What’s happening in my business: CENSORED

Today I had planned to write an email about changes I’m making to this little online info publishing business, and my plans for the coming months and next year.

But then I stopped and censored myself.

There was a quote echoing in my head. It said:

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One of the greatest clues I ever had was working at Mercedes-Benz. My most successful clients — STFU. They were, “Lid on it, black box.”

So many times, they would buy a very nice car — I’m talking an SL 65 — but they wouldn’t drive it to their workplace. They would just keep it for their other place, down by the beach house, hinterland property, like it wasn’t part of their public thing.

===

That quote came from business coach and Internet marketer James Schramko. James has been in the industry for a few decades, and has coached big-name, multimillionaire marketers like Ryan Levesque (ASK Method), Patt Flynn (Smart Passive Income), and Kevin Rogers (Copy Chief).

James says it took discipline, but in time he’s learned to keep a “cone of silence” around what he and his clients are doing and planning. He says not sharing his best ideas is what makes him valuable to his clients, and it’s also intensely valuable to him.

Is what James is saying true? Is it right?

I don’t know. Maybe it is. I can imagine the opposite also, that giving away your best ideas is the smart way to go, because ideas are ultimately cheap, while things like relationships and reputation are really where value lies.

But the concept behind this newsletter has always been to share ideas that are first of all interesting and second possibly useful. “True” or “right” is not something I obsess over. I like to try things out and see how they fit. And so — my plans are CENSORED, at least in this email.

The past few days, as I roll out my Daily Email Habit service in private, I’ve been sharing links to content that is “not predictable” for a newsletter like mine.

The link I’m about to share is quite predictable, because it’s James Schramko’s podcast. It’s predictable both because James is part of direct response world, so it’s normal I would link to him, and because his podcast episodes cover (seemingly) standard industry topics.

But maybe something more is going on?

I don’t listen to podcasts by business gurus and I had no intent on listening to James’s podcast either.

And yet, each of James’s past 5 podcast episodes, ever since I got on his email list, got me sucked in, and ultimately gave me interesting and possibly useful ideas I didn’t have before.

Maybe it can do the same for you? If you’d like to try it out:

https://www.jamesschramko.com/list-all

MVE cancelled

No, not Most Valuable Email.

The MVE that’s been cancelled is the Most Vivian Event, the big promotion I announced yesterday.

I had hoped to use this event to pull every remaining non-buyer on my list and get him to buy Most Valuable Email, will-he, nill-he.

My plan was to use I know about promos inside the Most Vivian Event — structure, copy, and most importantly offer:

An “Italian lottery,” giving new buyers a good chance to get MVE free…

A stack of free bonuses that I’ve sold for good money before, totaling the price of MVE and more, so even if somebody didn’t win the “Italian lottery,” they would still feel like they’re getting a steal…

An entirely new bonuses as well, which would reveal all the thinking that went into this promo — basically a little promo course built around a specific case study, to make this MVE offer so valuable that if you ever send any kind of emails, the investment would pay for itself with this one new bonus alone.

I had grand plans to make this event fun, epic, and undoubtedly immensely successful. Except…

It’s all been cancelled.

Reason why:

Each time I got near to settling on the final offer for the Most Vivian Event, I kept bouncing into one problem:

“What do I do with previous buyers?”

I have a long-standing policy to reward early buyers for buying for me. That means I grandfather previous buyers into any upgrades, new runs of a course, or bonuses I end up offering in the future. It also means I don’t feature discounts.

Yesterday, when I had the initial idea for this new promo, I shrugged this question off.

I told myself I’d figure out some way to incentivize new buyers… to reward previous buyers… and to have this promo make business sense for me personally.

But no matter how I structured this offer, there was always one end of the triangle — new buyers, old buyers, me — that was left high and dry.

I realized it’s not a matter of what bonuses or incentives I end up offering. It’s simply a consequence of my “reward previous buyers” policy, and the fact that I have hundreds of previous buyers of MVE.

That’s why I’ve actually never run a bonus- or discount-based promo for any of my offers, outside of a launch. I just never realized it until yesterday.

You might say I’m being stubborn to stick to this policy. And that’s exactly right. Because I want people to believe a few simple certainties when they think of me.

One of those simple certainties is that I won’t screw over previous buyers. I don’t ever want my buyers to think, even in passing, “Huh, maybe I should have waited to buy this, this new deal is better than what I got.”

Yesterday, I wrote that I had clearly been falling short by continuing to sell MVE on its merits alone.

Some people who could benefit from MVE — like Vivian, who wanted something for “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way” — never even considered buying.

Frankly, that falling short will most likely continue.

But if you have been on the fence about MVE for a while, I do have a special offer for you today. It’s nothing like the spectacle I was planning on. But you can decide whether it’s enough to get you to take me up on Most Valuable Email today.

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… and 12 bonus persuasion secrets.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote above — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets. No need to write me for it. I’ll add it straight inside the MVE course area, right under the MVE Swipes document.

Do you sell info products?

If you sell your own info products — courses, ebooks, big boxes of DVDs and workbooks to go with them — then I’d like to share a genuine secret to help you sell more of what you’ve created.

This secret has nothing to do with writing more emails, or creating promotions, or running ads to get more leads, or affiliate marketing.

My guess is this is a method of selling info products that you’ve never heard of or thought about. At least that’s how it was for me until about a week ago.

​​This method requires almost no work on your part, and yet it could bring in hundreds or even thousands of new sales of your info products each month.

So here’s the deal:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you this secret. I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

“No-fooling” secret to writing opening lines that get read and copied

Yeah, I bet you want the secret. I’ll tell you, but it won’t make sense unless you read the following first.

Last Friday, I sent an email about a photo I found on Twitter of a guy hand-copying my emails. To which I got a reply from an online entrepreneur with a 200k-strong audience, Kieran Drew. Kieran wrote me:

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Guilty confession: I handcopied a fair few emails from your bonus doc in SME.

When I write my emails, I always go back to my inbox to see how you started your last few too. I still find the opening lines hard and I’m yet to see anyone do them as well as you do.

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I heard something similar about my opening lines from a friend who runs a successful niche magazine (hi Radu). He told me he keeps my emails for their opening lines, as inspiration for openers when he needs to write something.

I never thought writing an opening line was some special superpower of mine. But like they say, once is an accident, twice is a positioning statement.

So I thought about what I do with the opening line of each of my emails. Really, it’s the millennia-old advice from legendary direct marketer Joe Sugarman:

“The purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence. Nothing more, nothing less.”

You probably knew Joe Sugarman’s advice. You probably even follow it, and think you do it well. And maybe you really do it well. But maybe you don’t, not as well as you could. The trouble is, it’s easy to fool yourself.

I thought a bit more about my opening lines.

The only other secret that came to mind, besides the Joe Sugarman advice, is that I’ve spent a good amount of time learning to write sales bullets.

​​I’ve analyzed how A-list copywriters start with factual and dull source material… give away the relevant parts of it in their bullets… but leave out just the right thing to make you pull your hair out from wanting to know the secret.

It’s transformed how I write. Because it means there’s a way to learn to write copy in a way that you cannot fool yourself:

You start with the same source material A-list copywriters used to write their own bullets… write your own bullet… compare it to theirs… and see just how much tighter, more specific, and more intriguing theirs is.

The good news is, you don’t have to despair for long. Repeat this process, and soon enough, the A-listers tricks and tactics and skills start to seep into your own head, and people start saving what you write as examples of intriguing and specific and tight copy.

And on that note, I will remind you of my ongoing offer for Copy Riddles Lite.

The full Copy Riddles program teaches you how to write sales bullets, using the no-fooling process I described above.

Copy Riddles Lite is a tiny slice of the full Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced.

Copy Riddles Lite gives you a taste of this process, and gives you an opportunity to try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace. That’s a valuable experience whether or not you choose to upgrade to the full Copy Riddles program.

I’m making Copy Riddles Lite available until tomorrow, Thursday, at 8:31pm CET. If you’d like to get it, it’s available here (no sales page, just an order form):

https://bejakovic.com/crl

13 things mentally strong marketers do

I will tell you about the 13 things in a second, but let me first set it up with a story:

Yesterday I listened to an interview with Amy Morin, who has created a publishing empire starting with her 2014 book 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.

​​Morin has since written 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Do… Strong Women Don’t Do… Strong Couples Don’t Do… you get idea.

She has sold hundreds of thousands or millions of copies of her books.

And yet, she said that she never hit bestseller status in the first week after publication.

In fact, the original 13 Things book took a whole year to reach bestseller status.

How did it happen?

A year after Morin published 13 Things, Rush Limbaugh mentioned it on his radio show.

​​”Today I will talk about 13 things mentally strong people don’t do,” Limbaugh said.

But he never got around to it.

That was Monday.

(Are you starting to guess the 13 things that mentally strong marketers do???)

The next day, Limbaugh mentioned 13 Things again. “Yesterday I didn’t manage to get to it, but today I will talk about 13 things mentally strong people don’t do.”

Again the show ran long, and again Rush didn’t talk about Morin’s book or the 13 things inside it.

This went on for the whole week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday…

(By the way, we are getting really close to the 13 things that mentally strong marketers do. Bear with me.)

Finally, on Friday, Rush managed to list Morin’s list of 13 things mentally strong people don’t do.

​​But by then, bookstores had already sold out of all copies, and 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do had become a bestseller for the first time.

Point being… should I tell you?

​​Well, I might as well, instead of saving it for another email. The 13 Things Mentally Strong Marketers Do are:

1. Tease

​1. Tease

​3. Oh, I don’t know, tease?

​4. How about teasing for a change?

​5. Tease

​6. Tease

​7. Yep, still teasing

​8. I think you now know where it’s going, and that’s teasing

​9. I’ll give you a hint — it’s not giving away the secret. It’s kind of the opposite of that. Can you guess what it is?

​10. Tease

​11. Just in case it’s not clear: Tease

​12. Tease

​13. And tease some more!

It’s not easy to tease to its fullest effect. You might get queasy along the way. You might get bored. You might give in to angry readers who tell you to stop teasing already and tell them the secret or sell them the product already.

That’s why it takes a mentally strong marketer to tease to its full power.

And now that I’ve told you that, let me quickly mention I will rerelease my Insight Exposed training, all about my unique and supremely valuable journaling and notetaking system, some time in January.

For today, all I can offer you is my Most Valuable Email.

I released that training some 15 months ago.

I’ve been teasing it mercilessly ever since in these emails.

I always think I’ve gone too far, revealed too much, or tapped out reader curiosity.

And yet people continue to buy. So I will continue to tease Most Valuable Email and what the Most Valuable Email trick might be. In case you want to scratch the itch and find out:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

A message from Porter Spamsberry & Co

Each day, I like to check my spam folder several times because — who knows? Maybe somebody wrote me with a declaration of love, and I don’t get much of that in my usual inbox.

But no. No love ever in my spam folder.

Instead, all I ever find is dozens of messages from senders like:

Tech Crashes
Lucrative Market News
Worldwide Recession
Recession Starts Now
Market Collapsing

It’s not just the sender names that look the same.

All these emails have the same format, with a linked first sentence… a domain name that’s the same as the sender name (recessionstartsnow dot net)… and the identical “Thank You!” message that appears when you try to unsubscribe.

Unsubscribing, by the way, is impossible.

New disposable domains and new senders keep popping up in my spam folder, day after day, like moles. American Conservative Group. In Time Investing. Wallstreet Burning.

Sometimes, these website have disappeared by the time I click the link in the email, just a few hours after it was sent out.

But some of these emails do still point to live websites.

And on those websites, there’s always a video sales letter, which always features the same glum face. The glum face belongs to Porter Stansberry, the investment researcher and copywriter who started and then sold the billion-dollar company Stansberry Research.

What’s going on?

My suspicion is that this is some affiliate getting creative, and not a new email marketing strategy from Porter & Co, Stansberry’s new venture. But maybe I’m wrong.

If you know, and you would like to tell me, I will be grateful to you.

In any case, let me tease you about something else Stansberry-related:

A while back, a senior copywriter for Stansberry signed up to my newsletter. He replied to one of my emails, and offered to tell me the number one secret behind Stansberry’s billion-dollar success.

I won’t tell you what that copywriter told me — there’s value in not blabbing publicly.

But in case you would like to get on my email newsletter — after all, top copywriters and A-list marketers read it every day — click here to subscribe.

 

The most shocking, daring, even Robin Hood-like exploit ever to happen on board a Boeing 727

Today is Nov 24, 2022, which marks the 51st anniversary of NORJAK.

NORJAK was the most shocking, daring, even Robin Hood-like exploit ever to happen on board a Boeing 727.

On Nov 24 1971, Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 took off from Portland to Seattle. A short time after takeoff, a passenger calling himself Dan Cooper called over the stewardess and handed her a note.

“I HAVE A BONB,” the note read.

“A bonb sir?” said the stewardess. “What exactly is a ‘bonb’?”

“A bomb,” whispered Cooper, “I have a bomb!” And he opened a bag that was lying on his lap to show a mess of wires, clocks, batteries, and what appeared to be red sticks of dynamite.

To make short tale:

Flight 305 landed in Seattle. Cooper allowed the 36 passengers to get off. But he kept the crew on the plane. ​​He demanded $200k in 20-dollar bills — about $1.2 mil in today’s money — along with four parachutes.

And he got ’em.

Cooper then demanded the plane be refueled, and had it fly for Mexico City, at altitudes of less than 10,000 feet, at speeds of less than 200 knots.

And then, somewhere over Ariel, Washington, Cooper lowered the rear stairs of the Boeing 727.

He took off his tie, put on a pair of wraparound sunglasses, strapped on his parachute — and jumped.

In the weeks and months that followed, the FBI conducted one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in its history.

Agents interviewed over 800 suspects.

Other agents calculated wind speeds and flight paths and then still other agents combed probably areas for traces of Cooper.

But it all led to absolutely nothing. The hundreds of FBI agents and millions of dollars in government resources couldn’t find a single trace of Cooper.

And that’s how it stood for years — until February 10, 1980.

​​That day, the most unlikely thing happened. A few of Cooper’s 20-dollar bills surfaced, but in a place that nobody had expected.

Let me pause my story here because I really just wanted to set up a question I got.

The question came from a reader named Alex, who signed up for my Age of Insight training.

​​I’ve been following up with everybody who signed up to ask why they signed up and what they are hoping to learn. One of Alex’s wanna-learn topics was:

“How to give readers new insights into what they already know. So, for example, perhaps everyone knows a good subject line needs the curiosity element. But how can I retell this in a way that is different and insightful?”

My email today is one possible answer to Alex’s specific question about curiosity in subject lines.

As for Alex’s more general question — how do you take worn and familiar points, and make them sound insightful and new — well, there is another, very powerful strategy for that. I won’t talk about that today. But maybe I will tomorrow. In any case, if you’d like to read more of what I write, then click here and sign up for my email newsletter.

My frustrating personal experience reading a well-known marketer’s email a few days ago

A few days ago, a well-known marketer sent out one of his daily emails. I don’t to make it sound like I’m trying to make my name by repeatedly picking on people with bigger audiences than me, so let me just use an impenetrable alias for this guy. We can call him Gavin Juff.

So Gavin sent out an email a few days ago. The subject line read something like, “The one thing all successful copywriters have in common.”

But then, Gavin opened the body copy of his email with a long and I assume interesting personal story.

I say I assume it was interesting, because I just scrolled through it, looking for that “one thing” payoff.

And you know what? The payoff was, in effect, “We all make mistakes, and it’s okay.”

I rolled my eyes at this.

The fact is, Gavin was actually sharing a worthwhile point. The fact is, he put in a good amount of effort to illustrate his point with an (I assume) interesting personal story. And the fact is, it took me all of three seconds to open his email, scroll to the end, and feel he had wasted my time.

So there you go. That’s my personal story of a frustrating recent experience. I’m not sure what valuable point you can take away from that. Perhaps it’s something like:

“Excessive use of proven direct response techniques in personal daily emails can be more of a liability than an asset.”

Or maybe it’s something like:

“Make sure the transitions between your copy sections (including from subject line to body copy) are congruent and adequately prepared.”

Or maybe it’s just something like:

“The number one problem with daily email copy is a preachy, old-hat takeaway. But if you have to make such a takeaway because it’s actually true and important (like in Gavin’s case above), then sell something else in your subject line. Such as, for example, yourself and your frustrating personal experience.”

Anyways, I realize I haven’t done much to educate you in this post. I will try to do better in the future.

In case you would like to get my daily emails, and witness me trying to educate you more on the fundamentals of email copywriting and persuasion and influence more broadly, click here and follow the instructions.

Using Stefan Georgi in your copy

“It might take some figuring out to do it to where people aren’t pissed at you and you do it right, but I think this could actually be a home run thing that just absolutely CRUSHES it.”
— Stefan Georgi

So now let me ask you:

What is it?

What is Stefan talking about in the quote above?

I’ll give you a hint:

It’s a little gimmick, which Stefan advises you to use to start off your ad and VSL copy. It ties into that all-powerful driver of action, curiosity. And additionally, it creates a feeling of insight.

No? you don’t know the gimmick Stefan has in mind? Let me give you one more hint:

It starts with the letter R…

Then I…

Then D…

Then another D…

All right, fine — it’s riddles. In a recent video, “Using riddles in your copy,” Stefan advises using riddles in your ads and VSLs.

Why riddles?

Because riddles — “How many months have 28 days?” — consistently go viral on social media.

And what Stefan and many other smart marketers like to do is to camouflage their sneaky sales pitch and make it look like something — a riddle, for example — which you might want to consume for your own ends, and not for theirs.

And now, let me throw off my cloak and hold up my wizard staff, and with a blinding light shining from behind me, admit in my deep and resonant voice that this is exactly what I’ve done with this email.

Because the underlying idea Stefan is recommending — people enjoy riddles, so give ’em riddles — is at the core of my Copy Riddles program.

My goal was to make Copy Riddles fun. So I covered up the teaching, the learning, and the transformation bit in what I call copy riddles, hence the name of the program. ​​Did it work? Here’s what copywriter Cindy Suzuki, who joined Copy Riddles a few days ago, thinks about it:

Hi John,

I am having a blast with copy riddles so far. It feels like a game. I love it when learning is actually fun. Was on the fence until the last day, and I’m so glad I bought it 🙂

Cindy

If you like fun and games, and maybe some sales, then don’t join Copy Riddles. But see if you can sign up for my email newsletter. You can get started on that puzzle right here.

The IOU theory of copywriting

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