Mechanism

I’m free at last

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I entered the kitchen this morning in a kind of triumph and prepared a celebratory feast.

There was homemade shakshuka with a few fried eggs on top. There was bread, Catalan “pa de vidre,” which I love but rarely eat any more. There was butter, delicious butter, which I also rarely eat any more, except on special occasions.

And all this was a bonus added to the usual horsefeed that I chew through almost every morning.

“Free at last,” I said as a kind of thanksgiving prayer. “Free at last… thank God almighty, I’m free at last to eat whatever I want.”

The reason for today’s triumphal breakfast was that yesterday was the fifth and final day of the fasting mimicking diet I was doing.

If you don’t know the fasting mimicking diet, it’s a special diet, designed by a USC professor of nutrionology/how-not-to-die science.

The fasting mimicking diet has you eat significantly reduced calories and eliminate almost all protein for 5 days. Basically, you eat a bunch of vegetables and some olive oil for 5 days.

Why??

The claim is that this gives you A) all the benefits of an extended water fast, without B) any of the downsides, such as ravening hunger, impractical weakness, and long-term muscle wasting.

The USC professor has all kinds of medical studies, on rats and cats and maybe even owners of cats, to prove that his fasting mimicking diet does as he says.

I don’t have any real way to verify what he’s saying. But I trust the man — because you gotta trust somebody sometime.

I can also tell you that is that this is the second 5-day FMD cycle I’ve done, the first being back in February.

Both times, I was not hungry at all (just bored with eating vegetables all day), I could still go to the gym, and I got the results I was looking for.

As for what those results are, I’ll keep that private. I’m a little shy, and I’m sure you don’t wanna know anyhow.

The point though:

If you come from the world of direct marketing, as I do, you might be jaded, as I am, and think that every new “mechanism” is just some scheming copywriter’s invention.

But on occasion there really are genuine hacks, breakthroughs, secrets, better mousetraps or micetrap, which give you all the benefits without any of the downsides. Or at least something close to it, something close enough.

Once you have a new mechanism like that, your thing sells itself.

I was pretty much sold after hearing the name “fasting mimicking diet.” I guess so were many other people. Celebs such as Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, and Gwyneth Paltrow have done the fasting mimicking diet — and somehow, I doubt that they read the sales or scientific literature on it.

But let’s get to business.

My claim has long been that online courses have a real problem:

The good information inside them flies in one ear and flies right out the other.

It takes repeated reading/listening of a course to remember any of it. That’s bad.

What’s worse, it takes application of the ideas inside a course to actually get any bit of real value from the course.

But most people never do any of that.

I say this in spite of the fact that I myself sell online courses.

But I also sell something completely different:

My Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is not a copywriting course in any traditional sense. It’s not good information. It’s something else.

For more info on this training program that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, with a genuinely new mechanism that gets valuable copywriting skills into your head:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

I failed in my quest for the gift of the gab

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Yesterday I tried to win the gift of the gab. I didn’t manage it.

What surprised me was that I found I had really hoped for it. I was almost desperate to get it.

Background:

I’ve been vacationing in Ireland for a week. Yesterday was the last full day. It was supposed to be the climax — going to Blarney Castle outside Cork, to kiss the Blarney Stone.

Legend says that anyone who kisses the stone will be blessed with the “gift of the gab” — the skill of talk, palaver, flattery, “the ability to deceive without offending.”

But the kissing didn’t happen for me. The line to kiss the stone was impossibly long, down the stairs, out the castle, into the gardens.

My friend Sam and I had spent too much time idling around the Blarney Castle grounds, inspecting and enjoying the fern garden, the bee observatory, the lake with the gold treasure at the bottom of it, the horse paddock with no horses, the impressive botanical garden, the wish-granting magic stairs.

What a waste of time.

Because the line for the actual castle was building up in the meantime, putting a bigger and bigger barrier between me and the gift of the gab.

My point:

We all want something external, outside ourselves, a talisman, a magic spell, a divine approval, something to believe in as cause and guarantee for our success, and as a motivator to action.

Regarding my failed quest for the gift of the gab:

The last time I was in Ireland, 10+ years ago, was because I was competing at the European University Debate Championships, even though I had only taken up debating months earlier.

In the decade since, I met two of my long-term girlfriends — relationships that lasted multiple years — when I ran up to an unfamiliar girl on the street and started gabbin’ away.

And today, I have this gabbin’ email newsletter, which is read regularly by some thousands of people, and which provides me everything I ever wanted in life, at least as far as business goes.

Meaning, I shouldn’t really be desperate for a magic stone to grant me the ability to chat, chatter, and use words to connect with people.

And yet, yesterday I found myself scheming to get back to Cork at the very next opportunity, book a hotel near the Blarney Castle, and be the first person in line in the morning to kiss the stone and get that magic gift of the gab.

So I’m writing this email to tell myself as much as to tell you that power and responsibility aren’t in the Blarney Stone or really anywhere else you need to travel to. As Tolstoy wrote, the Kingdom of God is within you.

It can be valuable to remember that.

On the flip side, there’s no denying that something external to believe in will sell, and will sell big. It’s the allure of a new mechanism, as copywriters like to call it.

But let’s get off the ethereal plane and descend to a more mercenary plane:

Specifically, the plane of my Most Valuable Email course.

I’ve made sure that course contains a mysterious and magical mechanism, the “Most Valuable Email trick.” It’s a big part of the reason why many people have bought this course.

But as I make clear on the MVE sales page, what’s really most valuable is the process of applying this Most Valuable Email trick to yourself, which makes you a better marketer and copywriter every day, and which as a side-effect produces interesting and influential and even sellable content.

Or in the words of Spanish A-list copywriter Rafa Casas, who bought MVE right when I put it out:

===

Thanks for the course. It’s true that it can be read in an hour, but it needs more resting time and practice to get the full potential out of it. Which is a lot.

===

So if you want to develop and nurture and even cherish the gift of the gab that’s already in you, and learn to sell daily without offending, here’s the full info on Most Valuable Email:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The secret reason I still stick with copywriting after all these years

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Here’s a confession:

I’m not in this field because of the money or supposed freedom that copywriting brings.

Sure, that’s why I got into it in the first place. And I guess if I didn’t make any money, or if the work conditions sucked, I might move on to something else.

But the real thing that keeps me going in copywriting, that sucks me in and fascinates me, is learning more about myself and about other people.

Because it turns out that direct response marketing is an incredible lens to allow you to see inside people’s psyches, and what they really respond to.

Case in point:

Joe Sugarman of BluBlockers fame once told a story about his cousin, who was a psychiatrist. The cousin was hired by the San Diego Chargers, an American football team.

The Chargers wanted to find out what separated football superstars from the rank-and-file of all the others players. After some MK-Ultra type research, Joe’s cousin figured out there were two personality types who became superstars. They were either:

A. Egomaniacs

or

B. Deeply religious

“And when you really think about it,” Joe said, “what did they have in common? A very strong belief in either themselves or in a higher power.”

I’m not here to tell you to believe in yourself, or in a higher power.

I’m just here to point out am important fact in case you ever want to sell something:

If the thing that sets superstars apart is that they believe, either in themselves or in God, then what does that say about everybody else? What does it say about the 99.9% of people in any field who are not superstars?

They don’t believe. Or at least they don’t have anything focused to believe in.

And mercenary thought it might sound, smart marketers have been taking advantage of this lack of belief to sell trillions of dollars worth of stuff.

Because smart marketers give prospects something to believe in. An external thing… and yet, a thing that doesn’t require religious feeling or faith in the supernatural.

That thing is called the mechanism.

The mechanism is usually described as “how the solution works.” And it is that. But it’s really much more. It’s hope and belief in something outside yourself.

Of course, after a century-plus of creative mechanisms — cold showers and hyperventilation, buttered coffee, adaptogenic mushrooms — you can’t just hold up a bag of rocks and say, “Here, believe in this.”

You gotta come up with a mechanism that threads the thin line between exciting and exotic and believable and achievable.

I got a mechanism for you. It’s called “The John Bejakovic Letter” and it’s been called the most insightful newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and influence. In case you’d like to sign up for it, click here and follow the instructions.

Selling drugs to kids

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IN ONLY SIX MONTHS, that formerly desperate man bought a $385,000 house with half down, and became a millionaire in less than a year. He also bought a vacation house, put away enough to cover his kids’ college educations, easily stopped his bad habits, and attained complete personal and financial freedom… all accomplished automatically, without effort or willpower!

That’s the back envelope copy from a direct mail sales letter written by one Jeff Paul.

​​Jeff was a student and protege of Dan Kennedy, and this sales letter is actually selling Dan’s Psycho Cybernetics program.

I’m sharing this copy with you for two reasons:

First, because I want to point you to Info Marketing Blog. It’s got a few decades’ worth of brilliant direct response ads, and smart and interesting commentary. And if you need proof of that, the guy who runs Info Marketing Blog, Lawrence Bernstein, was called out as a valuable resource during Gary Bencivenga’s farewell seminar by Gary Bencivenga himself.

Second, there’s a masterful marketing and copywriting lesson in those two sentences of copy above. It’s right there at the end:

“… automatically, without effort or willpower!”

When I look outside at the people I know… and when I look inside, at my own feelings and frustrations… I find this is what we all really really want, deep down.

Peace. No effort. Definitely no struggle, and no demands on our willpower. No opportunity for it to go wrong. Instead, all done automatically, by some mechanism outside of us.

That’s why smart marketers like Dan Kennedy and Jeff Paul, and millions of others like them, make those promises.

And if you want to sell, in big numbers, at high prices, you should make these promises too.

Only be careful those desires you stimulate in your sales copy don’t seep into your own subconscious.

Because in my experience, life is all about effort, about exerting your willpower, about getting things done yourself instead of sitting around and wishing they could be done automatically.

How exactly do you reconcile selling something to people that you wouldn’t consume yourself? It seems a little like going down to the elementary school each day to sell drugs to kids, while being religious about never allowing that filth near your own family.

I don’t have a good way to reconcile these things for you. But facts are facts. And if you want to see some market-tested facts, here’s Jeff Paul’s complete sales letter. It’s worth reading. So much so that I’ll even talk about it tomorrow.

Sign up for my email newsletter if you want to read that when it comes out. And here’s the link to the sales letter if you want to get a head start.

https://infomarketingblog.com/wordpress/jeff-pauls-greatest-story-selling-ad/

Copy Koala Millions™

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What if your pillow could do more than just help you sleep at night?

What if it could do something unbelievably good for you…

Like instantly give you MORE powerful copywriting skills than years of study ever could…

Putting your brain into full “copy god” mode as soon as you wake up in the morning…

Allowing you to effortlessly stamp out royalty-producing sales letters, emails, and Facebook ads IN JUST A FEW MINUTES’ TIME…

Knowing you’re now automatically and effortlessly zooming towards your wealth and income dreams… while burying the gnawing doubts and insecurities that have held you back for so long?

And what if it could also implant into your head ALL the copywriting courses you’ve ever bought…

While dramatically increasing your productivity… opening up secret doors to new opportunities… and skyrocketing your status in the industry?

Wouldn’t that be INCREDIBLE?

Well, when you consider the latest breakthrough, peer-reviewed studies on creativity and learning… from the most well-respected universities and research departments on the planet…

Or if you ask the countless thousands of women and men of all ages, from all walks of life, who have found this email before you…

You’ll find that this is not only possible…

But you should actually EXPECT your pillow to deliver you all of this and more.

And all it takes is just a tiny, 10-second tweak to your night-time routine that you’re about to see…

Ok, I’d like you to slowly emerge from your hypnotic trance and become aware of the real world once again.

The truth is, I do not yet have a magic offer called Copy Koala Millions™, which transforms you into an A-list copywriter while you sleep. But I have been working on it.

The backstory is that I went on Clickbank a few days ago. Among the Clickbank top 10, three weight loss offers all showed the same trend:

* Lose weight by stuffing your face (Biofit)

* Lose weight by sucking on smoothies (Smoothie Diet)

* Lose weight by sipping coffee (Java Burn, which I modeled for the copy above)

In each case, the mechanism is NOT some exotic discovery or awesome invention.

​​Instead, the mechanism is a beloved everyday activity. In fact, it’s probably something the prospect is already doing all the time.

So that’s how I got the idea for Copy Koala Millions™. Because lying down to sleep is one of my beloved activities. There are few things that thrill me as reliably as putting my head to pillow each night. I can’t be the only one, right?

It’s the old direct response advice:

Come up with the ultimate, magic-wand offer. Promise your prospect all the outcomes he could ever dream of… done for him by some benevolent external genie… who smiles kindly and shushes away all the objections your prospect used to have.

So that’s step one. Figure out exactly what your prospect would irrationally love to hear.

Step two is to then dial it back or pay it off so your offer isn’t a complete hoax.

In the case of Copy Koala Millions™ I’m happy to say I deliver fully on the promise.

At a special launch price of just $67, I’ll sell you an mp3 player preloaded with copywriting audio courses, masked with pink noise.

Simply turn on Copy Koala and place it under your pillow at night — takes just 10 seconds. You can also upload other courses you’ve bought if you want. In case you don’t have a pillow right now, I’ll be selling that as a $197 upsell.

Normally, at this point in my email, I would invite a response. “Write in and pre-order Copy Koala Millions™,” I would say, “at a special 75% discount. Offer good only until this Thursday.”

But I’m a little hesitant to do that. We haven’t yet ironed out all the kinks with the pink noise and I don’t want to get swamped with orders I can’t fulfill. So I’ll hold off for today.

Instead, I’d just like to point out that the underlying idea might be valuable to you. Because the weight loss market is definitely buying this “coffee” mechanism right now.

​​And the weight loss market is like New York City — the fashion that’s popular there today will be popular everywhere next year. Might be worth keeping an eye on. I know I will be doing it. And if you want to find out what new trends I spot, sign up here for my email newsletter, and prepare to be hypnotized.

The thinking man’s horoscope

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Detailed and Reliable — LOW
Nurturing – LOW
Tough — LOW

Today I went through a part of Ray Dalio’s personality test. It takes 40 minutes to complete. I gave up after just 10. But based on those 10 minutes, Dalio’s test still spit out an uninspiring estimate of who I am (results above).

You’ve probably heard of Dalio. He’s a billionaire investor. A few years ago, he wrote an influential book about his way of thinking, called Principles. Well, now he has released a free online personality test, called Principles You.

Dalio got enthusiastic about personality tests a while back. He started by giving a bunch of his employees the Myers-Briggs.

“It gives you clarity of how people think!” Dalio said.

And to prove his point, he had those same employees fill out a survey after they got the test results. “How accurately does this describe the way you think?” 85% gave it a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1-5.

Impressive, except:

If you’ve been reading my blog over the past few weeks, you’ll know I recently wrote about cold reading. That’s when you tell people something about themselves without knowing anything about them.

In the very first cold reading experiment, all the way back in 1949, 39 students were all given the same personality profile. It came straight out of a horoscope.

And after reading their profile, 34 out of 39 students gave the profile either a 4 or a 5 on a scale of 1-5. That’s 87%. A finding that has been replicated since, and not just by Dalio.

But what the hell do I know?

I’m just some guy. And Ray Dalio is a billionaire.

​​Maybe his Principles You test really is more useful and accurate than a horoscope.

Either way, all I really want to suggest is that, up and down the success and skepticism ladders, people love categorizing others… and they LOOOVE being categorized themselves.

I think those two loves come from very different drives. I won’t get into that here. But I will leave you with this:

Entire businesses have been built by putting people into buckets. (Michael Gerber’s E-Myth comes to mind.) And if you need a unique mechanism… or you need a unique position in the market… then perhaps you can get started by creating a new diagnostic test. My suggestion for a name? Buckets You.

On a related note:

If you are honest, ambitious, and reliable, then you might get a lot of value out of subscribing to my email newsletter. Click here to try it out.

Genuine weird payoff bullets

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Sometimes, the book or course you’re trying to peddle has some advice that is so bizarre, so unusual, that all you have to do in your copy is report exactly what it says.

This gave rise to today’s lesson in my bullet’s course:

Lesson 11: “If your mechanism is so strange and unbelievable that the reader has to find out more, then reveal it in your bullet.”

I had three examples of such weird mechanisms in today’s lesson, taken from a David Deutsch promotion. In each case, ​​there was little that David had to do to take the source material and turn it into a bullet.

So is there any copywriting lesson to be had here? Well, I think it’s more of a marketing lesson. Because when there’s no genuine weird mechanism in your product, then you create your own product… all around a weird mechanism.

In the lesson, I also gave an example of a clever offer, which has been running successfully for years, which did exactly this. The name of this offer — in fact the entire positioning — is basically a revealed bizarre mechanism bullet.

And here’s a quick copywriting lesson after all:

If you do reveal a bizarre mechanism in your bullet (or in the name of your offer), make sure it’s easy, something the reader already has or can easily and cheaply get.

​And of course, don’t reveal the whole recipe, or the reason why it works. Because you’ve got to hold something back. The point, after all, is to get the reader to buy the damned product.

Which is why I’ve held back the actual bullets I used as examples in today’s bullet course lesson… as well as that offer that’s basically a bullet in disguise. That’s something that only went out to people who joined the course. If you’d like to join them (it’s still free):

https://bejakovic.com/bullets-signup/