Structure Of Copy and Content

The (yes, THE) secret of storytelling

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A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos likes to tell the story of how he became a copywriter. I’ve heard him tell this story multiple times, mostly online, and once in real life as well.

I forget the details of how it all goes, but there’s one detail that I never forget.

At one point, Parris was working at a real estate office, and the office manager at the time, in a fit of fury and impotence, punched his hand through a window.

And now comes the bit I always remember, which I’ve heard Parris repeat every time I’ve heard him tell this story:

There was a thin trail of blood on the floor, from the broken window to the elevator, as the manager walked out of the office, never to return again.

And that, in a snapshot, is THE secret of storytelling.

In a few more words, from an article I read about Irving Thalberg, a movie producer who was called the “Boy Wonder” of Hollywood, and who invented and popularized many Hollywood tropes that we now take for granted as elements of effective storytelling:

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The real reason for the enduring Thalberg myth has less to do with any of this than with that perennial idea, which fascinated [F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s, and who wrote a novel with a fictionalized Thalberg as protagonist] as it does us, that there are secrets of storytelling, to which a few are privy.

Yet good Hollywood films have more or less a single story. Raise the stakes, place insuperable obstacles before the protagonist, have the protagonist somehow surmount them while becoming braver and better. What works for Dorothy works for Rocky. In truth, we may follow stories, but we respond to themes; the story is just the tonality in which those themes are played. […]

No one can recall the ins and outs of Salozzo’s drug scheme in “The Godfather,” but we remember Pacino’s face in closeup: we come for the story, stay for the sublimations.

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I don’t really know what the guy behind this article is talking about when he talks about “themes” and “sublimations.”

I do know that few stories are memorable… that the structure of storytelling, hyped up as it is, is often irrelevant… and that what actually makes a story work is not the rags-to-riches, or riches-to-rags, or hero quest skeleton underneath… but a few dramatic and memorable snapshots:

The “kiss of death” that Michael Corleone gives his brother Fredo in the Godfather II; Rocky running up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the thin trail of blood from the broken window to the elevator.

So if it’s not the structure but the memorable snapshot that is the secret of storytelling… then how do you come up with memorable snapshots?

I hate to break it to you, but if that were a knowable secret, then every Hollywood movie would be a forever-beloved blockbuster. Which is clearly not the case.

The best you can do is to come up with the best snapshots you can, and then to test them out on your audience. See if the audience oohs and aahs, if they feed you back the same snapshot days and weeks and months later, and if they come back for more. Then double down on what works, and discard the rest.

And since I gotta sell you something, let me tie this into the topic of writing daily emails, because daily emails make for a particularly easy and fertile way to test out new ideas and ways of presenting those ideas to an audience.

I’ve written books and created courses that people buy and enjoy and then come back for more of. One secret of how I make such info products is that I repurpose my daily emails, or rather, the emails that worked — ideas and snapshots that I field-tested on my audience, and that I got positive feedback on.

If you want to start writing daily emails of your own, and if you want a field-tested guide for how to do that well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

What really makes for a good sex scene?

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As of last night, I’m about halfway through a 3-hour-long movie, titled Nymphomaniac, Volume 1. (There’s also a Volume 2, with more hours.)

I’m only halfway through it because I can only watch it in 25-minute increments. The movie is dark (literally, full of brown and black frames), heavy-handed, and worst of all, filled with gratuitous, very unsexy sex scenes.

I’m telling you this because, though you can’t tell it from Nymphomaniac, sex in movies can apparently be sexy.

Back in 1980, Francis Ford Coppola, best known as the director of the Godfather (volumes 1 and 2, each many hours long), was making a movie that was to feature a sex scene.

Coppola, who is a bit obsessive about making his movies good, tasked a UC Berkeley PhD student named Constance Penly with phoning up hundreds of famous and influential people to find out 1) which sex scenes were the best and 2) what those sex scenes had in common.

Would you like to know also?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

After hundreds of interviews and many hours of uncomfortable sex scene watching, Penley had her answer. The best sex scenes had two things in common:

1. The sex wasn’t supposed to happen, because of some big difference between the sexers

2. One or both of the characters were under threat of death

Penley gives the example of the sex scene in the original Terminator movie, between the characters of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. He is a rebel soldier from 45 years in the future, sent back in time. She is a woman of the present, being hunted by a cyborg assassin. Sarah and Kyle have sex, and apparently Penley thought it was hot.

(Incidentally, the Skynet future of the Terminator movies, which both Kyle Reese and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin are sent back from, was set in 2029.

That was distant back in 1984 when the Terminator came out, but it’s near to us now. And it looks like we’re right on track.

I saw a video just yesterday of an AI conference in China in which a woman was kickboxing with a humanoid robot that looked like it was trained on thousands of hours of UFC footage. For demonstration purposes, the robot was tuned to a setting of “Not Kill.”)

But back to those good sex scene criteria. What is it about these two criteria specifically?

I realized what makes a good sex scene is just like what makes a good promotional sales event — there’s a time-limited window and a real cost for not acting during it.

Is this a coincidence? Or am I reaching? I don’t think so. I think it goes back to the fundamental and age-old questions that all human minds are always asking:

Why? Why this? Why should I care? Why is it now or never?

And with that, I can finally wrap up my email and point you to the offer I have been working up to promoting. It’s a book, one I’ve written.

The reason I’m promoting it today is that it ties into the question of “why.” In fact, my book has the question of “why” running through it in different ways, from beginning to end. And not just that. It also shows you how to answer that question, implicitly and explicitly, to influence others without being heavy-handed and gratuitous about it.

Would you like to know how?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

A mystery on today’s date

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At 10am on July 2, 1937, precisely 88 years ago, the following happened:

An overloaded plane, 5,000lbs over its normal weight, rumbled down a grass runway.

Observers at the airport thought the plane had actually fallen down the cliff at the end of the runway, but a few moments later, the plane reappeared, apparently airborne, and gradually rose up into the clouds.

Aboard, there were only two passengers: a navigator, named Fred Noonan, and the most famous female aviatress of all time, Amelia Earheart.

Earheart and Noonan were completing the final leg of their round-the-world flight, crossing the Pacific from Melanesia back to the U.S.. If successful, Earheart would become the first woman to fly all the way around the world.

But Earheart and Noonan never made it to the next stop. Some 20 hours later, also on July 2 (thanks to crossing the international date line), they disappeared somewhere over the Pacific, never to be heard from or seen again.

Except… maybe they were heard from or seen again?

A woman in Texas picked up an SOS radio transmission the next day, in which she heard a woman who claimed to be Earheart, and a man groaning in background. The two were supposedly stranded on an uninhabited island in the Pacific.

Then again, a Japanese woman on the island of Saipan claimed she had personally witnessed Earheart and Noonan, following their crash on the island, being executed by the Imperial Japanese Army.

There were also claims that Earheart was captured but not executed by the Japanese. In this scenario, she was forced to work as Tokyo Rose, an English-speaking radio broadcaster used to spread Japanese propaganda during WWII.

And finally, there was the theory that Earheart completed her flight as planned but immediately chose to go into obscurity, only to reappear years later as a New Jersey banker.

All in all, around 100 books have been written about Earheart and what really happened to her.

Organizations and well-funded expeditions have been established to really get to the bottom of it.

Numerous TV shows and documentaries have tried to shine light on the mystery. I’m surprised Angelina Jolie never made a movie about Earheart.

Now I think you will agree with me, because I happen to be right about the matter, that none of this would have happened had Earheart simply crashed and burned in a certain death, or had she even managed to complete her round the world tour as expected.

There’s something about the mystery of not knowing what really happened, a lack of closure, which drives intense attention or even obsession, which cannot be created in any other way.

If you have basic knowledge of copywriting, you are familiar with this human quirk, and you probably even exploit it via “open loops” in your copy.

What you might not be familiar with is the underlying neurology of why we feel the need for closure so strongly, or how the same neurology can be exploited by magicians (if you ever hear a magician tell a corny joke, that’s why), by negotiators (Jim Camp’s advice to “negotiate in the bathroom”) or by hypnotists (to perform a rapid induction that gets 5 weeks’ worth of hypnosis down into 3 minutes).

If any of that sounds intriguing to you, take a look at Commandment X of my new 10 Commandments book, waiting patiently for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to push-pull prospects on your list

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A few days ago, long-time reader and personal development coach Miro Skender sent me a message with a highlighted passage from my new 10 Commandments book which says:

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Expose human beings to anything constant — even incontestably good things like compliments, security, or money — and people soon stop responding. Like Macknick and Martinez-Conde say, we need contrast to see, hear, feel, think, and pay attention. Otherwise the world becomes literally invisible.

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Miro then said how he knows this fact of human psychology well. He knows how to apply it in his work with coaching clients. But he doesn’t know how to put it to use with prospects on his list. Do I have any ideas?

It’s a good question.

Prospects get bored and leave if you expose them to a constant stream of the same — even if it’s good, valuable, well-written same. But not only that. You make fewer sales with the prospects who stay, because your emails are simply less persuasive than they could be.

I thought of how best to answer Miro’s question in an email. Should I give an example from my own previous emails? Or from a sales letter written by an A-list copywriter? Or would a metaphor be needed to really get the point across?

There are benefits to doing each, I thought. So why choose among them and risk doing a sub-optimal job?

I soon realized that answering Miro’s question properly would involve a ton of work, way too much for a daily email.

Fortunately, I remembered I had done it all already, and more, inside my now-retired Most Valuable Postcard #2, code name “Ferrari Monster.”

The background on the Most Valuable Postcard is that it was a short-lived, paid, monthly newsletter I ran back in the summer of 2022.

It was short-lived because I found it was way too much work and stress to write up something as in-depth and researched as I wanted to make each of these monthly guides to be.

I pulled the plug on Most Valuable Postcard after the second issue, but not before I got glowing reviews from a group of initial subscribers that I let in.

For example, email marketer Daniel Throssell, who was one of those early subscribers, wrote me to say after the first issue:

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Seriously though, dude, I know it’s issue #1 but this program you’ve created is amazing. You’ve honestly made me pause and reconsider some ideas about how I want to do my own newsletter because this is just so excellently executed. I love pretty much everything about how you’ve done this, from the format to the content to the value you deliver in your insights. Really impressed.

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I don’t make back issues of Most Valuable Postcard available regularly. Most Valuable Postcard #2 wasn’t available yesterday. It won’t be available tomorrow. But it is available today.

If you’d like to find out more about what’s inside, and how you can use it to push-pull the prospects on your list:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp2/

Ideas are cheap, here’s how to sell them for good money

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A couple days ago I got a message from Alex Popov, who works as a copywriter (he had a couple controls for an Agora affiliate) and as an NLP trainer. Alex read my new 10 Commandments book and wrote me with some qualified praise:

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Hey Bejako!

Your new book is quite simply fascinating.

I know most, not all, of the big persuasion ideas inside, yet I’m learning them in all new mind-expanding ways.

Your book is changing my thinking about these persuasion principles for the better.

Thanks!

Only one, negative, though. The price is ridiculously low. So low in fact, I almost didn’t buy it.

Anyway, I’m glad I did.

Real thanks and use this if you like.

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I’ve been saying it for a long time:

Ideas are cheap. Even good, profitable, proven ideas.

The real value lies not in sharing an idea. Odds are excellent people have heard it all before, even if you feel you thought it up yourself. (You may have, but others have thought it up before you.)

Instead, the real value lies in:

1. Presenting an idea in a way that has a chance to penetrate the defenses your reader’s mind is sure to throw up (“I don’t get it,” “I’ve heard this before,” “I’m busy,” “I could never do this”)

2. Presenting an idea in a memorable way so that it sticks with your reader long after he’s finished reading

3. All the surrounding stuff besides the idea or even its presentation — all the encouraging, taunting, goading, shaming, motivating your reader to actually do something with the idea you’re sharing other than just squirrel it away

And that’s what you can find in my new 10 Commandments book:

Grifters, suckers, the “World’s Youngest Hypnotist,” an openly racist “comic’s comic,” a couple of tophat-wearing magicians, a pickup artist who describes himself as “average, with a serious tilt towards ugly,” the “world’s most feared negotiator,” the last Russian Tsar, the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Ronald Reagan, and much, much more.

They are all in the book so you see the underlying ideas in a new light in case you know them already, so you remember them in case you don’t, and so you put them to work in your business and personal lives, and profit from them.

As for the ridiculously low price, it’s there for a reason, which has nothing to do with the value of what’s inside. Don’t let it dissuade you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Free course by bestselling author on how to write a book in 30 days

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No not me. I don’t do free courses. And though I’ve reached various levels of Amazon bestsellerdom over the years, I’d feel like a liar branding myself a “bestselling author.”

No, the bestselling author in question is James Altucher.

Altucher has published 25 books in his life. Some were total flops. Others got on the WSJ and USA Today bestseller lists. A couple were the number one selling books across all of of Amazon for a while.

I’ve been a fan of James Altucher for years. And even though I’ve just published a book (my new 10 Commandments book, which is built around an idea I actually got from Altucher), I was eager to listen to his new course.

It’s delivered for free, at least in part, via his podacst.

The initial lesson was inspiring and insightful, as usual with his material.

First came all the benefits that Altucher has personally seen from writing his many books.

Then he exploded objections about what writing a book really entails (spoiler: short, disorganized, and ungrammatical are perfectly ok, particularly in the first draft).

Then he gave three patented questions for positioning yourself so that your book naturally clicks with your audience, in the present moment.

All good stuff. And then, in lesson two, Altucher got to the Hero’s Journey. And I groaned.

As you might know, the Hero’s Journey is a story structure that keeps repeating, over and over, throughout various stories and cultures and ages. A familiar recent example is the first Matrix movie:

Neo is just some dude. Then he gets a call (literally, via a cellphone) to go on a quest. At first, he resists. Then he’s forced into it. He meets a guide in the form of a wise sage named Morpheus. He faces increasing challenges and obstacles as he progresses on his quest. He makes friends and allies along the way. Finally, there’s a climactic battle between Neo and the forces of evil, or rather, a climactic battle between Neo and his own doubts, fears, and limiting beliefs.

My issue with the hero’s journey, or with James Altucher talking it up, is not that the structure is not effective. Rather, like any structure or format that simplifies a complex topic and creates a feeling of insight (Myers-Briggs, AIDA), is that true believers start to shoehorn the entire world into this one structure.

Altucher does it in his course. Everything becomes a Hero’s journey, from Princess Leia’s backstory in Star Wars, to Moses dying right before he reaches Israel, to some woman writing a tweet about crypto.

If I didn’t already know the Hero’s Journey well, and if I didn’t already know there are lots of other effective ways to communicate that didn’t fit into this mold, I’d be very confused about what these very different stories actually have in common.

Anyways, this email is getting long. I got two conclusions for you:

1. If you want to follow the canonical Hero’s Journey as a paint-by-numbers structure, like the Matrix does, you’ll probably be fine. You might not write the next Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, and you might have to lie a little if you’re telling your own life story, but you will have a serviceable structure that people will understand and even respond to.

2. If you don’t want to follow the canonical Hero’s Journey. you don’t have to. The basic thing you want to have in a good story is tension, which comes from ups and downs, twists and turns. Remember that, and you can write effective content — a story, a book, a Tweet — that doesn’t fit the Hero’s Journey, even if true believers are sure to argue otherwise.

And now back to my new 10 Commandments book, specifically to the topic of tension, ups and downs, twists and turns.

Turns out this isn’t just valuable in telling stories, but in influence in general.

I have an entire chapter on the topic, which starts out with a famous screenplay (which doesn’t fit the Hero’s Journey), then moves on to a pickup artist seducing a lingerie model in a Hollywood nightclub (a story that doesn’t fit the Hero’s Journey), and finally ends with an example of a real live con game I dug up from a 1912 newspaper article, featuring the “Charles Gondorff Syndicate,” who managed to con a man for about $1.8 million in today’s money.

All these persuaders and influencers were relying on the same same basic technique, one that you can use if you want to sell more, persuade more, or simply communicate more effectively in your personal life. In the book, I sum it up in two words. Best part? Those words are not “lying,” “cheating,” or “Hero’s Journey.” For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Солярис

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Last night, I went to the movies. By myself. At 10pm, which is pretty much my bedtime.

First came one trailer — some Iraq war thriller with Matt Damon as a solider yelling at other soldiers and lots of explosions and jets swooping in and rapid-fire editing between more yelling and explosions and gunfire.

Then came another trailer — a horror movie about vampires in the deep south, with bloody mouths and fangs and a vampire banging his head on the door of a wood cabin, asking to be let in, while the non-vampires inside cower and transfer their fear to the audience.

And then, after about six total minutes of this adrenaline-pumping overstimulation, the screen got dark. A Bach piece on organ started playing and a barebones title card showed the name of the movie:

Солярис

… or Solaris, if you can’t read that. A three-hour-long science fiction movie from 1972. In Russian, which I don’t speak. With Spanish subtitles, which I can barely read before they disappear. The movie opens up with a five-minute sequence of a man walking next to a lake, without any dialogue.

I’ve seen Solaris twice before, years ago. A few days ago, I finished reading the science fiction novel on which it’s based. When I saw it was playing at the local old-timey movie theater, I decided I would violate my usual bedtime and go see it again, and on the big screen.

I’m not trying to sell you on Solaris. All I really want to highlight is the contrast that was so obvious between those new Hollywood trailers and the start of the 1972 Russian movie. It reminded me of something I read in William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade:

“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”

Goldman was writing in a different era. He was contrasting movie writing to TV writing.

At the beginning of a movie, Goldman said, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.

Things have changed since Goldman wrote the above. Today, all Hollywood movies have become like TV. That doesn’t eliminate the fact that different formats allow you to do different things, and that not every movie needs to start with a heart-pounding sequence of bloody vampires banging their heads on the door.

The bigger point is, just because you know a trick, this doesn’t require you to use it at every damn opportunity. Holding back can in fact can make the show better.

A year ago, I read a book titled Magic And Showmanship, about… magic and showmanship. The author of that book, a magician named Henning Nelms, kept coming back to a principle he called conservation.

Conservation is keeping from overselling what you’ve got, and from making yourself out to be more skilled or powerful than absolutely necessary for the effect in question.

It’s a lesson that can apply to a lot of showmanship, including showmanship in print.

Anyways, I suspect nobody will take me up on a recommendation to read Nelms’s Magic And Showmanship, but recommend it I will. In order to sell it to you, I can only say that last year, I was even thinking of taking the ideas from this book and turning them into a full-blown course or training about running email promos, because I found the ideas so transferable.

In case you’re a curious type, or in case you simply want new ideas for running email promos:

https://bejakovic.com/nelms

Eureka! The opposite of a humblebrag

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In this newsletter, I have a questionable habit of dissecting jokes to find out what their digestive and pulmonary systems look like. I’m about to do it right now as well, and I honestly think the result is gonna be amazing.

A couple days ago, I wrote about an interview I’d listened to with a Dublin barman, Brian Wynne. Here’s how Wynne introduces himself at the start of the podcast:

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As Michael Crichton said, I do sometimes suffer from a “deplorable excess of personality.”

I’m a friendly kind of an outgoing chap. I become friends with people easily. That’s what makes me, um, fit the bar trade so well is that, uh, I’m extremely likable… I’m incredibly handsome, intelligent, witty… you know? I am the most humble man in Ireland.

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Now here’s a riddle for ya:

If you ask people what characteristics they hate most in others, the top 2 Family Feud responses are likely to be 1) Arrogant and 2) Fake.

And yet, here is Wynne being either arrogant (“I am the most humble man in Ireland”) or fake (maybe he’s just saying he’s the most humble man in Ireland, but he doesn’t really mean it).

Of course, you probably don’t agree with either of those negative diagnoses of Wynne.

I can tell you that when I listened to him introduce himself in this way, I certainly didn’t get irritated by his supposed arrogance or repulsed by his supposed fakeness. In fact, he put a smile on muh fehs. I imagine this effect comes through in the transcript as well.

So the riddle for ya is:

What is Wynne doing/saying to make his message come across as it does?

I don’t have a good name for the effect he’s creating, but it’s kind of the opposite of a humblebrag. Maybe it could be called a boastful bond.

In any case, I have my own insightful ideas about what exactly Wynne is doing to achieve this effect.

My insightful ideas take advantage of my experience of 5+ years of running this daily newsletter, plus of course my own native intelligence, which truly is… something spectacular. An intelligence to behold. In fact, I might be the most brilliant man to ever write an email newsletter of middling reach and questionable influence.

If you’d like to get my immense insights on this topic, all I can really recommend is that you be signed up for my Daily Email Habit service before tomorrow, because I will have a daily puzzle and accompanying hints that allow you to do a “boastful bond” in your own emails as well.

After all, there’s no sense in just knowing how to do something without actually putting in in practice. And putting in practice is what Daily Email Habit is all about. If you’d like to sign up for it in time:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Basic tip for doing live webinars/workshops

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A few days ago, copywriter GC Tsalamagkakis posted the following question in my Daily Email House community:

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I have a retainer for whom I’m writing paywalled articles about coding with AI, creating custom agents, etc.

Starting next week, we’re going to start doing live webinars/workshops based on those very articles.

This will be my first time presenting–except for one time for a hackathon in 2019 where we secured a podium spot because our presentation was full of memes and our app had the right amount of buzzwords like ‘blockchain’–so I was wondering if you have any basic tips or good-to-knows.

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My basic tip or good-to-know is illustrated by the fact that I’ve forbidden myself to eat chocolate, because I’m much like a dog.

I can eat chocolate until I get sick from it, and even then, I’ll keep eating.

Logic says there would be some off-switch, some kind of negative feedback loop, some mechanism to say, “No, now is enough.” But logic is wrong.

That’s really an illustration of the fundamental marketing truth, that there’s great value in selling people more of what they have already proven to buy and consume.

I think of this a little differently from the way you may have already heard the idea.

For example, and this is in answer to GC’s question above, I sell the same kind of paid content as I do free content, which people already consumed to buy the paid content.

In other words, the books I’ve written, the courses I’ve created, the live trainings I’ve put on, and charged anywhere from $10 to $1,000, are all as stuffed as I can make them with personal stories, analogies, case studies, pop culture references, jokes, profiles of interesting and influential people, and occasionally completely irrelevant but fun asides — just like my daily emails are.

Problem:

At least in my experience, it’s hard to come up with a bunch of really good stories, analogies, case studies, jokes, pop culture references in one sitting, or even two, or even 10.

Much more effective, and much faster and easier long term, at least when it comes to creating new offers, is already to have a bunch of good stories, analogies, case studies, jokes, pop culture references lying around, which you can repurpose.

The way I personally get there is writing daily emails, which have the rather magical Triforce of:

1. Converting new prospects into customers…

2. Continuing the relationship with existing customers and helping them get more value out of what they already bought, and…

3. Creating, or helping create, high quality new offers one email at a time.

That’s to say, if you want to start putting on live webinars or workshops in the near future, or if you want to create a course, or write a book, or create a pinup calendar, then start writing a daily email today.

You will have instant fodder, usually of a very high quality, when it’s time to sit down and create that other thing.

That’s my basic tip or good-to-know for today, along with the fact that, if you haven’t yet started writing daily emails, or have started but haven’t been able to stick to it, then I can help, or rather, my Daily Email Habit service can help. For more info on that:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

How to write how-to content in the age of ChatGPT

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“They can put a man on the moon, but…”

Jerry Seinfeld did a comedy routine in the 1980s about how Neil Armstrong landing on the moon was the worst thing to ever happen, because it gave ammo to every dissatisfied and griping person on earth.

Well, I feel like we’re in a similar moment today. Just yesterday I read a prediction by four smart and informed people called “AI 2027.” It says we will have superhuman artificial intelligence in the next two years.

“They are gonna put superhuman artificial intelligence on my stupid iPhone, but…”

… people still have problems today, big and small.

That’s a part of the reason why I feel that how-to content, mocked for years by Internet marketing thought leaders, is making a comeback.

(By the way, everything I’ve just told you above is a “problem-solution” lead, which is a good way to “pace” your reader in your how-to content, and set up the actual tips you have to share. As for that:)

#1. Absolute best case: Offer a new solution

How-to content offers solutions to people’s problems. People have problems not because they are incompetent and hapless morons. Instead, they have problems because what they’ve tried before hasn’t worked.

So the absolute best how-to solution you can offer them is something new.

Example:

A few years ago I wrote about a trick I had found made me motivated and eager to get to work.

Basically, before getting to work, I’d set a timer for 7 minutes and just sit, without allowing myself to do anything but sit. When the seven minutes was up, I’d be raring to get to work simply because my mind had been so impatient and was looking for some outlet.

(I’ve since started calling this Boredom Therapy and I still highly recommend it.)

When I wrote an email about this 7-minute pre-work trick, I got a record number of people replying and saying, “This is so cool! I gotta try it!”

People are always looking for ways to be more productive or, rather, less unproductive. They’ve heard about goal setting and Pomodoro technique and eliminating distractions. They have either tried them (“didn’t work”) or they’ve dismissed them (“couldn’t work because I heard it before”).

But offer them something new, and neither of those objections holds.

Offering a genuinely new solution is valuable in the age of ChatGPT, because by design, ChatGPT contains at best yesterday’s solutions that it learned from yesterday’s how-to articles.

The trouble is, there’s only so much new stuff, and even less new stuff that actually works. What then?

#2. Next-best case: Offer a solution that’s worked for you personally

In short, if you can’t write a new “How to” solution, write a “How I” case study.

It’s easy to suggest solutions when people have problems, and it’s even easier to dismiss such solutions. What’s impossible to dismiss is a fact-packed personal case study of how you solved a problem in your own instance.

Example:

Did you see what I did in that point 1 above, about a new solution? The fact is, “offer a new solution” is hardly new advice for in how-to content. So imagine that I’d just written the “how-to” part of that section, without including the personal case study of my boredom therapy email.

I feel, and maybe you will agree with me, that it would have made that section much easier to shrug off, and might even have made it sound preachy and annoying (“Oh yeah Bejako? Where am I supposed to get a new solution you donkey?”)

A how-to solution backed by your own case study is valuable in the age of ChatGPT because, while the solution is not new, the case study is. It therefore makes your content both unique and credible. On the other hand, default ChatGPT how-to advice is, once again by design, generic, anonymous, and therefore at least a bit suspect.

#3. Not-quite-best case: Sell the hell out of an old hat

If you got nothing new AND you don’t have a personal case study to share, then you’re left with familiar, well-trodden, old-hat solutions.

At this point, you’re not really in the information-sharing how-to business any more. Rather, you’re in the inspiration and motivation business.

Example:

In my Simple Money Emails course, I spend about a page’s worth of copy in the introduction to warn people against dismissing ideas in the course they might be familiar with.

That’s because later in the course I will suggest such tame breakthroughs as “make sure the opening of your email supports the offer you are selling.”

My customers might be tempted to shrug this off, and so I sell them on it, in advance — by acknowledging it might sound basic but highlighting how valuable it has been to me and other successful marketers, and how long it took me to actually internalize it, and how many people, including well-paid copywriters, actually don’t follow it.

Inspiring and motivating people will remain valuable in the age of ChatGPT because — well, who knows if it will remain valuable.

I’ve actually found ChatGPT to do a pretty good job inspiring me and motivating me.

But I still think humans have the edge here, simply because of our own pro-human, anti-machine embodimentism (a word I just made up to mirror racism and speciesism). I predict that will continue to hold, at least until 2027.

By the way, it’s good to keep your how-to articles to no more and no less than three points. I have more tips to share on writing how-to content in the age of ChatGPT, but I won’t.

Instead, let me tie this all into my promotion of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, which I’m bringing to an end tomorrow.

If you think back to my point 1 above, about how there’s not a lot of new stuff out there, and even less new stuff that works… well, that’s because most of the new stuff that works is inside Travis’s Royalty Ronin membership, and the bonus courses he gives away to members.

Over the past five years, I’ve seen dozens of people build 6- and 7-figure coaching businesses by reselling and repackaging ideas that Travis was sharing back in 2018 and 2019.

But Travis hasn’t been sittin’ pretty in the meantime. He keeps creating and innovating new ideas, ones that actually make money for him and for others who know of them and put them to use.

You can know of these if you look inside Royalty Ronin. And maybe you can be inspired and motivated by the other people inside the community to actually put some of these ideas to use.

I’ve been promoting Royalty Ronin for 2 weeks now. I will end my promotion tomorrow, Sunday, April 6, at 12 midnight PST.

I will certainly promote Royalty Ronin again in the future, maybe even every month. So you might wonder what exactly this Sunday deadline means.

I have been giving a bonus bundle to people who signed up for a week’s free trial of Ronin. After Sunday, this bonus bundle will go away, or rather, it will go behind the paywall. I will no longer give it to people who do the free trial, but who end up signing up and paying for Ronin.

If you’d like to kick off a week’s free trial to Ronin before the trial bonuses disappear, you can do that at the following link:

​​https://bejakovic.com/

P.S. My bonus bundle, which I have decided to call the “Lone Wolf and Cub” bonus bundle, to go with the “Ronin” theme, currently includes the following:

1. My Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what people in your audience really want, so you can better know what to offer them + how to present it.

2. A short-term fix if your offer has low perceived value right now. Don’t discount. Sell for full price, by using the strategy I’ve described here.

3. Inspiration & Engagement. A recording of my presentation for Brian Kurtz’s $2k/year Titans XL mastermind.

I say “currently includes” because I will probably add more bonuses to this bundle, once I remove it as a bonus for the Ronin free trial and make it a bonus for actual Ronin subscription.

But if you sign up for trial now and decide to stick with Ronin (or you’ve already joined based on my recommendation), I’ll get you the extra bonuses automatically in the course area.