I’ve talked about in this blog already. It’s what I called Ben’s “sink-or-swim” close. That’s when you tell your prospect something like:

“If you don’t believe this technology/service/information can help you be more competitive, then simply don’t buy it.”

And then you wait and allow them to make a decision.

Of course, you have to do a good job painting a vision before you do this. And as Ben likes to say, you have to do it on principle, rather than as a tactic. In other words, you have to be confident you’ve got a good offer, and you have to accept that even so, some people still won’t buy.

Not everyone is right for your offer and that’s ok. Because when you find a prospect who’s right for your offer, you’ll see something like I saw at the park.

They’ll think. They’ll stare. And they’ll start to move. Next thing you know, they’ll be charging down the hill towards that big yellow balloon you’ve put in front of their face, and you will soon have a sale.

At least, that’s how it worked with me in the case of the sales letter that Ben sent.

Anyways, if you don’t need sales emails like this written for your business, then, you know, that’s ok. Otherwise, you can get an idea of how to write them yourself, with a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. More info here:

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

Good Will Camping

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Yesterday, I ragged on yes-seeking questions.

Today, I want to offer up an alternative — one of four I’ll be covering over the next few days. And to do that, let’s talk Good Will Hunting.

That’s the flick that put Matt Damon on the map in the role of Will Hunting, the supernaturally talented math genius from the slums of Boston who literally mops the floors at MIT.

The relevant scene for us is when Will is sitting opposite a shrink named Sean Maguire (played by Robin Williams).

Shrink Maguire is trying to draw Will out of his shell. “You can do anything,” the shrink seems to be saying, “so take advantage of your opportunities.”

Will gets defensive about this. He says how there’s nothing wrong with doing manual labor or with mopping floors — there’s even honor in it.

Shrink Maguire doesn’t argue with this. He doesn’t say, “Yeah, but…” He also doesn’t ask, “Isn’t there more honor in being a world-renowned scientist?”

Instead, he simply asks,

“You could be a janitor anywhere. Why did you choose to work in the most prestigious technical college in the whole fucking world?”

This causes Will to pause. And it slowly but surely sets off something in his head, which leads to the movie’s eventual happy ending.

So what happened?

Well, the point of asking that question was not to one-up Will’s smarts, or to trap him in a lie. At least not if you listen to master negotiation coach Jim Camp, whose playbook this question comes straight out of.

Camp advocated asking open-ended questions. The point of this was to “build vision” — to make the other side clearly see their own dire situation in their own minds.

It’s the only way to convince people of anything, Camp believed. And with his track record of successful billion-dollar negotiations in some of the most competitive business markets in the world, Camp probably knew what he was talking about.

Anyways, this idea of creating vision applies to in-person sales, and it applies to sales copywriting as well. Not necessarily in the form of asking open-ended questions. But creating a vision — such as by retelling a scene from a movie — is a very powerful way to drive home a point and to make the sale.

Speaking of which, if you need help with sales copy, you might like the ideas in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. This lays out the techniques I’ve used to triple (yep, 3x) sales from an email sales funnel for an 8-figure supplement company. To get notified when this book is out, sign up below:

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

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/