Consumption

How to use an involvement device to win customers for the long term

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Yesterday, I got on three calls with three people who expressed interest in my new daily email prompts service.

The last of these three calls was with a media buyer named Sean (not sure he wants me to share his last name), who works at an agency in Colorado.

Sean has bought pretty much every training and course I’ve put out, starting with Copy Riddles back in 2021.

As were getting started with the call, Sean explained how it started:

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What I really liked about Copy Riddles was that little involvement piece where you have to read the source material and come up with your own bullet that’s close to what the copywriter came up with.

And that involvement advice kept me going through the entire course. It’s probably the coolest course that I’ve done in terms of copywriting. I’ve been dabbling in the copywriting space for 20 years, since I was 15.

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You can do something like this as well.

Instead of just giving people information, add in an involvement device. In other words, give your customers some sort of safe opportunity to actively practice, not just consume.

The reason to go to this trouble is because your customers will end up going through what you sell them, and will get more out of it as a result.

That’s good for them, and it’s good for you. By my entirely made-up math, an involvement device makes it an estimated 13.471x times more likely customers will buy something from you again. And I think Sean’s custom with my little online business is a good example of that.

If you have Copy Riddles, you know how the involvement device in that program works. And if you don’t have Copy Riddles yet:

I’ve never done a Black Friday promotion, and I won’t be changing that this year.

But I will have a “White Tuesday” special offer on Copy Riddles, starting tomorrow and lasting through Tuesday November 12.

Why White Tuesday?

I just thought it was a funny-sounding zag to everybody’s constant zigging with “Black Friday.”

I did try to find some kind of historical event to tie White Tuesday into… but I only came upon a decree from November 12, 1938, in Nazi Germany, excluding Jews from participating in the economy.

This is most definitely NOT the kind of White Tuesday I have in mind.

Instead, I just mean this event to be a fun, little, completely Nazi-free promo, hopefully with an irresistible offer to get you to try Copy Riddles if have been curious about it but have not jumped in yet. But more on all that tomorrow.

No response

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Here’s an idea that I’ve found to be true:

If you do a good job getting people to consume and digest your content all the way through, it’s much easier to get great testimonials, ones you can actually feature because they say something substantive, and because they have a real shot of converting others as well.

I bring this up because last night, a copywriter named Pete, who’s been on my list for a while and who has already bought a few of my previous offers, signed up for my 3rd Conversion training, all about consumption and digestion.

When I asked Pete why, and what he’s hoping to get from the training, he replied:

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Reason I joined is, because I’ve done a few workshops in the past few months that I’ve repurposed as content to sell.

Some people bought, but when I send emails to them to get feedback I get no response.

Which I’m assuming is because they haven’t gone through it.

If they thought it sucked, I’m certain I would hear about it. As negative people usually have something to say lol

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I’m not sure if people who think an offer sucked usually have something to say about it. I know I like to keep my mouth shut and just go elsewhere.

I’m not saying that’s what happened in Pete’s case, and there’s no reason to think so based on his message.

But I do know what I told you above:

If you do a good job getting people to consume and digest your content, it becomes much easier to get great testimonials, or at least feedback and response of some sort.

And as an example of that, I can tell you that last month, Pete bought my Most Valuable Emails and the stripped-down version of Simple Money Emails. When I wrote to him to deliver the courses, he replied:

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I stayed up last night to binge read everything in MVE…

And all I have to say is, you’re not charging enough, dude.

After going through Copy Riddles and now MVE, and I’ll likely do the same with SME…

Everything you sell is solid.

Always grateful when I see one of your emails roll in.

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Today, I’m not selling either Copy Riddles or MVE or SME, though of course if you’d like to give me money for those, you can.

Today, I’m simply trying to tell you it’s the last day to sign up for the 3rd Conversion training.

On the training, I will cover a small number of techniques, ones I’ve used and ones I’ve had used on me, to get people to actually go through your paid courses and ebooks and programs, ideally to the end.

I’m only charging $100 for this training. It’s probably not enough, but I’m doing it because frankly I want to organize this knowledge in my own head.

Doing it live, in front of an audience of people who are genuinely interested and can profit from it, is a good motivator for me.

In other words, money and sales are not main reason why I’m putting this training on.

That said, money and sales can be the main reason why you might want to join me on this training.

Everything in your business — from your ads to your emails to your sales pages (hello testimonials) — becomes much easier if people get value from what you deliver.

And in order for them to have any chance of getting value from what you deliver — beyond just the thrill of spending money on something — they have to consume and digest what you’re selling them.

The deadline to sign up for the 3rd Conversion training is tonight, Wednesday, at 12 midnight PST.

The training itself will happen on Zoom tomorrow, Thursday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. There will be a recording which I will send out after the call, though if you can make it live, you and I both are sure to benefit more from it.

If you’d like to get in before the doors close:

​https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion​

How and why I started this newsletter

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For some reason, many people seem fascinated by the obscure origins of this newsletter.

“How did you get started? What was your initial motive? Is it true that you were once a Pinterest star?”

If none of that interests you, I can’t say I blame you.

But if you are curious, here’s my origin story, in all its Peter Parker awkwardness:

1. In 2015, with my savings dwindling and with the thought of going back to an office job being absolutely repulsive to me, I anointed myself a “direct response copywriter” and started selling myself as such to anybody who had $5 to spend.

2. I soon decided to focus on email copywriting, because my Spidey-sense told me this would be a “thing.”

3. After a couple months and a dozen random clients, a suspicion started to creep into my mind. “Maybe I should learn a little bit about email copywriting if I’m going to be selling it?”

4. So I signed up to Ben Settle’s email list, because frankly there was not all that much free and ongoing information at the time about email besides Ben.

Each of Ben’s emails seemed to follow the same format: a teasing promise, maybe dressed up with some pop-culture reference, and a link to sign up to Ben’s $97/month Email Players print newsletter.

5. For years, I didn’t sign up to Email Players, though I was tempted by Ben’s teasing. At first, I didn’t sign up because why pay $97 a month for a newsletter?

“I never pay for information,” I told myself. Instead of paying, I preferred to go on working for years without getting any improvement in my results.

Later, when that changed, I still didn’t sign up for Email Players because of Ben’s policy of telling people not to sign up unless they are fit to be an Email Player, and his threats that if you ever sign up and quit, you can never come back.

6. Eventually, in 2017, Ben’s teasing and mind games wore me down. I signed up to Email Players. (I also finally read the free issue of Email Players that Ben gives away on his site, and which I had gotten years earlier, when I signed up to his list.)

7. I started using some things Ben teaches in my client work, and I got good results. But I was still struggling personally to make consistent good money as a copywriter because client work was unreliable.

8. Ben started selling a new course which was called something like Client Cash Machine, all about how to get clients. I bought it, rationalizing the $297 price by saying that if I got a bit of extra client work as a result, it would pay for the course.

9. A few weeks later, Ben’s client-getting course arrived. I opened it with trembling fingers. It was a flash drive with the audio version, and a printed-out transcript.

10. An hour or so after that, I had gone through the course. It said, in a nutshell, “Start an email list and write it daily.” Disappointing. I knew that already. It was all over Ben’s emails for free, and I had hoped Ben would tell me something exciting and new.

11. Still, some time later, I followed Ben’s advice and finally started an email list, with the distant future goal of getting clients, and with the immediate goal of fooling around in my own sandbox each day, putting into practice things I was learning from books and courses, and demonstrating my growing skills to anybody who would bear witness.

12. Ta-da! A successful personal brand, authority in the field, and a 6-figure-a-year income, just from writing one daily email, or actually more like writing 3,000 daily emails.

THE END.

I’m telling you this riveting story because I’m putting on a training this Thursday. It’s called 3rd Conversion. It’s about getting your buyers to consume and digest the information you sell.

If you read my story above carefully, it can give you lots of clues about effective strategies to increase consumption and digestion.

If you want me to spell out actual lessons, you can get that on Thursday’s training.

This 3rd Conversion training can be useful to you if you’re after long-term customers and fans… rather than one-off transactions with buyers who hand you a bit of money once and then never benefit from what you sold ’em… never buy from you again… never build up your brand by writing up an email like I’ve just written about Ben Settle.

And in case you’re wondering:

My training on Thursday won’t just be about rehashing Ben Settle’s strategies, and using Ben as a good example of effective consumption and digestion techniques. Because Ben can also serve as a cautionary tale.

Like I’ve written before, I ended up unsubscribing from Ben’s Email Players after a few years — even with Ben’s threats of never being allowed back in. The reason again was consumption and digestion. I felt Ben’s newsletter had simply become a chore to read, so I took my money and my custom elsewhere.

The 3rd Conversion training will happen this Thursday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. There will be a recording which I will send out after the call, though if you can make it live, you and I both are sure to benefit more from it.

If you’d like to sign up for 3rd Conversion now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion

Announcing: 3rd Conversion

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This coming Thursday, October 24, I will put on a live training, called 3rd Conversion.

The ticket to get inside is $100.

3rd Conversion is intended for forward-thinking online business owners and info marketers… those who have realized that selling to one person, ten times over, is easier, more enjoyable, and more profitable than selling to ten people, one time.

Specifically, 3rd Conversion will show you techniques — ones I’ve used with my own products, and ones I’ve had used on me — to turn one-time buyers into long-term customers… by getting buyers to consume and enjoy the info products they bought.

But why? Why worry? Why worry if people consume and enjoy your info products?

Because if people consume and enjoy what you sell them, they are more likely to benefit from it… and they are more likely to come back for seconds, and thirds.

And the third time you sell a buyer something something — the “3rd Conversion” — you cross a kind of threshold.

The research shows, and I got no reason to doubt it, that at this third conversion, for the first time, the customer finally becomes more likely than not to keep buying from you, over and over, year after year.

On Thursday, I’ll give you specific techniques to get to this magic point yourself, and turn your own one-time buyers into long-term customers, by making your info products more consumable and enjoyable.

You don’t have to decide to sign up for the 3rd Conversion training right now. I’ll keep talking about it until Thursday, when I will close the cart down.

But if you’re the kind of forward-thinking person that I think can benefit from this information… and if you already know that you want this info, because you care about getting more customers for the long term… and if you think $100 is a fair price for the promise I’m making… then here’s where to get your ticket for the show on Thursday:

https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion

Pick one of these 3 niches

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Less is often more when it comes to marketing education.

Example:

I’ve heard marketer Travis Sago say he was once selling a biz op training, about providing some sort of marketing service to businesses.

The first iteration of the training didn’t work out well — Travis had to spend too much time helping his students figure out what niche of businesses to go after.

After it was all over, Travis took stock.

He paced and paced the floor of his laboratory, deep into the night.

And then, in the early morning hours, he had an epiphany:

For the second iteration of the training, Travis simply took out the niche selection part.

Instead, he made niche selection a part of the marketing and application process. When you signed up for the training, you had to pick one of three niches to be in.

Result:

Much easier delivery of the training, and much better results for the students.

I bring this up because I have my Daily Email Fastlane coming up on Thursday. This is a workshop about sending daily emails for your personal brand.

It’s the first time I’m ever offering this workshop.

I have learned a lot from Travis Sago, and I plan to learn from him here as well. So I will not be covering how to pick a niche in Daily Email Fastlane.

Instead, for anyone who does not yet have a niche, but is considering writing daily emails for themselves, my advice is to pick one of these 3 niches for your daily emails:

1. Personal interest

2. Previous experience (preferably, something you got paid for)

3. Make money

You can mix and meld these. My daily emails started out as #1 (interest in persuasion, influence, and personal development)… moved into #2 (talking about copywriting and marketing, based on the work I was doing for clients)… and I’ve since introduced #3, how to get adequately rich so you can live life on your own terms. Which brings me back to Daily Email Fastlane.

The above advice about niches holds whether or not you decide to join me for Daily Email Fastlane. If you want to write daily emails and build a personal brand based on those emails, pick one of the 3 niches above.

But if you want my advice on topics that are a bit further down the daily email road, then consider actually joining me for this workshop.

I will talk about 3 daily emailers I have coached. Each of them fits primarily into one of three categories above. And each built a nice lifestyle business, with one daily email at the center of it.

The deadline to sign up for Daily Email Fastlane is this Wednesday, at 8:31pm CET. If you know you want in, and you want to make sure you don’t miss the deadline, here’s where to go now:

https://bejakovic.com/daily-email-fastlane

The 10-word hangover jingle that doubled sales

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This morning, I was reading Frank Luntz’s Words That Work. That’s how I came across the following ancient marketing anecdote, with a very modern takeaway:

Back in the 1960s, Alka-Seltzer, the upset-stomach effervescent tablet, wasn’t selling well. And advertising wasn’t helping.

Then the company ran a new ad with a new jingle:

“Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is”

Result:

Sales almost doubled. Customers were happier. Alka-Seltzer as a business was rescued and was eventually sold to Bayer in 1977, for about $1.4 billion in today’s money.

WTF happened?

Plop plop fizz fizz…

Sure, the jingle was catchy. But that’s not what rescued Alka-Seltzer. Instead, it was simple economics.

Until this ad, most people, hung over on a Sunday morning from the Saturday night’s bender, would plop one Alka-Seltzer into some water, stare while it fizzed up, and then chug it down to feel less awful.

After all, that’s how Alka-Seltzer was sold, and that’s what the instructions on the box said.

It worked ok. Clearly not great though, considering the straits that Alka-Seltzer was in.

Then a doctor at the Alka-Seltzer labs named Dorothy Carter suggested taking two Alka-Seltzer instead of one, in order to “break through the pain barrier.”

Sure enough, two pills made the hangover more bearable. Customers were happier. And so were Alka-Seltzer execs, after the plop plop fizz fizz campaign spread the message to the public, and nearly doubled Alka-Seltzer consumption and sales.

The very modern takeaway, as relevant today as it was in the days of Madison Avenue jingles:

Educate your customers on consuming more of your product. Increase the transaction size, not by telling people they’ll save money, but by telling them how to get better results.

This ancient anecdote and the modern takeaway have nothing to do with my upcoming Daily Email Fastlane workshop.

Well, they have something to do with it, but I will save that for the actual workshop instead of giving away everything in this email.

In case you’re curious about this workshop, here’s what to know:

This workshop will cover the common elements I’ve seen in three uniquely successful daily emailers I’ve coached over the past year and a half.

These daily emailers have stood out to me — in terms of the money they make, the stability of their income, and simply in how much they seem to enjoy their business and their life.

My claim is that, once you know the common elements of three very different, and yet very successful daily email business owners, you can take what has worked for them and have it work for you. You can get to success with daily email for your personal brand, in the fast lane.

Daily Email Fastlane will happen next Thursday, May 23, at 8pm CET, 2pm EST, 11am PST.

The deadline to sign up is Wednesday, May 22, at 8:31pm CET.

In case you’d like to sign up now, so you can be sure not to miss out:

Click here, sign up, get ahead fast, never stop

Daniel Throssell offers a thought on my CopyHour promo

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This morning, I started my final-day email barrage promoting CopyHour. In reply to my last day’s first email, I got a message from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, who wrote:

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Can I offer a thought?

If it were me I’d make more of a big deal of how little a burden your extra training will add to the not insignificant time burden of doing CopyHour.

I get the feeling one of the big objections to a program like CopyHour is the massive time & work commitment it entails, and buyers will (justifiably or not) use that as a reason to excuse themselves from the promo. I think a five-bonus stack does you no favours in that regard. But it looks like mostly small, punchy stuff … so you might do well to emphasise each time that it only adds (say) 1 hour of total time to get the benefit of all those bonuses.

Of course it may be presumptuous of me to say that to you, but it was just a thought I had when reading this.

Good luck!

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As Daniel tends to do, he makes a good point above.

There are two costs to any kind of product. One is the price you pay up front. The other is the effort and time to actually consume or use the beast.

Info product owners often think that the more mere tonnage they pile onto their offer, the better it will sell. But I have personally been turned off by offer smorgasbords that made me think, “Ugh, who’s got the stomach to swallow all those mixed meats…”

So let me take and apply Daniel’s advice:

The core promise for CopyHour is “write six & seven figure copy in the next 90 days.”

Yes, getting there will require work. It’s there in the name — CopyHour.

I encourage you to sign up to CopyHour if you plan to do the work, since that’s the only way to actually get the promised benefits in those 90 days.

If you do decide to join CopyHour today, and you do so before 8:31pm CET using my link below, I will also give you a free bonus, which I’ve taken to calling Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets. This is a bundle of five bite-sized offers which I’ve previously sold for a total of $499.

I won’t overwhelm you now by talking about what each of the five offers is about. I will say that you can use three of these offers as references, meaning you reach for them when you need to, at a cost of just a minute or two of your time.

The remaining two offers inside Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets will take you under an hour total to consume and benefit from — and I have worked hard to make those trainings entertaining as well as valuable.

And now the deadline, always the deadline…

Less than 5 hours remain before I close down my CopyHour promo. If you’d like to get in before then, take a gander now at the CopyHour landing page:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do join CopyHour, write me and say so. Also write me in case you already have bought via my affiliate link. The affiliate portal only lets me see the first name of who’s bought and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll send over your bonuses. Like a reader named Esat who just wrote:

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Hey John!

Just finished buying the CopyHour program by using your affiliate link. Thanks for this – I’d have never seen it if I wasn’t a big fan of you & read your emails.

Please send over my bonuses when you get a chance, thanks.

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Clicks of the dial

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Another day, another Airbnb.

​​Today I am in Warsaw, Poland because it was one of the few places in central Europe that won’t be raining for the next five days. And five days is how much time I have until I go to Gdansk for my first-ever live event to do with marketing and copywriting.

This morning, I woke up, carefully stepped down the circular staircase from the second floor of the apartment to the ground floor, located the inevitable Nespresso machine, popped in a capsule, and made myself a coffee.

And you see where this is going, don’t you?

If you have anything to do with marketing, you should. It’s a basic topic, so basic that I in fact wrote about it in the first month of this newsletter, back in September 2018.

The same marketing model is shared by Nespresso, by King Gillette’s safety razors-and-blades empire, and by info publishers like Agora and Ben Settle. They all promise you almost-irresistible sign-up premiums in order to get you paying for a continuity offer.

You almost certainly know this. Many people have talked about the same. It’s obvious. I won’t belabor the point.

Yesterday, I promised to tell the bigger point behind such models — models which might seem obvious, when somebody else points them out to you.

There’s a document floating around the Internet, legendary marketer Gary Halbert’s “Clicks of the Dial.”

It’s a collection of Gary’s “Most Treasured ‘First-Choice’ Marketing Tactics.”

I read this document once. I even shared a link to it in this newsletter last year.

But I never really got much out of Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” list. I doubt the hundreds or thousands of my readers who downloaded Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” got much out of it either.

That’s because there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, reading, nodding your head, and saying “hmm good idea”… and, on the other hand, observing, thinking a bit, and writing down your own conclusions.

So my point to you today is to open a new text file on your hard drive. Title it “Clicks of the Dial.” Break it up into three columns to start.

Name one column “traffic.” Name the second “conversion.” Name the third “consumption.”

And then, each time you go for a coffee, or a bagel, or a haircut, observe an obvious business or marketing practice you’re exposed to. Odds are, it’s been proven in hundreds or thousands of different situations. “Chunk up” that practice to make a model out of it. And write it down in your list in the appropriate column.

Gary Halbert’s entire “Clicks of the Dial” list was something like 20 items.

In other words, it won’t take you long to fill up your own “Clicks of the Dial” document to full.

​​Very soon, you can have a list of core business and marketing strategies, that you can cycle through, and solve pretty much any marketing problem by clicking the dial.

​​And since you put this list together yourself, based on your own experiences, it will actually mean something to you. Eventually, you might even appear to others to be a marketing jeenius like Gary himself.

As for me, it’s time to go get a brownie. I have a long list of food recommendations for what to eat in Warsaw, but only a limited amount of time and stomach space to do so.

Meanwhile, if you have no more interest in reading anything from me, because you’ve determined to learn all of marketing and copywriting by observation and thinking, there is nothing more I can tell you, except farewell and good luck. On the other hand, if you do want to hear from me every day, with more ideas and occasional inspiration, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

I fly to Sevilla to meet Sean D’Souza

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I’m on the plane as I write this, wedged into the middle seat, surrounded by dozens of conversations in Catalan and Spanish, waiting for the plane to take off. ​​I’m flying from Barcelona to Sevilla. The occasion is a meet-up organized by Sean D’Souza.

Sean is literally a legend in my world. Because Sean is an online marketer, and because he was already successful back when I was just getting started and knew nothing about nothing — except that there are successful people like Sean.

But even now that I know something more, Sean is still worth looking to and learning from. Because he does things differently from everybody else.

I remember a talk Sean gave for Ken McCarthy’s System Club. Over the course of an hour, Sean laid out his counterintuitive but effective, consumption-over-conversion way to run his info publishing business.

At the end of the presentation, somebody in the audience raised his hand. “This all sounds great Sean,” the audience member said. “But do you have any numbers to show your consumption-first approach works better than what we are all doing already?”

Without any bluster, Sean said, “I’m not trying to prove anything to you. If you find this consumption idea works for you, use it. If it doesn’t work for you, no problem.”

By the way, I’ve found that to be a great attitude to take whenever people ask me to explain myself. It doesn’t have to be confrontational, and it doesn’t have to be stated explicitly. ​​But anyways, let me get back on track:

I’ve largely taken Sean’s consumption-first message to heart.

​​It informs how I write this newsletter and how I run my own little info publishing business.

​​And it’s part of the reason why today, some five years after I first heard Sean’s System Club talk, I am willing to get on a plane and fly to another city, just because I like the idea of having coffee with Sean and having a person-to-person conversation with him.

Maybe, like that guy in Sean’s audience, you say that sounds great — for me. But maybe you prefer hard conversion rates and sales numbers and certainty that what you are doing is the proven way to success in marketing.

In that case, let me point you to my Copy Riddles program. It’s all about proven sales numbers and hard conversion rates.

Copy Riddles is the pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of direct response copywriting, reached through millions of dollars in tested advertising, and boiled down to improbable but highly potent combinations of just a few dozen words, also known as bullets.

If you feel like running a numbers-based, conversion-first marketing business, Copy Riddles can quickly get key copywriting skills into your head.

On the other hand, if you like running a fuzzy, numbers-optional, consumption-first marketing business, it also make good senses to get those key copywriting skills into your head, and early.

It’s what I’ve done, and it’s what Sean did also. If you read his his blog or his paid products, you will see frequent reference to and use of copywriting principles and ideas, taken from A-list copywriters and marketers.

In any case, I’m not here to prove anything to you. But if are interested in Copy Riddles and in getting copywriting skills into your head, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Why I’ve just sent you the only Times New Roman newsletter you are likely to read today

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This past Wednesday, I found myself mystified by an article titled The Reaction Economy. It was written by a William Davies — “a sociologist and political economist” — in the London Review of Books.

Davies was complaining about Twitter, and how he is trying to wean himself off it, and how his brain screams to set the record straight whenever it sees idiotic conservative tweets. But Davies is a disciplined person, so he didn’t give in to the urge and get back on Twitter. Instead, he went and wrote a 6,276-word article in the LRB about it.

As I read this, I found myself mystified why I was reading it at all. I mean, what was fresh here? Some guy saying he wants to use social media less? Or a liberal airing his lungs about conservative trolls? Or an online pundit shaking his finger and warning me, as I nod along in silence, that social media is designed to provoke outrage?

And yet, there I was, reading, paragraph after long paragraph. I asked myself why. One small part was the good headline, The Reaction Economy. That sucked me in initially. But what kept me going had nothing to do with the actual content, which was neither new nor insightful.

I realized that the real reason I was reading was that the article was hosted on the LRB website. Beyond that, it was the formatting — 10-line paragraphs, drop capitals, Times New Roman font.

Copywriter Gary Bencivenga once told a story of how his ad agency rushed an ad into the New York Times. In the rush, the NYT typesetters set the ad with a sans-serif font. Gary’s agency complained, and the Times offered to run the ad the next week, for free, with the correct serif font. This was not a proper A/B split test. Still, the serif ad ended up pulling 80% more sales than the sans-serif ad the week earlier.

Is there really sales magic to serif font? Probably not. But we use cues all the time to decide on value, and to guide our decisions. I’ve written before how I find myself unable to spend more than 20 seconds reading a 700-word blog entry or email newsletter, but that I’m happy to read a four-volume book of 1,900 pages for more than a year.

Quality of content is a part of it, but only a part. The fact is, I use cues all the time to evaluate that quality, and I rely on past habits to determine what deserves my attention or not.

So my point for you is is, why stack the odds against yourself? Why give your reader subtle cues that your writing is skimmable, disposable, low-value fluff? The bigger principle, which I’ve seen proven in different areas of life, is: Assume people are already acting how you want them to act. Very often, they will end up doing just that.

Since you’ve read this far, I assume you must be a reader. So I will remind you that, for the next three days, until February 27th, I am opening the doors to my Insights & More Book Club. After that, I will close off the club to new members. We will start reading the next book on March 1st, and it makes no sense to have people join mid-way. The only way to join is to be signed up to my email newsletter first. If you like, you can do that here.