Promises

The epidemic of thinking big

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Lesson for you, really lesson for me:

Last week I was digging through my emails, and I found this:

“Oh, btw. If you use AI at all…and want to do a guest post on Write With AI, let me know. Love to promote you.”

That message came from Justin Zack, who I mentioned a few emails ago. Justin is the Head of Partnerships at a paid newsletter called Write With AI, which has 54k subscribers.

Except, Justin wrote me that back in August. I had completely missed it then.

I wrote Justin to see if he’s still interested. He said, yes.

I asked what kinds of posts had done well previously on Write With AI. He gave me an example by Matt Giaro, which is the top-performing post for Write With AI, on how to write a weekly newsletter with AI.

“Mhm,” I said. Just like I thought. I had a problem.

Because I use AI for research… for filling in things I don’t know or can’t think of… as a replacement for Google and YouTube and Reddit combined.

But I don’t use AI to write. Not my own stuff anyhow. I have a policy that I won’t use AI for anything that’s published under my name.

In part, that’s because I think there’s value in making a big deal of actually being real, live, more or less human being on the Internet.

In part, it’s because AI never actually writes like me, and I’m pedantic about what I put out.

So I told Justin, “Yeah let me go away and think a bit, and see if come up with a topic that could work.” Frankly, I was not optimistic.

And then, independent of all this, I wrote an email for this newsletter (by hand, by myself, without AI) about how I had used AI to create a little tech tool — the in-email streak tracker for my Daily Email Habit service.

Justin, who reads these emails, replied to that email and said, “btw, ‘how I created a daily email counter with AI (with promo for deh)’ is what we should do…. just a thought.”

It was one of those forehead-slapping moments. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

So that’s what we ended up doing.

I’ve written up the post about how I got ChatGPT to be my little code monkey. I’m finishing up that post today. I’ll get it over to Justin, and I guess he will publish it at some point on Write With AI when they get a spot in their busy editorial calendar.

But the lesson I promised you, which is really a lesson for me, because it’s a mistake I keep making:

There’s an epidemic of thinking too big and too broad. I know I’ve definitely been infected by this contagion.

Over time I’ve managed to develop an immunity to it when it comes to writing daily emails. But I still get sick with this disease when it comes to writing in other formats… or when it comes to creating offers, or making new products.

So the lesson I would like to suggest to you, in the hope I myself will remember it, is to make smaller, more specific promises.

Don’t teach people how to walk, run, and jump.

Just teach them how to tie their shoes.

And if you additionally restrict your teaching to just a course on how to tie asymmetrical, decorative laces on $400 fashion sneakers, odds are good you will not only have an easy time selling to that dedicated market, but you’ll be able to charge a premium.

All right, time to tie this shoe up:

My Daily Email Habit service does just one tiny thing. Each day, it helps you get started writing an email to your list, with the ultimate goal of making it easier to stick with the valuable habit of daily emailing.

Here’s a tiny case study I got about Daily Email Habit, from Roald Larsen, who used to be a high-powered consultnant and now runs an online brand called Solopreneur MBA:

“Today I wasn’t really feeling it. But the prompt helped to make it smaller. Easier. More manageable to write and send to the list. Nice.”

But I’m not inviting you to sign up for Daily Email Habit, which costs money. Instead, I’m inviting you to sign up to my daily email newsletter, which I write based on the prompts inside Daily Email Habit, and which is free, at least for the moment. To try it out, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Sell the summer, not the seed

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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/

Do your customers really want a relationship with you?

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I talked about the legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga yesterday.

​​Gary wrote sales letters that brought in millions of dollars for big publishing companies. He rarely if ever lost a split-run test, even when competing against the highest level, against other top-of-the-pile copywriters.

​​I’ve been going through Gary’s farewell seminar for the fourth time. I’m finding all kinds of nuggets of gold that I had missed before.

For example:
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At one point during his farewell seminar, Gary mentions in a slightly exasperated tone the idea of “relationship marketing.” And he says:

“I buy an aspirin because I have a headache, not because I want a relationship with my druggist.”

Maybe you’re ready to pick this statement apart. And I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can do a good job proving that Gary’s statement isn’t true, not most of the time, not with all people, and that it doesn’t apply to your particular situation or to the way the whole market has changed since Gary was in his heyday.

That’s fine.

​​I don’t have a dog or a cat in this fight. I’m just here to share Gary’s idea with you, and maybe give you something new to think about.​​

But if you think a bit, and realize that maybe your customers aren’t primarily interested in buying from you because you are you, because they want to imagine you’re their friend and they like your sense of humor and they feel good about obeying your commands, then what are you left with?

Well, you can always talk about your offer.

​​Or about your customers’ problems.

​​Or about convincing proof that your offer will solve your customers’ problems.

Or simply about your customer’s deep hidden desires, about his identity, and how your offer naturally reinforces that. ​​

If this is what you want to do, and you want to do it well, then you can learn to do it with my Copy Riddles program.

It teaches you to write copy by showing you how A-list copywriters have done it, starting with a dry source text, and ending with a sexy and sparkling sales letter that netted millions or tens of millions of dollars. Often, without the slightest shred of personality or relationship.

And yes, among the A-list copywriters that Copy Riddles looks at is Gary Bencivenga himself. ​​If you’d like to find out more, take a look at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

One roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer

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This morning I found out that Active Campaign has this spreadsheet view of campaign results.

It allows you to sort and compare previous campaigns rather than just looking at the results for each campaign individually.

So I looked at the past three months of my emails. I was curious to see my most unsubscribed-from email over that time.

It turns out I sent this toxic email only last week. The subject line read, “The secret spider web of money and love opportunities.” It had more unsubscribers — both in actual number and as a percentage of the people who got the email — than the other 90+ emails I sent over that period.

Why was this email so reviled?

Maybe the subject line was too good, and it sucked in people who wouldn’t normally open.

Maybe the content was truly awful.

Maybe my unsubscribed readers didn’t like my tone. Maybe they felt I didn’t deliver on promise of love opportunities (all the unsubscribers were women, judging by names). Or maybe they just realized my list is not for them (several came from a classified ad I ran a few days prior).

So what’s my point?

I’m not sure. I don’t really have a smart conclusion to draw from this experiment.

Instead, let me share an interesting idea with you that I read in Jack Trout’s and Al Ries’s book Positioning:

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For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.

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Maybe I should take Ries & Trout’s advice. Let me try it right now:

If you want one roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer, then you can find that inside my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is based on an exercise devised by legendary copywriter Gary Halbert. Top marketers and copywriters, including Ben Settle and Parris Lampropoulos, have praised this exercise and said it’s how they got good at the craft and how they started writing winning ads and making lots of money.

If you’d like to find out what this exercise is, or even start practicing it yourself, click on the link below and start reading the page that opens up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Barcelona man discovers the secret of how to escape the online rat race

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“It was unbelievable. One day he’s driving around in a rusted out ’68 Pontiac station wagon, living in an uncarpeted house that didn’t even have a color T.V., and struggling to make ends meet like the rest of us. The next day he’s driving in a brand new Lincoln Mark, a brand new Mercury station wagon, a $35,000 GMC motor home, his house is fixed up like a palace, and he’s traveling all over the country.”

This morning I read an old but gold business opportunity ad.

The ad ran across a full page of newspapers, in tightly crammed print. I imagine the entire thing was 3,000 words or more.

This ad is a master class. If you are doing email marketing today, particularly if you sell yourself and your expertise and your authority and your trustworthiness, this ad is worth studying, thinking about, and emulating in your own email copy.

​​You can easily find versions of this ad by googling for the headline:

“Ohio Man Discovers the Secret of How to Escape the American Rat Race”

The Ohio man in question is marketer Ben Suarez. The secret in question is a system Suarez called NPGS.

​​Once upon a time, you could discover the NPGS secret if you mailed a check for $20 to get Suarez’s book, 7 Steps to Freedom.

A little-known fact about me is that I live in Barcelona in a hipster neighborhood called Poblenou.

An even lesser-known fact is that a few years ago, before I started living in Barcelona’s Poblenou, I went on a used-book website and actually bought Ben Suarez’s 7 Steps to Freedom.

I did it because it was one of the books recommended somewhere by Gary Halbert in his newsletter.

Suarez’s book arrived to my house. It is the size of a comprehensive dictionary and weighs as much as a brick. Over many hundreds of pages, it lays out Suarez’s NPGS system — basically how to run a successful mail-order business.

As you can probably guess, I never got beyond the table of contents in 7 Steps to Freedom. I bet that 99.9% of other people who bought this book didn’t get any further.

No matter.

Because as another Ohio bizopp marketer, Dan Kennedy, once said, people want miracles, not how-to information.

So if you want to escape the online rat race of endless content creation that never turns into much cash, here’s the secret:

Give people what they want. Miracles, and not how-to information.

This is why I organized my Copy Riddles program as I did.

Sure, Copy Riddles features some how-to information. That was unavoidable.

​​But the main thing inside Copy Riddles are the repetitive daily exercises, which I claim implant A-list copywriting skills into your brain, will ye or nill ye.

That’s not just an empty claim I’m making. Here’s proof for it, in the words of freelance copywriter Ivan Sršen, who went through Copy Riddles a while back:

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Before John’s Copy Riddles training, I knew about the problem mechanism… and I knew about the solution mechanism. In fact, I knew about around 60% of the stuff he teaches in this course. But I was still like a deer in headlights. Only after going through Copy Riddles… after applying all this that I ‘knew’ in daily exercises, did it all click together. My bullets — and my understanding of copy mechanics — are light years ahead of where they were after a few short weeks.

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If you’d like to experience a miraculous transformation in your understanding of copy, you can find out more about Copy Riddles at the link below.

As I mentioned in my email yesterday, this is the last week I am giving away two free bonuses with Copy Riddles. The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.​​

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until Saturday Jan 21 at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.
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After then, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.​​​​

To get the whole package:​​

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Marketing prediction: Welcome to the Age of Insight

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A year ago, I sent out an email with the subject line,

“Business Prediction: Welcome to the Age of Aquarius”

In that email, I made the claim that the world has gone through three distinct ages of consumption.

The first was the Age of Stuff. That age was made up of straight-up consumerism — Cadillacs and and Frigidaires and Armani suits — which became dominant after WWII. It was about what you own.

The second consumption age was the Age of Experiences. It began around 1990, or at least that’s when I became aware of it. Amazing Thai food, swimming with the dolphins, a visit to Ernest Hemingway’s favorite bar in Key West. It was about what you’ve done.

My claim was that the third age of consumption, in which we are now, is the Age of Transformation. It’s about who you would like to become. Crossfit, sex-reassignment surgery, Masterclass subscriptions.

Like I said, I sent that email a year ago. A year is a long time. I have been enlightened greatly in that time, and I want to share with you some of the things I have seen.

What I have seen is that, mirroring the world of production and consumption, there have been parallel shifts in the world of marketing and advertising.

What I have seen is that the world has gone through three distinct ages of marketing.

The first age was described by copywriter John E. Kennedy. Kennedy correctly divined that advertising is salesmanship in print. As a result, Kennedy gave birth to the Age of Promise:

“Let this Machine do your Washing Free”

The second marketing age was identified by a clever astrological duo, Al Ries and Jack Trout. According to their occult research, some fifty years after Kennedy, advertising had gotten to a point where promises were insufficient — there were just too many players in the market. As a result, we entered the Trout and Ries age, the Age of Positioning:

“Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us? We try harder.”

And now, if my calculations are right, we are now entering the third age.

It’s the Age of Insight.

Today, a hundred years after John E. Kennedy, it’s no longer enough to make a promise and build up desire.

Today, fifty years after Trout and Ries, it’s no longer enough to give people a mental hook to hang your name on.

Today, the smartest marketers — people like Rich Schefren, Travis Sago, and Stefan Georgi — are doing something different. They are using specific and subtle techniques to take the disgust with manipulation, the disappointment of previous purchases, the confusion and uncertainty and indifference that most of us feel on some level…

… and transform them into something new. Into something motivating. Into something contagious.

Into the feeling of insight.

Maybe you find that idea intriguing. Or maybe you find it confusing.

If so, don’t worry. You are in luck, or rather, you are in the right place at the right time.

I’ll be telling you more about insight over the coming two weeks.

Because, as you can probably guess, I’m promoting something. I’m promoting a series of live trainings, all about the Age of Insight. In these trainings, I will tell you how you can align yourself to this new age in such a way that you prosper and surpass those marketers who do not yet possess this esoteric knowledge.

The first of these live training calls will happen on December 1. So I will be talking the Age of Insight until the end of this month, when registration for this training will close.

If at any point you decide that this is an opportunity you do not want to miss, you can get the full details on my Age of Insight training, or even register for it, at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/aoi

I’d like to present to you the most wretched opening sentence of 2022

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Ever since 1982, for more than a few years now, the world has been outraged (an increasingly common emotion these days) by a strange something called the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest.

Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was a 19th-century novelist. In his time, he was more widely read than Charles Dickens. Also in his time, he opened one of his novels with these fateful words:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the blah blah…”

Well, the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest is named in memory of poor Edward George. Each year, it challenges participants to channel Bulwer-Lytton and invent an “atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.”

I found out about this bizarre contest I don’t know when. Of course, I immediately went to the BLFC website and signed up for their “(infrequent) BLFC news and updates.”

Then I forgot all about it.

But today, my patience and foresight were rewarded. Because the 2022 Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest winners are out!

Perhaps you are morbidly curious to find out the winner — I mean, the loser — of this year’s contest.

If you are, don’t worry. I will reveal the offending sentence right now so you can scoff at it.

Ready? Cue the tubas, point the Klieg lights at the center of the stage, and let’s welcome this year’s most wretched opening sentence:

“I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn’t help — I was fresh out of salami.”

So? As bad as you thought?

Worse?

Or does it seem a little contrived?

It’s not easy writing wretchedly. John Farmer, the winner of this year’s Bulwer Lytton award, did a lot of things right, or wrong, to make this sentence so bad.

Perhaps you’re sure this could never happen to you. Not in real life. Not unless you yourself were trying on purpose to write something awful.

But let me get to my mandatory marketing and copywriting takeaway. And that is, it often makes sense to stack different related promises and appeals in your copy. For example:

“It slices, it dices…it even makes Julienne fries!”

It can even make sense to stack promises that aren’t immediately related:

“The ‘pleasure trigger’ secret accidentally discovered by medical doctors that sets up more intense and more frequent orgasms for you! (It also curbs premature ejaculation! Pages 136-141.)”

But at some point, the promises you make can get so far apart that they don’t blend pleasantly any more. Instead they clash, jangle, and feud with each other.

And it happens to the best of ’em.

Like the few people in my Copy Riddles Inner Ring. They have become very very good at writing bullets. Each week, I’m impressed by their copy and sometimes a little put off — “I wish I would have written this. Could I have written this? Or are they getting better at this than I am?”

And yet, on last week’s Inner Ring call, this exact same issue of clashing, jangling, and grating promises came up. The promise of the combined 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency might seem convenient and attractive… but it’s actually atrocious.

So what to do?

The solution, if you ask me, is not to follow the “Rule of One” blindly.

After all, plenty of successful and effective copy doesn’t follow the “Rule of One.” Just look at the Ron Popeil and John Carlton copy above.

Instead, my advice is to be mindful that you can go too far.

And if you want to develop a a good ear, or eye, or nose for what too far might be, then the second best way to do that is to read good writing, and see how good writers do not cross that line.

The first best way of course is to look at really awful writing. Writing where mistakes are taken to the extreme, so they both make you laugh and so they stick in your memory.

If you want to see some of that, then check out the BLFC website, and scoff and snort at this year’s winners. Or just sign up to my email newsletter. I don’t always write atrociously. But sometimes I do, to make a point. In case you’re interested, here’s where to go.

The IOU theory of copywriting

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I read once (in a book) that credit, aka debt, came way before money. In other words, an IOU — a little slip of clay tablet commemorating the three sheep you gave to me — is a more powerful economic idea than gold coins.

I also read once (in an email) that copywriter Gary Halbert said the most powerful human motivating force is not self-interest… but curiosity.

Is there a connection between these two powerful facts?

Clearly. Because I personally think of curiosity as an IOU.

You give a couple of IOUs to your reader right in your headline. “I promise to pay you some valuable information,” each IOU says, “just give me a bit of time.”

As long as you’re in the reader’s debt, as long as he’s holding one of your IOUs, he sticks around. He wants to get paid.

The good thing is that you can give your reader a new IOU before paying off an old one. That way you can keep him around. But be careful.

If you start handing out too many IOUs… if the debt you’re incurring is too outrageous… if the repayment period is too long… then your reader is likely to get frustrated.

“This guy is never gonna pay up,” he will say. “This is just worthless paper.” He will throw away all your IOUs into the river, and along with them, your sale.

In other words, don’t overdo your debt of curiosity. But do do it.

And if you want some technical pointers on how to do curiosity in your sales copy, why, I’ve got just the thing.

It’s hidden right there inside Commandment III of my book on A-list copywriter commandments.

In case you haven’t checked this book out yet, but are a bit curious, here’s the link:

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

How I’m manipulating you again by telling you the truth

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Came a curious question yesterday, in response to my email with the subject line, “How I manipulated you, and how I might do it again.” Reader Jan wrote:

Hi John,

I’ve been reading your emails for a while now and I really enjoy them.

I’d love to know what’s your stance on actively mentioning downsides and what a certain offer is NOT/whom it’s NOT for in order to disqualify the wrong buyers.

This email sounds like you’re not really a fan of it, which surprises me a bit. Maybe I misunderstood something about it.

I would appreciate it a lot if you could clarify that.

At first I found myself flummoxed.

After all, this question came in response to an email in which I actively gave a potential buyer reasons why my Copy Riddles program might not be right for him.

But then my slow, tortoise-like brain struggled forward a few inches. And I remembered the “disqualification” I gave to the potential buyer in yesterday’s email.

I said that Copy Riddles is not for anyone who’s not willing to “poke, prod, jolt, shock, creep out, and unsettle people.” Because my claim is that copywriting is about:

1) Stripping out details that don’t help your case (ie. not telling the whole truth), and

2) Using reliable ways to get people more amped up than they would be normally.

So is this in flagrant conflict with the practice of actively mentioning downsides or disqualifying the wrong buyers?

Maybe. Or maybe it’s more subtle than that.

Now, I hate to do what I’m about to do to you.

But get ready for a bit of hard teaching, because I don’t know how else to deal with this question right now.

During my Most Valuable Email presentation last week, I talked about what I call frontloading. I used a Ben Settle email to illustrate:

And it contains the exact same methods I used to land high-paying clients who could have easily afforded to hire better and more seasoned writers. But, using my sneaky ways, they not only hired me… they hired only me (often multiple times, plus referring me to their friends), without doing the usual client-copywriter dance around price, without jumping through hoops to sell myself, and without even showing them my portfolio, in most cases.

I used this info during good and bad economic times.

In fact, I got more high paying clients during the bad times (2008-2010) than the good times.

I cannot guarantee you will have the same results.

And the methodology doesn’t work overnight.

But, that’s how it worked out in my case, and this book shows you what I did.

Frontloading is when you make a powerful, extreme promise. Then you qualify your promise. But the big, extreme, initial promise still keeps ringing in your prospect’s head.

Ben is a past master at this, as you can see in the snippet above.

Sure, he actively mentions some downsides to make his offers sound legit. But he does it after he’s thourougly amped up his readers with an irresistible promise, which might sound too good to be true — were it not for those downsides.

And by the way:

I’m not in any way criticizing Ben. All I’m saying is, he’s a serious student of direct response copywriting… and he knows what works.

And what works is what I tried to explain, perhaps clumsily, in my email yesterday:

1. Controlling your reader’s attention, and

2. Arousing his emotions in an almost unnatural way

Of course, you can do this to rope in people who are a bad fit for your offers. That’s dumb if you ask me.

You can also do it to turn good prospects into buyers. That’s smart, and it’s what Ben does every day.

And now:

I have an amazing offer for you… a new way to own A-list copywriting skills more quickly than you would ever believe.

Some of the smartest and most successful marketers of all time, Ben Settle among them, have endorsed the approach that this offer is built on.

But the thing is, my offer does cost money.

And it’s gonna require work. Every weekday. For 8 weeks straight.

And it might even make your head hurt a bit once or twice.

But if none of those downsides turn you off, you might be a good prospect for my offer. It’s called Copy Riddles. To take me up on it:

https://copyriddles.com/

You are a copywriting god… in the making

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Today is June 21, which means that in 10 days, the second issue of my Most Valuable Postcard is going out.

I am preparing to write it by watching a popular Ted talk about classical music… researching the motivations of men who like to go to strip clubs… and revisiting an old Jeff Walker presentation I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Today, I want to share with you a fascinating moment from that presentation. A bit of background:

Some time in the late 2000s, Jeff Walker was offering a business opportunity called Product Launch Manager. The basic idea was:

No list, no product, big money.

HOW???

By managing big companies’ launches using Jeff’s Product Launch Formula.

This was ideal for the most rabid of Jeff’s customers, the people who bought all his products, maybe even consumed those products, but never did anything beyond that.

Now comes the fascinating moment. ​​

At the end of this five-day event, speaking from the stage to a small segment of this group of hyper-responders, who had each agreed to pay $25k to attend, Jeff raised his hands up in the air, lowered his head to his chest, and said in a soft yet penetrating voice:

“You are marketing gods. If you can speak Internet marketing, you are in a separate class from the rest of the people walking the face of the earth.”

Jeff says this set the room on fire.

People jumped up from their chairs. Others started rolling around in the aisles. Still others were tweeting to let the whole world know. “Jeff says we are marketing gods!”

The implied message was that, by paying a lot of money, by attending an event and hearing a bunch of stuff, and finally by getting Jeff’s benediction, these folks had achieved true success.

And who knows, maybe some of them did go on to achieve true success.

After all, Jeff’s program was a step-by-step roadmap for what to do to manage big launches for big clients.

Put one foot in front of the other, while looking at the map, and you will get to your destination, sooner or later.

Still, the thing that struck me was simply the audacity of the claim — marketing gods! — and how much it resonated with people.

I feel it’s something to keep in mind when you are crafting your own promises… and the promises behind those promises.

Anyways, today, being June 21, is also the last day that I will email inviting you to register for my Most Valuable Email presentation, which happens tomorrow at 7pm CET.

At the end of that presentation, I would like to raise my hands, lower my head, and say in a soft and yet penetrating voice:

“You are now copywriting gods… go ye forth and use your new daily email knowledge to line your pockets with many shekels.”

And sure, I will give you a step-by-step roadmap. I will tell you how I write the one kind of email that has been most valuable to me in the history of this newsletter.

This one kind of email has allowed me:

1. To get in the heads of my readers, including some of the most successful and sophisticated direct marketers and copywriters out there…

2. To pump up my own authority, even when I don’t brag about all the successful and sophisticated marketers and copywriters who read my stuff every day…

3. And maybe most importantly, to drastically improve as a copywriter and marketer.

So there is that promise in the air, “… and you can do it too!”

Well, about that:

Attending tomorrow’s presentation, learning all the stuff I will share, and even having my benediction at the end will still only make you something like a copywriting god… in the making.

In other words, it won’t do you a damn bit of good unless you do the moderately hard work of putting one foot in front of the other, and not just once, but many times over.

So the close to this email is not as fire-generating as Jeff’s talk from the stage.

But it is a fact of life, and it might lead you to success sooner, rather than later or never.

Whatever the case may be:

If you would like to get the info inside my Most Valuable Email presentation, you will have to sign up to my newsletter before 7pm CET tomorrow. And once you get my confirmation email, you will have to hit reply, and let me know you’d like to attend, at the last minute, this fearsome email revival meeting.