Structure Of Copy and Content

A bit of magic and faith to persuade hardened cynics

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I hear it’s Christmas time, so here’s a little gift. It’s taken from the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street.

If you’ve never seen the movie, it’s about department store Santa who just might be the real Santa Claus.

He looks like Kris Kringle…

He acts like Kris Kringle…

He even calls himself Kris Kringle.

Of course, while Kris Kringle soon makes some folks believe that magic is real and he is Santa… a few cynics refuse to allow faith into their hearts.

And so Kris Kringle winds up in the kounty kourthouse. He’s on trial and the point is to prove he is not really Santa, because Santa doesn’t really exist.

And then there’s the following scene, which I thought you might find valuable:

KK’s lawyer and the opposing lawyer both approach the judge.

KK’s lawyer holds up three letters from kids to Santa, which have been delivered to Kris Kringle.

Since the USPS is legally bound to deliver letters to the intended recipient, the lawyer argues, the US Government is throwing its authority behind the fact that Kris Kringle is actually Santa.

The opposing lawyer says, “Come on, three letters to Santa, that proves nothing.”

“I have additional exhibits,” KK’s lawyer says. “but I hesitate to produce them.”

The judge is intrigued. He insists. “Let’s see them. Put them here on my desk.”

“But your honor…”

“Put them here on my desk!”

It turns out KK’s lawyer has been holding back. Three letters not enough? How about this:

A dozen mail carriers carrying sackfuls of letters come into the courtroom. They pour them out onto the judge’s desk. The judge ends up buried in letters, all addressed to Santa, and now delivered to Kris Kringle.

Case closed!

Look, it’s a family movie, and it’s about Christmas and faith. It doesn’t have to make 100% sense.

But sense or not, I think that courtroom gambit is a powerful technique, and something you can benefit from in your own marketing.

Maybe you can see exactly what I have in mind. Or maybe you’d like me to spell it out.

​​In that case, write me an email and simply state your wish. You can address your email to the North Pole or to me specifically. Google will deliver it either way. Oh, and don’t forget to sign up to my newsletter before Christmas.

Welcome to Horneytown

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First, a warning:

Today’s email contains several dirty, obscene, lewd — and I’m afraid to say this — even French names. I see no other way to make an otherwise important point. If this upsets you, I suggest you stop reading now.

But if you’re still with me, here are some real places with unusual names:

* Blue Ball and Intercourse, Pennsylvania
* Eggs and Bacon Bay, Tasmania
* Pee Pee, Ohio
* Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands
* Y, France
* Pett Bottom, England
* Whorehouse Meadow, Oregon

I’ll tell you in a moment where I’m going with this.

But first, let me tell you how I found all this out. It was in a book called “Welcome to Horneytown, North Carolina, Population: 15.” I spent the last 40 or so minutes reading it.

It was my email yesterday that did it. It mentioned the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I saw the name again today when going over replies I got to my email from yesterday. This led me to the Horneytown book — as well as a surprise.

Because I’d known about Truth or Consequences for years. I even made plans once to travel there with a girl I’d chatted up one evening when I was feeling uncharacteristically outgoing.

But all these years, I assumed Truth or Consequences started out as some fundamentalist Wild West community. Fear of God and the Bible, let any stray cowboy riding into town know exactly what he’s getting into, that type of thing.

But no. Truth or Consequences was founded in 1930. It was originally called Hot Springs. It renamed itself in 1950 after a popular radio show as a publicity stunt.

I could keep going on about this. But I once heard A-list copywriter Parris Lampropolous share a valuable lesson he himself learned from A-list copywriter and entrepreneur Mark Ford.

Mark advises copywriters NOT to go on for more than a page about the same thing. Page, page and a half max.

Then Mark advises you to say, “I’ll tell you more about that in a moment, but first…” And then hit them with something new.

Perhaps you wonder what this has to do with obscene, unusual, and French place names. In that case, perhaps today’s email deserves a closer reading. And so do some of my other emails.

Because this page, page-and-a-half-max thing is so important that I try to respect it in each email I write these days. Only, expectations are different in emails than in sales letters. A page and a half in an email is too long to talk about the same thing. I’ll explain why in just a bit, but first…

Understanding really influential writing

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Let me warn you ahead of time that today’s post is vague and speculative. I’m sharing it because I think the core idea could be very valuable, and maybe you will agree.

​​But if you are looking for a quick tip to improve your conversion rates, you won’t find that in today’s post, so maybe it makes sense to stop reading now.

And now that you’ve been warned, let me jump to the big question:

What’s up with consciousness? It seems to be a trendy question these days. And since I am a trendy person, I clambered onto this bandwagon.

So I just finished reading a book about one theory of how consciousness arises, called The Feeling of Life Itself. The book was written by Christof Koch, formerly a professor at Caltech and now chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

At the heart of Koch’s book are two diagrams. Each diagram shows a network of logic gates, the kind of stuff computers, or human brains, are built of in the abstract.

One diagram shows a network with three gates. The other diagram shows a much bigger network, with 66 gates.

And here’s something non-obvious:

The 3-gate network and the much bigger 66-gate network actually do the same computation. In other words, start with the same inputs, run the thing for a while, and you will end up with the same outputs with these two very different-seeming networks.

How is this possible? Well, the 3-gate network is richly interconnected, with each gate doing double and triple duty. On the other hand, the big 66-gate network is much more linear, with each gate serving just one tiny role.

Rich interconnectivity is why the 3-gate network can punch above its weight, computation-wise.

And it just so happens — so says Christof Koch — it’s also why the tiny 3-node network has some small bit of consciousness… while the much bigger 66-node network has none.

In other words, Koch’s claim is that consciousness is the same as how tightly integrated a network is, and how many distinct roles its elements serve.

​​That’s why certain parts of the human brain give rise to consciousness… while a computer, no matter how fast or smart it gets, will never be conscious.

I can’t judge Koch’s argument one way or another. But I feel there’s something there, because his idea stimulated an analogous idea in my own mind. I think something similar happens in writing and communicating ideas.

Let me show you. Here’s the intro to the 1994 reprint of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media:

“Thirty years ago this past summer Herbert Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and within a matter of months the book acquired the standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author the foremost oracle of the age. Sel­dom in living memory had so obscure a scholar descended so abruptly from so re­mote a garret into the center ring of the celebrity circus, but McLuhan accepted the transformation as if it were nothing out of the ordinary, nothing more than the inevi­table and unsurprising proof of the hypoth­esis that he had found in the library at the University of Toronto.”

How did McLuhan go from obscure scholar to oracle in a matter of months? From the same intro:

“Despite its title, the book was never easy to understand. By turns brilliant and opaque, McLuhan’s thought meets the specifications of the epistemology that he ascribes to the electronic media – non­ lineal, repetitive, discontinuous, intuitive, proceeding by analogy instead of sequential argument.”

So that’s the idea I wanted to share with you.

A textbook and a book of the Bible both convey information. Possibly even the same information.

But a textbook creates no experience, no consciousness in the reader’s brain. A textbook might be useful. But it’s too linear, and that’s why it’s forgettable, and it inspires nothing.

On the other hand, take writing like the Bible or McLuhan’s Understanding Media.

​​These are non-linear, self-referential works, where each passage is doing double and triple duty. ​The more integrated the writing, the more it creates an experience of consciousness in the reader’s brain.

That’s why these books are remembered, absorbed, and acted upon. That’s why they can transform somebody from obscure to celebrity. And it just so happens, that’s why they punch above their weight, influence-wise.

Split-brain persuasion

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Imagine a table in a science lab. At one end is a man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, smiling and looking around. At the other end is a scientist in a white coat, holding a clipboard.

“I’ll ask you some yes-no questions,” the scientist says. “But don’t answer me in words. Instead I want you to point to YES or NO on this board here. And for each question, I will tell you which hand I want you to point with. Makes sense?”

The other man nods.

“Let’s start then. Right hand: are you at Caltech right now?”

The man points to YES with his right hand.

“Left hand: are you a woman?”

The man points to NO with his left hand.

“Right hand: is chocolate your favorite ice cream flavor?”

YES.

“Left hand: are you asleep right now?”

NO.

“Ok… here’s a more personal question. Right hand: do you believe in God?”

The right hand points to NO.

“Left hand: do YOU believe in God?”

The man’s left hand flies to point to YES. Because the left side of this man’s body, and the right side of his brain, are believers. But the right side of his body, and the left side of his brain, are atheists.

The crazy thing is, this experiment really happened. And so have many other related experiments.

They were all done on patients who had their corpus callosum cut. That’s the bridge between the two islands of your left and right brain hemispheres.

People with a cut corpus callosum do just fine in normal situations. But in a lab setting, you can tease out that they have two brains… two personalities… and two different consciousnesses inside their skulls and skin.

In a person with a normal corpus callosum, these two parts somehow merge. But my guess is these split-brain conflicts remain in all of us, just hidden beneath the surface.

Anyways, now that I’ve told you about the man who might be going to both heaven and hell, here’s the point of today’s email:

According to split-brain research, the right side of the brain responds to images, humor, surprise, and metaphors…

While the left side of the brain responds to facts, argument, consistency, and logic.

So you’ve got to both SHOW and TELL. Because you don’t want the two sides arguing with each other beneath the surface. It might sink your message.

And here’s another tip:

If you’ve tried and failed to persuade somebody before… even though you have a good point… then you don’t need better logic.

The left side is happy hearing the same sound logic over and over.

But you do need a surprising new presentation. It doesn’t have to be logical. It just has to be dramatic. How dramatic? Ideally, heaven-and-hell-type stuff.

Did you find this post enlightening? If you did, then use your left hand to click here and sign up for more ideas and images like what you just read.

It was a bright cold day in April…

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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

I frowned. I bared my teeth. Two hours had passed since I sat down to write.

But I still hadn’t finished the email. All I had was a bunch of research and half-starts.

How much more time would I waste? Suddenly, ice water ran down my back. The deadline, I thought. It’s so soon.

Now I’ll be honest with you:

Writer’s block is not something I ever suffer from.

But I do suffer from writer’s fiddling… writer’s lack of focus… and writer’s doubt, which turns into writer’s backtracking.

I’ve found a few ways to manage these writer’s conditions. They don’t always work.

But thanks to a reader named Lester, I’ve now found a new way also. It works for writer’s block, too.

The technique comes from a marketing guy called Roy Williams. Williams gives it to you in three easy steps:

1. Randomly force upon yourself a dramatic opening statement BEFORE you know what you’re going to write about. [My tip: Google “weird opening sentences in books” and take the first result that comes up.]

2. Look for the defining characteristic of that statement.

3. Think about what you want to sell. Use the defining characteristic of the statement as the angle of approach into your body copy.

That’s it? Yep. I tried it. It works.

But here’s the thing that really gets me:

Williams performs this act on stage. He asks for a bunch of strange or shocking opening sentences. Then he brings a bunch of business owners up. He asks them what they would like to sell more of. And then he uses the process above to come up with cool ads for those business owners, right on the spot.

People think it’s magic. They even accuse Williams of planting stooges in the audience to set up the act.

But then Williams explains how to do this trick. It’s just what I told you above. It’s something anybody can do. But Williams says, nobody ever does it.

That’s the thing that really struck me. Because it reminded me of something I read early on in my marketing education. Fortunately, it came so early that it actually made an impact. Here’s the intro to it:

I’ll tell you something: This issue of my newsletter is going to make a lot of my readers very uncomfortable. Why? Simply because I know the difference between winners and losers and, in this issue, I’m going to put the choice right dead square in your face. I’m going to give you an extraordinarily simple set of instructions and, if you do what I say, your chances of becoming extremely prosperous are going to be magnified by a factor of at least 1,000!

But most of you are not going to follow these simple instructions. I know that already from past experience. And I even know already the reasons you’re going to give for not doing what I suggest. These are the same reasons everybody (including me) nearly always gives for not doing something which will make our lives better.

Does that make you frown or bare your teeth? Well, if you’d like to read more, and find out how to 1000x your chances of becoming extremely prosperous, before the clocks strike thirteen, here’s the rest of that thing:

https://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/aslz_winners_losers.htm

(And if you want to subscribe to issues of my own newsletter, for free, you can do that here.)

Hitchcock sales structure

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The exciting climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest goes like this:

Eva Marie Saint is about to fall off a cliff.

Cary Grant is reaching down to try to keep her from falling.

“I can’t,” she says.

“Yes you can,” he says.

And then one of the evil guy’s henchmen comes and starts to crush Cary’s fingers underfoot. But Cary needs those fingers to hold on to the cliff, and to keep himself and Eva from death below.

Like I said, that’s the climax.

But don’t worry.

It all turns out fine. The police arrive and shoot the evil henchman, who falls off the cliff. The main bad guy is caught. The secret microfilm is safe. And some time later, Cary and Eva, who made it off the cliff and got married in the meantime, head back east by train to start a new life together. The end.

Pretty usual Hollywood, right?

Right. The only unusual thing is the speed:

That entire anti-climactic sequence, from the moment Cary gets his fingers crushed to the train ride home, takes a total of 43 seconds.

​​43 seconds!

For reference, North By Northwest is a movie that lasts 2 hours and 16 minutes.

Of the total, 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 17 seconds goes to building up tension and misery.

The last 43 seconds goes to relieving it.

And yet people watch. And more relevant for us, they buy.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve previously had the task of selling many generic, unremarkable, sometimes suspect physical products. To boot, these products often sold at 3-4 times the price you could find on Amazon.

How can you possibly sell millions of dollars of a commodity at three times the price that anybody can get, just by shopping as they always do?

In my case, the answer was stories. Full of tension and misery. That’s how the bulk of the sales message went.

And when you thought things were bad, an evil henchman came to make it all worse.

The relief of all that tension, in the form of talking about the product, was really an afterthought. Not quite at Hitchcock levels, but still.

So that’s my takeaway for you.

Don’t sell overpriced crap.

​​But even if you sell something great, it probably makes sense to talk less about it than you want to. Instead, focus more of your prospect’s time and attention on that “I can’t/Yes you can” drama.

And in case you want more storytelling and selling ideas:

You might like my email newsletter.

How to get away with making extreme promises more often than you would ever believe

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In a recent email, A-list copywriter David Deutsch included the following P.S.:

P.S. Justin Goff says working with me enabled him to multiply his income 10 times over.

Not saying I’ll do that for you.

But it does show the power of getting the right kind of help improving your copy.

I call this frontloading. Here’s a second example of it, from an email by Ben Settle:

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

I used this info during good and bad economic times.

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

I cannot guarantee you will have the same results.

And the methodology doesn’t work overnight.

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

So those are two examples of frontloading. It works like this:

First, you make a powerful, extreme promise. Then you qualify your promise. That way, you create believability… while still leaving the extreme promise ringing in your prospect’s head.

This works well as a way to organize a single sales argument (as in David’s case above). It can also shape your entire message (as in Ben’s email).

I think of it like grabbing a man by the shoulders and shaking him violently. Once his body goes limp and his head starts to swim, then you let him go and even dust off his shoulders and straighten out his rumpled shirt a bit.

In other words, you agitate and agitate your prospect… and then you agitate some more… and then you ask him to be reasonable.

Of course, you can also choose to be more subtle about it. You can only agitate a little bit, and then immediately get more reasonable. This can work well in your subject lines… or even your headlines.

Anyways, in case you want to get on board the most interesting email newsletter in the world, according to several marketers and copywriters who are subscribed to it, here’s where to go.

Chance encounters with Blackie

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And somewhere in the darkness
The gambler he broke even
But in his final words
I found an ace that I could keep
— Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

This morning, I started writing my bread-and-butter piece of copy. It’s an advertorial of a person on a quest.

In this case, the quest is a mom looking for a way to cope with her 8-year-old’s ADHD without drugs. I’ve also used the same quest structure to sell tens of thousands of shoe insoles, silicone kitchen sponges, even fake diamonds.

The quest has 3 acts.

Act 1 is the hero coming face-to-face with the horror of the problem… and then getting sucked deeper and deeper into promised solutions that don’t work or even make things worse. Despair sets in.

Act 2 starts with a chance encounter. And that’s what I want to tell you about today.

In my advertorials, this chance encounter is usually a friend or acquaintance the hero hasn’t met in a long while. The friend casually mentions the key missing ingredient for the hero’s quest.

At first, the hero is skeptical. But the friend isn’t pushy, plus there’s a good reason why the solution could work. So the hero goes home to do more research and— EUREKA!!

If this sounds familiar, it’s because something like it is present in more than 99% of all make money, rags-to-riches, “I was living in a trailer but look at me now” sales letters. The hero in those stories wouldn’t be the success he is today were it not for the trick he learned from a Yoda-like guru who lives on top of a mountain or in a gated retirement community in Florida.

In fact, according to Dan Kennedy, this same trope goes back to at least the middle of the last century. It’s called a “Blackie story.”

Old Blackie was this horse track regular until the day he died. He had a secret for bettin’ on the ponies… and then on his death bed, he revealed the secret to the writer of the sales letter.

What do you think? Corny? Overplayed? Transparent?

Think what you like. The fact is these Blackie stories work.

Because chance encounters in stories are like spike proteins on the surface of corona virus. They jam themselves into your soft defenses so the payload can worm its way in.

And if Blackie dies to boot, like The Gambler in the Kenny Rogers song, it’s even more powerful. Because the secret is now lost… unless you buy the product on sale.

This all reminds me of a run-in I once had with an old door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He showed me a neat little trick to get your foot in the door, every time, without fail. It works brilliantly online too.

Unfortunately the poor bastard died just a few weeks later. Rest in peace, Jerome.

If you’re curious to learn Jerome’s “foot in the door” copywriting trick… it’s one of the things I share inside my email newsletter. It’s free to subscribe. You might find it entertaining, and you can always unsubscribe if you don’t like it. Here’s where to sign up.

The hidden structure of the best bullets. 2 parts needed. Here’s how you could have gotten both

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Over the past few weeks, while looking over dozens of bullets written by A-list copywriters, I realized the best bullets have a hidden 2-part structure.

I think being aware of this can help anyone write more powerful bullets… and become a top-tier copywriter in general.

For example, one bullet by Parris Lampropoulos that had this structure was so powerful it became the headline for Parris’s entire promotion. And the promotion went on to beat the control.

I covered both parts of this hidden structure in today’s lesson of my bullets course. You could have gotten that lesson for free, had you been signed up.

But it’s still not too late. Because I’ll be covering other bullet topics in the coming days… including special cases of both of those “hidden structure” parts.

In case you’d like more info about my bullet course, or even to sign up, here’s where to go:

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

A three-act election story

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I broke my long-standing rule of not reading the New York Times to bring you the following:

In Povalikhino, a tiny village in the Russian heartland, the incumbent mayor was running for re-election. But there was a problem:

He had no opposition candidate.

According to the NYT article, Russian elections always need an opposition candidate. That’s to make it appear fair, because the ruling party candidate always wins. Well, almost always.

In this case, the political machine went in search of a patsy to run against the mayor. They asked the local butcher, cobbler, and the high school chemistry teacher.

Nobody was willing to get roped in.

Fortunately, Marina Udgodskaya, the janitor at the mayor’s office, finally accepted the role of running against her own boss.

And she won. In a landslide.

Nobody’s quite sure where it all went wrong. But the fact is that the villagers of Povalikhino voted Udgodskaya into office. She now sits behind the mayor’s desk in the office she used to clean. She said her first priority will be to fix the public lighting in the village.

Meanwhile, the old mayor refuses to speak to the media. According to his wife, he never even wanted the job himself. He finds the topic of losing to the cleaning woman painful… and blames his wife. “You got me into this,” Mrs. Former Mayor reported her husband as saying.

I’m not sharing this story with you to illustrate the importance of voting. I’m of the school that voting doesn’t matter (well, unless you’re voting in a village of three hundred people).

Instead, I just thought this was a good story.

It’s got an Act 1, an Act 2, an Act 3. It’s got tension, drama, and surprise.

I bring this up because I often see people telling “stories” in copy that don’t have these basic elements.

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, but cannot find one. The end.”

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, gets a local lawyer to run against, and then the mayor wins as usual. The end.”

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, which is how things go in Russia, for example this other time there was a second election and…”

Those are events, yes. But they are not stories — at least the kind that suck readers in and sell something.

Incidentally, if you want an education in how to write good stories in your copy… you can’t go wrong by reading the New York Times. Not for the facts. But to observe the outrage they evoke in their readers, and for the subtle sales techniques.

Or you can just sign up for my daily email newsletter. It’s not as outrageous as the New York Times. But it can teach you something about sales and storytelling. If you’re willing to take the risk, click here to subscribe.