Surprise

The unpardonable sin in daily emails

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> be me
> get email yesterday
> feel sucked in by the subject line because it’s the same as the name of a paid training i’m thinking to create
> read email
> interesting opening, about how the author wrote something that got a whole lot of reader engagement and replies
> get to the takeaway
> “Vulnerability”
> feel face drop, groan
> close email and vow never to read another of the author’s emails again

An A-list copywriter, Robert Collier, once wrote that the unpardonable sin in nature is stagnation, standing still.

Another A-list copywriter, Jim Rutz, once wrote that the #1 sin in ad mail is being predictable.

It applies to daily emails as well. The #1, unpardonable sin in daily emails is stagnant, predictable content. That’s why a point of my personal philosophy, which may resonate with you, is to do anything but be predictable.

Right now, I’m in the middle of rolling out my new Daily Email Habit service to people who expressed interest and got on priority list.

While I do that, I have no paid offers to promote.

So let me take the next few days, while the rollout is happening, to share some unpredictable pieces of writing.

I mean “unpredictable” both because these pieces of writing contain surprising ideas presented in insightful ways… and because you wouldn’t expect to have them shared inside of a newsletter like this one, about direct marketing and online businesses.

To start with, here’s something I read two years ago that still pops up in my mind pretty much every week.

The title of it is When Magic Was Real.

The idea that sticks with me is that magic — real magic, not stage magic — is real, and is “the product of belief x belief.”

If you want to read something surprising, insightful, and maybe mind-altering:

https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-magic-was-real

Today only: Stage Surprise Success

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Here’s a fun story about thieves:

Penn Jillette is a famous magician. He was once sitting at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, holding court.

Among the people around him was a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins. Robbins had been working in Las Vegas casinos as a performance pickpocket — stealing wallets and watches for show, and then giving them back to their owners.

Penn rates pickpockets “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole” — and God knows stage hypnotists rank low.

Penn braced himself to be unimpressed, and he challenged Robbins to steal something.

But Robbins shrugged his shoulders. He shook his head. He doesn’t like to perform in front of other magicians, he said.

Jillette repeated his challenge.

But Robbins said no again. Penn was wearing just shorts and a sports shirt, and Robbins said this wouldn’t be much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”

Robbins smiled and said no one last time. Instead, he offered to perform a magic trick for Jillette.

By this time, a large audience had formed around the two.

Robbins told Jillette that the trick would involve tracing a circle on a piece of paper around the ring Jillette was wearing.

Jillette took off his ring. He put it down on the table on a piece of paper. He reached for a pen in his shirt pocket. He brought the pen down to the paper and clicked it to start writing.

Suddenly, his face went white. He looked up at Robbins.

“Fuck. You,” Jilllette said.

Robbins was there, standing with a small plastic cylinder between his fingers. It was the ink cartridge from Penn Jillette’s pen.

There are lots of possible morals from this story. But let me focus on just one particularly valuable one. It is this:

For the next 24 hours, until 8:31pm Tuesday, Feb 6, to be exact, I have a special offer if you buy my Most Valuable Email course.

I will tell you the particularly valuable moral from the above story, which I am calling Stage Surprise Success.

​​Stage Surprise Success will give you step-by-step instructions for creating surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence.

If you want this disappearing bonus:

1. Get a copy of my Most Valuable Email training at https://bejakovic.com/mve/

2. Then reply to this email and say you want the disappearing bonus offer.

3. I will then reply with a brief writeup explaining Stage Surprise Success.

4. This disappearing bonus offer is good until tomorrow, Tuesday, February 6, at 8:31pm CET.

5. And of course, if you’ve bought MVE already, this is open to you as well. Write in and ask away, and I will send you Stage Surprise Success also. But the same deadline applies.

A story about true magic

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If you’re interested in my Most Valuable Email program, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

And now, here’s a story about true magic:

Magician Max Malini made his reputation thanks to impromptu performances.

One time, Malini sat down at a restaurant for dinner with company. He spent hours there, talking with his friends, drinking, eating. Fish soup. Lamb chops. Then a slice of chocolate cake.

During the entire time, Malini didn’t get up from the table.

Eventually, he turned to a woman at his table and asked to borrow her hat. This was at a time when women still wore hats. The woman took off hers and handed it to Malini.

Malini set a coin spinning on the table, and asked the woman, lady or eagle? The owner of the hat called out, eagle.

Malini used the hat to cover the still-spinning coin. When he lifted the hat, the coin was flat on the table, tails up, showing the eagle.

Mailini set the coin spinning a second time. He asked a man at his table, lady or eagle? The man said, lady.

Malini covered the coin with the hat again. When he lifted the hat, the coin was flat on the table, heads up, showing the lady.

Malini then set the coin spinning a third time, and covered it with the hat.

And when he lifted the hat, there was no coin at at all.

Instead, there was an enormous block of ice on the table, a cube about one foot to a side, perfectly chiseled, without a single drop of melted ice water anywhere.

And the point? In the words of another magician, screenwriter and novelist William Goldman:

“In a sense, a screenplay, whether a romance or a detective story, is a series of surprises. We detonate these as we go along. But for a surprise to be valid, we must first set the ground rules, indicate expectations.”

And now you can go back to the beginning if you like.

Trust lessons from a professional fraudster

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Several times in this newsletter, I’ve mentioned a tiny book I’ve been reading, Leading With Your Head, by Gary Kurz. Really, it’s a pamphlet more than book, just 40-odd pages. But I’m still not done with it.

Leading With Your Head talks about the misdirection part of magic, all the other psychological stuff besides the sleight-of-hand. ​​How to focus the attention of your audience. How to direct that attention. How to make people believe and trust you, even though you are known to be a professional fraudster whose job it is to mislead and trick them.

So how do you do it? Lotsa techniques. Here’s one:

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One of John Ramsey’s favorite techniques for creating the moment was to create suspicion and then dispel it. The audience’s surprise that their suspicions were unfounded created the moment he needed to do the move for real.

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I don’t know who John Ramsey is. But I do know something else — and that’s the value of reading widely.

Now at this point, you might expect me to launch into a mentalist-like pitch for my Insights & More Book Club. But no. I would never.

Instead, I just want to give you a real example, right here, for free, of the value of reading widely. Here’s an effective opening and an interesting fact I found by reading a newsletter called Contemplations On The Tree Of Woe:

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The Chinese curse their enemies with the phrase “may you live in interesting times.”

Or, rather, Americans think that Chinese curse their enemies like that; according to Infogalactic, “despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no equivalent expression in Chinese.”

Fortunately, there’s an actual Chinese phrase that’s much more interesting. It’s found in a 1627 short story collection…

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And now in this brief moment, let me slide my Insights & More Book Club into view.

This elite club is open to a select, small group of new members right now. But the heavy front doors of the club will be sealed again soon, on Sunday, April 30, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re curious to find out more about this club, or even to join, then the first step is to get on my email list. That’s the only place I recruit members. To take that first step, click here and fill out the application form that appears.

AI wants you to take its job

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Yesterday, the waning gibbous moon in Leo opposed Saturn in Aquarius. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that a half dozen marketers all independently and yet simultaneously decided to send emails with their thoughts about AI and what it means for copywriters.

But in spite of the AI barrage yesterday, the most interesting thing I’ve read about AI for copywriters came not from a marketer, but a guy named Sam Kriss.

​​Last week, Kriss published a long article, putting ChatGPT into a surprising historical context, and making the claim that AI writing is getting worse rather than better.

Worse, because earlier versions of GPT were weird, sometimes useless, but sometimes new and wonderful.

Meanwhile, the most recent version of GPT has simply gotten very good at approximating the current state of writing on the Internet, which is bad and getting worse — clickbait and fluff, optimized for skimming, for nodding along, for other AI like search engines and front-page algorithms. Kriss makes a prediction:

If you write the keyword-laden babble for Emily’s Scrummy Kitchen, or monetised blog posts angling for answerboxes, or bludgeon-headed political takes that go viral every weekday, or flatly competent student essays, or little inspirational poems in lowercase, or absolutely anything to do with cryptocurrency — if your writing can be done by a machine because it is already machinelike — then ChatGPT will take your job. If you do screenplays for Netflix, it may have already done so.

At this point, the standard email marketing formula calls for saying something hopeful, about how there’s still time to up your skills and build the right relationship with your audience, so you can insulate yourself from the coming AI purges.

But I won’t follow the standard formula. In part, because I’d just be helping the AI obsolete me sooner.

In part, because rather than hopeful, I feel mostly curious. I feel we’re on the verge of a big moment, not just for copywriters, but as a society. I’m curious what what that moment will look like, and what’s waiting on the other end of it.

And now, even though I probably haven’t done a good job preparing you for it emotionally, I’m still going to tempt you with an offer. That’s one part of the standard email marketing formula I’m not willing to forgo.

So here goes:​​

Maybe you yourself are curious why exactly I found the Sam Kriss article so interesting, and why I decided to share a quote from it with you.

Really, I told you above. But maybe you want it spelled out a little more clearly, or maybe you want some more examples.

If you do, or if you want to write things that get shared on your behalf, by actual humans, then the secret is here, in Chapter 8:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

A man, a woman, a gun, and some crickets

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Picture the scene:

It’s dark.

Crickets are chirping.

A beautiful school teacher is moving quickly around her empty and isolated prairie house.

She’s undressing after a long day.

She gets down to her white chemise. She turns around from her closet to her bed and— SHRIEK!

She sees there’s a man sitting there in the dark, hands crossed on his chest.

“Keep going teacher lady,” he says with a hint of menace in his voice.

The school teacher stands there, breathing heavily, her hand at her chest, with a look on her face that says, NEVER.

The man slowly reaches over, picks up a gun, and points it at the school teacher.

“Don’t mind me,” he says coldly. “Keep on going.”

The woman looks down at her chemise in shame. She starts to untie the top. Now her face seems to be begging the man to let her stop.

But the man is obviously enjoying the show. He looks the woman up and down while still keeping the gun pointed at her.

The woman continues to undress. She’s now down to just her britches. She holds her chemise against her body to keep some dignity.

The man takes a deep breath.

“Let down your hair,” he says.

She does. The chemise drops to the ground and she’s just left in her one-piece underwear.

“Shake your head,” the man says.

She does. Her hair falls across her face.

The man doesn’t say anything more. Instead, he just gestures with the gun. He wants the woman to do away with the remaining underwear also.

She hesitates. There’s a mixture of fury and resolve on her face. Eventually, with decided movements, she starts to untie and unbutton her underwear.

She stands there, almost naked, with the underwear barely on her shoulders, ready to slip off.

The crickets keep chirping.

The man lowers his gun. Slowly, he takes off his gun belt. He stands up and walks to the woman.

He reaches inside her untied underwear.

The woman can barely control her fury.

“You know what I wish?” she says with her teeth clenched.

“What?”

“That once you’d get here on time!” And she puts her arms around the man and they kiss.

As you might know, that’s a scene from the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It’s the first time we see the character played by Katharine Ross, the school teacher who was Sundance’s lover and who accompanied Butch and Sundance all the way down to Bolivia.

I’m using this scene to express an idea by Mark Ford, which is itself an expression of a much older idea:

“Ideas in and of themselves have little value. The value lies in the way they are expressed. New ideas are never new. Nor are they the product of a single mind. Rather, they are the particular articulation of general ideas that are in the common marketplace of ideas, repeated endlessly until one particular articulation catches fire. Remember this when you have a new idea that you are excited about. If you want to have it accepted, you must be willing to express it in dozens of different ways.”

A man and a woman in love. Not new.

A man and a woman in love, meeting after a long absence and hungrily reaching for each other. Not new.

An apparent rape, which turns out to be a man and a woman in love, meeting after a long absence and hungrily reaching for each other. That’s something you win an Oscar for, which is what happened to screenwriter William Goldman after he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Whatever. Maybe you see where I’m going with this. And maybe you don’t. If you don’t, then I guess I’ve done my job, and that job ain’t easy. As A-list copywriter Jim Rutz said once:

“You must surprise the reader at the outset and at every turn of the copy. This takes time and toil.”

Do you see where I’m going now? I want to make sure that you do, so let me spell it out:

I write a daily email newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and influence. If you’d like to be surprised on occasion, and maybe get exposed to some valuable ideas as well, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

“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

The IOU theory of copywriting

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I read once (in a book) that credit, aka debt, came way before money. In other words, an IOU — a little slip of clay tablet commemorating the three sheep you gave to me — is a more powerful economic idea than gold coins.

I also read once (in an email) that copywriter Gary Halbert said the most powerful human motivating force is not self-interest… but curiosity.

Is there a connection between these two powerful facts?

Clearly. Because I personally think of curiosity as an IOU.

You give a couple of IOUs to your reader right in your headline. “I promise to pay you some valuable information,” each IOU says, “just give me a bit of time.”

As long as you’re in the reader’s debt, as long as he’s holding one of your IOUs, he sticks around. He wants to get paid.

The good thing is that you can give your reader a new IOU before paying off an old one. That way you can keep him around. But be careful.

If you start handing out too many IOUs… if the debt you’re incurring is too outrageous… if the repayment period is too long… then your reader is likely to get frustrated.

“This guy is never gonna pay up,” he will say. “This is just worthless paper.” He will throw away all your IOUs into the river, and along with them, your sale.

In other words, don’t overdo your debt of curiosity. But do do it.

And if you want some technical pointers on how to do curiosity in your sales copy, why, I’ve got just the thing.

It’s hidden right there inside Commandment III of my book on A-list copywriter commandments.

In case you haven’t checked this book out yet, but are a bit curious, here’s the link:

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

The power of sitting and not taking action

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Yesterday, I found myself reading a promising article titled:

“Buy Things, Not Experiences”

“Wow!” I said, as a gust of wind shook my window. “That’s the opposite of that tired phrase everybody’s always preaching, ‘Buy experiences, not things.'”

A little smile spread across my face. I couldn’t wait to see how the writer would pay off this shocking, denialist headline.

But woof, what a disappointment.

The article sounded like a speech prepared in 15 minutes by a high school debater. Three unrelated, undeveloped, unconvincing arguments. I won’t retell them here, but I’ll tell you the upshot:

The controversial headline got my attention. But the actual content didn’t make me want to read more by the same writer.

In fact, it put me on guard. In case I ever see another link to this guy’s content, I will think twice — Oh, that’s the high school debater, it’s probably not worth wasting my time.

That’s a fate I would like to avoid for the things that I write. Perhaps you want the same for yourself, too.

In that case, I can tell you a little secret which goes against much conventional wisdom in the marketing space:

There’s a lot of value in just sitting on things. Well, at least that’s what I’ve personally found.

For example, this newsletter. I don’t “execute” these emails fast. I don’t write at breakneck speed or jump on good ideas as they come to me.

Instead, I often get an idea for a subject line, topic, angle… and then it sits there, for days, weeks, sometimes months. I have things I wrote down two years ago which have still not matured.

But on occasion, something will click. A second good idea, or illustration, or whatever, will come my way. And I’ll remember — boy, this would go great with that other thing I thought of months ago.

Of course, it doesn’t always click. But in general, by sitting on ideas, like a mother goose on her eggs, I’ve written some of my most effective, interesting, and influential emails.

And maybe, you will find the same with your own writing. By sitting, and not taking action fast. In spite of that tired phrase everybody’s always preaching, “Money loves speed!”

But really, all this has just been a buildup to the thing I really wanted to show you.

Because a few weeks ago, I found a funny clip on YouTube. ​​It was part of a sketch show that ran on the BBC between 2006 and 2010.

​​All the clips I found from this show were clever and well-written, and they often had direct application to persuasion and influence.

Such as the clip I’m about to share with you.

It’s a satire of Richard Dawkins, looking for a new topic after his blockbuster book, The God Delusion.

Maybe you will enjoy the sketch. And maybe, it will give you some good ideas for controversial content that delivers… rather than disappoints. You can find it below.

But before you click to watch it, sign up for my email newsletter. Or don’t, and sit on it for a while. Here’s the video:

How to get “America’s best copywriter” to read your every email

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I tend to idolize things that happened before I arrived on the scene. So I imagine it must have been great to fly in the “Coffee, Tea, or Me?” heyday of TWA…

It must have been great to do business by the screeching and crackling fax…

And it must have been great to write copy for junk— I mean, direct mail.

I imagine direct mail copywriters to have been like titans, bigger and cooler and more powerful than any of us today.

That’s one of the reasons I have so much respect for Gary Bencivenga. Of course, there are many other, more logical reasons to respect Gary.

Like the fact the man’s been called called “America’s greatest copywriter,” by people who should know. Or that he has an unmatched string of wins, going up against other top pros. Or that he’s a deep thinker in this field, whose ideas have influenced many, myself included.

So here’s one idea of Gary’s. It’s the one that influenced me the most.

This idea was connected to another titan who stomped the Earth before I became aware of direct response. I’m talking about Gary Halbert.

Gary Halbert died in 2007. And when that happened, Gary Bencivenga wrote the following:

In fact, I was thinking about Gary and his newsletter just a few weeks ago. I had noticed something unusual about my reaction to it. I subscribe to numerous marketing ezines. But I noticed that, under the crush of hundreds of emails a week, I found myself deleting almost all of them unopened… except for The Gary Halbert Letter. I would always open his, usually as soon as it hit my inbox.

Whenever I notice an anomaly like that, I ask the most instructive word in the English language: Why?

[…]

Gary shared news. Sometimes he was the news, sometimes it was a dramatic turn of events in his tumultuous life, but often enough, he shared news of a technique or strategy that would make your response and profits soar. You couldn’t afford to miss even one of these gems, so you had to open every issue.

Maybe you think is trivial.

But maybe it says something to you. It did to me. It told me that, if you can get America’s best copywriter to read every email you send, it’s worth doing.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. supposedly said, “Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension.”

This one observation by Gary B., which I read early in my copy career, really got in my head and stretched it to a new dimension.

And ever since, it’s been key in how I write my own emails. And key to why these emails have gotten in the heads of other people as well. That’s why “Say something new” is the central tenet behind my Influential Emails training, which will happen next month.

Now that you know that, maybe like me, you can go off and spend a few years meditating on Gary’s koan. Try implementing it in your own business. And keep it up until you start to see results.

Or if you’d like a shortcut, both in terms of coming up with new things to say… and of new ways to say ’em… then Top Gun, as Gary might say, take a look at my Influential Emails offer. It’s open now, but it will close this Sunday. Here’s the link:

https://influentialemails.com