Structure Of Copy and Content

Persuasion world: Men wanted for hazardous journey

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A couple years ago, I got an email from a successful copywriter who had just signed up to my list. He wrote me to say hello.

​​He also mentioned he found my site because he was studying Dan Ferrari’s sales letters in detail. (I had written some stuff about Dan and about being in Dan’s coaching program.)

The copywriter and I got to email-chatting a bit. I mentioned a presentation Dan once gave, where he broke down one of his most successful promotions. I offered to send successful copywriter #1, the guy who had written me, this presentation.

But he was reluctant. It seemed he had gotten what he wanted from Dan’s sales letters alone… and he didn’t want or need to hear Dan’s take on it.

And you know what? I can understand.

I liken it to going to see a movie versus reading a review of that same movie. The review might be good, might be bad… but even if it was written by the director himself, it’s certainly going to be a very different experience than seeing the actual movie itself.

The review won’t stimulate the same random pathways in the brain. It won’t trigger the same emotions. And it won’t allow for much independent thought.

This applies to you too. Right now, you may be reading books… going through courses… skimming emails like this one. Fine. They can give you the lay of the land when you’re new to a topic.

But the map, as they say in NLP, is not the territory.

Somebody else’s second-order interpretation of what persuasion is all about can only take you so far.

The good news is there’s a whole wild and dangerous world of TV shows, movies, current events, tabloids, political propaganda, real-life experiences, and yes, even books and articles, just waiting for you to start exploring and asking — why do I think this is compelling?

If you find that argument compelling, then I’ve got a contradictory bit of advice for you:

G​o and read my 10 Commandments book.

​​Not for any persuasion lessons it might contain… but rather, as an example of content that you can dissect and analyze yourself.

After all, a lot of people have found this book interesting and even valuable. If you want to see why, and maybe even how you can do something similar yourself, take a look here:

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

I just remembered Cialdini’s best way to teach anybody anything

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I’ve just awakened from a hypnotic trance.

I spent the last 16 minutes watching a video of a fridge repairman from Alabama disassembling a failed fridge compressor.

As my hypnotic trance cleared, I began to marvel at this mystery.

After all, I don’t have a fridge compressor to fix. And I’m not looking for DIY advice.

In fact, I have zero interest in fridges or handymanism. I wasn’t familiar with 95% of the technical terms the fridge guy was using. I really could gain nothing practical or pleasurable from his 16-minute video.

So why did I watch it, with rapt attention, from beginning to end?

Perhaps, you say, I was just looking to waste time instead of writing this email.

I certainly do like to waste time instead of working. But why not waste time doing something I like, like reading the New Yorker, or watching some Bill Burr on YouTube?

No, it wasn’t that.

But perhaps, you say again, I just enjoy feeling smug and right.

After all, the dead fridge compressor was from 2009. And the fridge repair guy specializes in maintaining long-running, old fridges that go back to the 1940s. So maybe I was just looking for confirmation of my belief that old is good and new is worthless.

Maybe. But if that’s the case, why did I have to watch the video, and all 16 minutes of it? I mean, the video’s title gave me all I really needed to feel smug:

“Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridge compressor autopsy…”

So no, it can’t be that.

But perhaps I just wanted to share something cool with a friend.

Even though I have no interest in handymanism, I do have a friend who is into it. I wanted to forward him this video, and maybe, you say, I just wanted to make sure it was worthwhile.

But that doesn’t hold water either. After all, this video popped up on a news aggregator I frequent, where it got 2-3x the usual number of upvotes. That’s a lot of tacit endorsement of quality. And I could tell within just the first minute or two that my friend might find this video interesting, and that I should send him the link.

So why did I myself watch the entire thing?

In trying to figure out the answer to this puzzle, I jumped back to a critical point in the video at minute 5:54.

The fridge guy has just tested whether the compressor failed because of electrical failure. No, it turns out, it wasn’t electrical.

So he decides to cut open the locked-up compressor and see what’s going on inside. As soon as he cuts the compressor open, the motor moves freely, and is no longer locked up.

The fridge guy is in wonder.

“I don’t understand at all,” he says. He decides to try to power the compressor up again. “My guess is it still won’t start.”

“Aha!” I said. “I get it now!”

Because I realized what was going on. I realized why I had been sucked into this video so hypnotically.

It was the structure of the way the fridge guy was doing his compressor autopsy.

He was using the exact same structure I read about once. A very smart and influential professor of persuasion spelled out this structure in a book, and he said it’s the best way to present any new information and teach anyone anything.

I don’t know if the fridge repair guy had been secretly reading the work of this professor of persuasion.

But I do know that if you’re trying to teach anybody anything, whether in person, in your courses, or just in your marketing, then this structure is super valuable.

It makes it so people actually want to consume your material. They will even want to consume it all the way to the end (just look at me and that 16-minute fridge video).

This structure also makes it so the info you are teaching sticks in people’s heads. That way, they are more likely to use it, profit from it, and become grateful students and customers for life.

And this structure even makes it so people experience an “Aha moment,” just like I did. When that happens, people feel compelled to share their enthusiasm with others, just like I am doing now with you right now.

You might be curious about this structure and who this professor of persuasion is.

Well, I will tell you the guy’s name is Robert Cialdini. He is famous for writing the book Influence. But the structure I’m talking about is not described in Influence.

Instead, it’s described in another of Cialdini’s books, Pre-Suasion.

Now, if you read Daniel Throssell’s emails, you might know that Daniel advises people to skip Pre-Suasion. He even calls it the worst copywriting book he has ever read.

I don’t agree.

Because in Chapter 6 of Pre-Suasion, Cialdini spells out the exact structure I’ve been telling you about. Plus he gives you an example from his own teaching.

This is some hard-core how-to. ​And if you ever want to get information into people’s heads, and make it stick there, for their benefit as well as your own, you might find this how-to information very valuable.

In case you want it:

https://bejakovic.com/presuasion

“Email Marketing: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson”

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Here’s a quick checklist of elements that make for engaging, effective, and influential emails:

1. Conflict, outrage. We seem to take a constant delight in seeing or participating in a fight. The more real it is, the more engaging it is. The more status the fight participants have, the more engaging it is.

2. Surprising connections between unrelated things, or surprising distinctions in things that seemed simple and unified.

3. Metaphors, analogies, and “transubstantiation.”

4. Angst. All good copy is rooted in angst. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “The sky is either falling or is about to fall.”

5. Imitation and parody.

6. An engaging character. As Matt Furey didn’t but should have said, “For the email marketer, nothing transcends character.” The email of personality, rather than the email of “value.” Email is not about sharing valuable information. It’s about writing about normal things in a valuable and interesting way. It’s about accuracy of human observation and precision of the observation.

7. All right, enough of this. Let me come clean:

Everything I’ve just told you actually comes from a video titled “Visual Comedy: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson.”

Atkinson you might best know as the clumsy priest from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I watched Atkinson’s Visual Comedy guide a few days ago, expecting to be entertained. And I was that. But I found the video surprisingly full of deep analysis of what actually makes for visual comedy. It was like a prehistoric episode of the Every Frame a Painting series, if you’ve ever seen that.

And not only was this video insightful.

I realized that much, or maybe all, of what makes for good visual comedy can be ported very easily to email marketing.

For example, point #1 above is really about slapstick. As the Visual Comedy video says, “We seem to take a constant delight in seeing people hurt and humiliated. The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more dignified the victim, the funnier it is.”

And that Matt Furey non-quote in point #6?

​​It actually comes from Charlie Chaplin. “For the comedian, nothing transcends character.”

If you like, I’ve linked the entire Rowan Atkinson video below. You can watch it and try to figure out which techniques of visual comedy I mapped to each of my email marketing points above.

Of course, there’s more in this video than just what I’ve written above. The list of connections between visual comedy and email marketing is long and distinguished, and doesn’t just stop at 6″.

As just one example:

Maybe the most valuable part of this video is the detailed discussion of what exactly makes for an engaging character in visual comedy. I found almost all of this applied to email marketing directly, without the need for even the smallest bit of translation. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s a lesson I should apply myself.

So to wrap up:

​If you’re a goofy and thoughtless person who enjoys laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel…

​Or if you’re a deep and serious thinker who is interested in uncovering the hidden structure of things most people take for granted…

​Then I believe you will get value out of this video. Or maybe you’ll just get some pointed human observation. You can find it below. Before you click to watch it, you might want to sign up for my daily email newsletter, and get more insightful things like the essay you’ve just read.

“So cringe”: Content creators get rich without anyone knowing who they are

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I sat down just a few minutes ago, my hotdog + espresso soup at the ready, and I watched 8 minutes of:

* A hot girl putting a live fish down her sweatpants

​* A man walking up the side of a 30-foot light pole

​* A motorcyclist’s head falling off

​* Pigtails being cut by office scissors and meat cleavers

​* Cheating wives and husbands caught in the act and running for cover

​* A leech up somebody’s nose

The backstory is all these videos were produced by Network Media, a video content mill that’s gotten 200 billion views on Facebook and Snapchat over the past two years.

200.

Billion.

Let me repeat that number so that it perhaps has a chance to sink into your brain. If each of those video views were a hotdog, that means that you and everybody else on the planet would have eaten 25 Network Media hotdogs each over the past two years.

Network Media was started by Rick Lax, who looks a little like a young Mickey Rourke.

Lax ​​has a law degree.

But Lax’s primary passion was never law. It was always magic.

Lax wasn’t popular as a kid. To make things worse, he never could quite make it at the highest levels of the magic business.

He was apparently hurt to be excluded even from this community of misfits.

So Lax went outside the magic establishment, and started posting videos on Facebook, iterating, optimizing, and cranking out content. At first, his videos showed magic tricks. Later, they showed random stuff Lax figured out to be popular.

It got so Lax’s Facebook videos were easily getting 100 million views each.

Lax started to monetize his videos with Facebook’s “paid creator” ad share as soon as that became available. Immediately, he started making six figures a month.

What’s more, Lax realized the demand for his bizarre videos, which applied his insights from magic, was endless. So he brought on more people, often broke actors and singers, who were making minimum wage before Lax found them.

Lax turned many of his anonymous content creators into millionaires. By late 2021, Lax’s Network Media was pulling in $5 million a month across all its different videos.

I’d like to tell you more of Lax’s story, but I’ve just finished my hotdog + espresso soup and my time is up. So I’ll make you an offer instead.

Check out article below. It’s where I learned about Rick Lax and his $5M/month viral video business. The article contains lots of titillating facts, plus some useful techniques.

In fact, if you read the article below, you can find out why almost all of Lax’s video feature something surreal, such as tampons in the fridge or a dirty hairbrush as part of a cooking video.

​​Maybe that will even explain why I’m eating hotdogs in espresso sauce as I write this email.

So my offers is, read the article below, find out the technical term for this “tampons in the fridge” technique, sign up to my email newsletter, and then write me an email to tell me the name of this technique.

In return, I will share with you something else interesting, valuable, and related. It’s something that I might share with my entire list down the line, but that I will share with you first, and for certain, if you only take me up on my offer.

In case you want to do that, here’s the link to get started:

https://bejakovic.com/lax

How living next to train tracks can transform your copywriting skills

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A few days ago, I came across a trending science article with the headline:

“These cancer cells wake up when people sleep”

From what my zero-biology-classes-in-college brain could understand, researchers have made an important new discovery.

Cancer cells in one part of the body are most likely to spread to other parts of the body — a dangerous process called metastasis — while we sleep.

In other words, sleep — usually a good thing – suddenly becomes threatening and dangerous if you have cancer.

I guess this is big news in the science community and might lead to new ways to stop cancer from metastasizing.

But I’m not part of the science community. I’m part of the direct response copywriting community.

And so I mused that, were I in the business of selling important new health information, like Boardroom used to do, I might sell this breakthrough research with a provocative headline:

“How living next to train tracks can stop cancer”

The reason I thought this immediately was because the above science story reminded me of what I think is the greatest bullet of all time:

“How a pickpocket can cure your back pain”

That bullet was written by A-list copywriter David Deutsch in control package for Boardroom, back in the 2000s. David’s brilliant bullet has a clever underlying structure, which I modeled for my would-be headline/bullet above.

Perhaps you can parse exactly what I did with my bullet above. Or perhaps you know the story behind David’s bullet and therefore don’t need to parse what I did.

But if not, you can find the background of David’s bullet, including a breakdown of his clever technique, in Round 10A of my Copy Riddles program.

But let me put it this way:

Living next to train tracks can transform your copywriting skills.

Because enrollment for Copy Riddles closes later today, at 12 midnight PST.

If you haven’t signed up yet, and if you’re sleeping fitfully when the deadline hits, you will miss the enrollment window, and you will have to wait who-knows-how-long to enroll and find out the secret (and more importantly, the copywriting lesson) behind David’s bullet.

So trains rumbling outside your window might actually be a good thing in this case.

On the other hand, if you got no rumbling trains to count on, then you can always sign up now, while you’re still awake and while your mind is fresh and on it. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

A shark in blowfish’s clothing

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A few days ago, as research for the next issue of my Most Valuable Postcard, I re-watched an old presentation given by Jeff Walker.

You might know Jeff as a big-time Internet Marketing guru and the inventor of the Product Launch Formula, which has been used by tons of businesses to make tons of money online.

Here’s what got me:

Jeff’s whole aura during this presentation was very gee-shucks, how-did-I-wind-up-here-on-stage.

He had a kind of Woody Allen delivery, constantly correcting himself, backtracking, stammering, stumbling, and apologizing.

His outfit confirmed the impression. Jeff wore a ballooning blue shirt, which looked a size too large for him, and which was crimped at the chest by a microphone.

Of course, you won’t make tens of millions of dollars, which Jeff had already done by the time of this old presentation, by being a naive nincompoop.

But if you look like a naive nincompoop, it can certainly help you out, particularly if you are actually shrewd and calculating at heart. It pays to put on a oversized and poorly fitting blue shirt, and turn yourself into a harmless and goofy blowfish, when you are really a shark underneath.

Anyways, at one point, Jeff said the following about product launches using his PLF:

“I don’t just teach them, I’m pretty good at them. That’s actually self-deprecating. I’m REALLY REALLY good at them.”

This reminded me of a valuable mantra I heard from Chris Voss, the FBI negotiator who wrote the book Never Split the Difference.

“The last impression is the lasting impression,” says Chris.

You can see that in the structure of how Jeff talks about himself and his skills and success.

And if you meditate on this example a bit, you can hit upon a very clever way to sneak giant, even unbelievable claims into people’s heads.

If you’ve been through my Copy Riddles program, you might know what I’m talking about. It’s there in round 6B.

And if you haven’t been through Copy Riddles, you’ll have a chance to do so, starting in a few weeks from now, and to find out about this clever technique.

But Copy Riddles isn’t open yet. And neither is my Most Valuable Postcard. So my only offer for you is to sign up for my email newsletter, and read what I have to write about copywriting and marketing topics.

Of course, I don’t just write about them. I’m pretty good at them. That’s actually self-deprecating. I’m REALLY REALLY good at them. So in case you’d like to get on my newsletter, here’s where to sign up.

Don’t rape your audience

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Today’s post is on the subject of email marketing, a rather milquetoast topic. The hook, though, is jarring — rape.

I didn’t think of that hook. Instead, it comes from William Goldman, somebody I’ve mentioned often in these emails.

Goldman was first a successful novelist and later a successful Hollywood screenwriter and then again a novelist.

Along the way, he also wrote a non-fiction book called Adventures in the Screen Trade. I read it a couple years ago. It’s a combination of memoir and an insider’s look into Hollywood as it was in the 60s and 70s of the last century.

Somewhere in the Adventures book, Goldman talks about the most important part of a screenplay — the beginning. And it’s here that he writes the following:

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

Goldman is contrasting movie writing to TV writing. At the beginning of a movie, Goldman says, 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.

I had never thought about this difference. But it makes sense. And it makes me think of…

Sales copy, which is definitely on the TV end of the seduction/rape spectrum. Just think of some famous opening lines of blockbuster VSLs:

“Talk dirty to me”

“We’re going to have to amputate your leg”

What about email copy? Much of it also opens up in the same aggressive way. Here are a few opening lines I just dug up from recent sales emails in my inbox:

“MaryAnne couldn’t take it anymore:”

“In 1981, a dirty magazine published an article that had the potential to make its readers filthy rich.”

I always assumed this is just the way good copy is — VSLs or emails or whatever. Of course, that’s not true.

When I actually look at some of my favorite newsletters (and even some successful sales letters), they don’t have an immediate and aggressive grabber. Instead, they build up and work their way into their point — without rambling, but without aggression either.

The difference comes down to the relationship you have with your list. Some businesses, including some businesses I’ve worked for, have little to no relationship with their list. Each email they send out is like a random infomercial popping up on TV — if it doesn’t capture attention right away, it never will.

But some businesses have a great relationship with their list. They can afford to take the time to light the candles and pour the wine and stare seductively at their reader across the table. In fact, if they didn’t, things would seem off.

Is it possible to go from one style of email marketing to the other?

I believe so. In my experience, people tend to mirror your own emotions and behavior. That means you’ll have to take the first step if you want things to change. Rather than waiting for your list to have a better relationship with you… start seducing, and stop trying to rape.

Now that we’ve warmed up the conversation:

I also have a daily email newsletter. You can subscribe for it here. And if you do subscribe, I promise to… well, I won’t go there.

\/\

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Today I’d like to tell you about the time I forgot how to write emails.

In the interest of keeping this story under 130,000 words, let me just give you four quick snapshots:

1. Friday, Oct 22 2021. I’m walking along the sea in Opatija, Croatia when I have a bright idea.

All these people have been telling me I’m so good at writing emails. So why don’t I finally offer a training on how I write emails?

​​Yes! I take out my phone, and write down a bunch of ideas for the offer, the sales page, and the actual content of the training.

Later that evening, I send out an email about it. Then I watch in wonder as thousands of dollars start to pour into my PayPal account from people who trust me enough to preorder this training.

2. Two weeks later. I’m sitting at my desk, head in hands, a pained grimace on my face. I’m staring at the pages of notes I’ve taken in preparation for the training, which is now called Influential Emails. But all I see are a bunch of half-baked ideas and vague fluff.

I start to despair that I will be able to give people their money’s worth. And the deadline is nearing.

3. Thursday, Dec 2, 2021. The Influential Emails training has completed. It consisted of me talking about a bunch of writing techniques, which I’d unconsciously used for a long time, but which I’ve now identified and given names to, such as stacking… layering… S. Morgenstern transitions… and bait-and-switch email closes.

According to the feedback I get, people loved the training. I’m amazed and very happy with how well it went.

4. The gray, rainy weeks and months that follow. Real despair sets in. After the Influential Emails training, whenever I sit down to write one of my daily emails, I am filled with confusion and doubt. Instead of writing spontaneously and enjoying the process, I hesitate.

“Should I stack something here? Or add another layer to the email? Maybe I could take out this whole section and replace it with an S. Morgenstern transition?”

Each email takes forever to write. I hate the process. And from what I can see in terms of engagement, people don’t love reading the results either.

I curse that Influential Emails training that I gave. “Why is fate like this?” I ask out loud, but nobody answers. I wish I could forget the techniques I have identified so I could enjoy writing my email newsletter again.

Let’s cut the story off at this point so I can tell what I just tried to show you. It’s the last of the six canonical story formats.

This one is called the Oedipus format. It goes like this: \/\. ​​Start high… go low… then go back up… and finally end down, way down.

And now that I’ve told you that… and now that you know about all six canonical story formats… maybe it’s best if you forget all about it.

Because these story formulas are fun to learn about. But they are not good to consciously follow. At least in my experience.

From what I’ve seen and tried myself, when you consciously write according to a formula or recipe, something feels wooden and off. And people can sense it, particularly in an intimate setting like daily emails.

Besides, there are a lot of fun stories that work well as anecdotes, which don’t fit any of these canonical structures, not unless you really give it some brutal massage.

So if you wanna have fun writing, and produce something that’s fun to read… then forget about the canonical story structure formats. Let them sink into the darkness of your subconscious, and let them guide you from there.

But if you really insist on conscious guidelines to help you write better stories, then remember the higher-level points I brought up over the past few days.

Be mindful of where you start your story… where you end it… what details you choose to include, what you omit… and of course, make sure there is drama, conflict, contrast, twists and turns of some kind.

Do this, and you won’t need an exact recipe. Your brain will surprise you with how creative you can be. And you’ll even enjoy the process.

And finally:

For more structural advice you can enjoy and then forget, sign up to my email newsletter.

/\/

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A poor, motherless, neglected boy is sent off to wizard school, where he discovers himself to be this generation’s—

“Oh what the hell is this?” I said to myself. “What did I get myself into? Is this some cheap Harry Potter imitation?”

It turns out no.

Late last year, I took one of my slow and creeping steps through my ever-expanding to-read list. I picked up a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea.

It turns out the book was published in 1968, 30 years before the first Harry Potter book.

The story might be familiar to you — and not just because of the Harry Potter similarities. It goes like this:

1. A poor, motherless, neglected boy is sent off to wizard school.

2. There he discovers that he has immense wizarding talent, and the promise to become his generation’s greatest and most powerful wizard. As a result, his hubris and his recklessness grow.

3. While abusing his still uncontrolled wizard skills, the boy lets an evil shadow into the world. The shadow almost kills the boy and leaves him scarred for life. The boy runs around the world, trying to escape the shadow and the evil that it brings.

4. Finally, the boy gives up running. He turns to face the shadow. He confronts it. And in so doing, he confronts his own dark side, and sets the world aright again.

The reason why this story might sound familiar to you is because it’s basically every story ever told. Well, at least it’s every story ever told in every fairy tale, every Disney movie, every Marvel movie, every Bruce Willis movie, every rags-to-riches sales letter, and every “horror advertorial” I have ever written.

The story template is called “Cinderella.” Maybe you can see why. It goes down-up-down-up and can be represented graphically by /\/.

Over the past few days, I’ve given you a lot of these canonical story templates. They started out simple — just a single / or \. Then two. Now three.

The bigger point is that in any good story, you gotta have contrast, emotional manipulation, surprise, twists.

In fact, that’s why you will often not see the typical rags-to-riches story, as I described it in my first email in this series. The contrast and drama in / is just not enough. Things are bad, then they get better, and then they get best. People feel let down. Where’s the conflict? It sounds too easy and too predictable.

You don’t want predictable. So give people twists and drama.

Which is a lesson I should take myself — this mini-series on canonical story types is starting to get predictable. So I will end it tomorrow, with the sixth and final canonical format for storytelling… along with a bit of storytelling advice that you might find to be a surprising twist.

If you want to read that when it comes out, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

/\

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I was tearing my hair out and gnashing my teeth and shaking my fists at the sky.

​​Ok, maybe it wasn’t that dramatic but things were really bad. I spent a long time trying to come up with an example to illustrate the “Icarus” story template — and I still had nothing.

And then I had this brilliant idea. I would write about pickup artist Tom Torero.

​​Tom went from a shy, nerdy, anxiety-ridden Oxford student… to a professional pickup artist, living a life of confidence, adventure, and freedom… to finally being doxxed, deplatformed, and driven to suicide this past December.

​​Pretty Icarusy, right?

But here’s the thing. Maybe you notice I am sending this email out later than usual.

​​That’s because I spent an unholy amount of time trying to tell Tom’s story. But I couldn’t do it right, not without running into pages of text, completely obscuring the Icarus structure I was supposed to be illustrating.

​​After hours of fruitless work, crushed and defeated, I raised my fist up at the sky one last time, shook it weakly, and then gave up. All I can do now is report on my failure to write today’s email.

So remember there is such a thing as a canonical Icarus storyline. It can be represented graphically by /\.

And also, remember to be mindful of what details you include in your stories.

There are details — like the oversized brown corduroy pants that Tom used to wear, which emphasized his girlish hips and his narrow shoulders — that can give your story sticking power.

But there also details — like the many too many details I couldn’t keep myself from including today — that just sidetrack your story.

So learn from my mistake. Be conscious and continent with your detail sharing. Your stories will be more impactful for it — and you will be done writing much sooner.

If you want more advice on storytelling, including about the most powerful story template to use in online selling, you will want to read my email tomorrow. You can sign up to get it here.