Consumption

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.

My recipe for writing a book that influences people and sells itself

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I just spent the morning reading statistics about the best-selling books of the 20th century so I could bring you the following curious anecdote or two:

The year 1936 saw the publication of two all-time bestselling books.

The first of these was Gone With The Wind. That’s a novel that clocked in at 1,037 pages. “People may not like it very much,” said one publishing insider, “but nobody can deny that it gives a lot of reading for your money.”

Gone With The Wind was made into a 1939 movie with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, which won a bunch of Oscars. Without the monstrous success of the movie, odds are that few people today would know about the book, even though it sold over 30 million copies in its time.

On the other hand, consider the other all-time bestseller published in 1936.

It has sold even better — an estimated 40 million copies as of 2022.

And unlike Gone With The Wind, this second book continues to sell over 250,000 each year, even today, almost a century after its first publication.

What’s more, this book does it all without any advertising, without the Hollywood hype machine, simply based on its own magic alone.

You might know the book I’m talking about. It’s Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People.

One part of this success is clearly down to the promise in the title. As Carnegie wrote back then, nobody teaches you this stuff in school. And yet, it’s really the fundamental work of what it means to be a human being.

But it can’t be just the title. That’s not reason why the book continues to sell year after year, or why millions of readers say the book changed their lives.

This includes me. I read How To Win Friends for the first time when I was around 18. It definitely changed how I behave.

For example, take Carnegie’s dictum that you cannot ever win an argument.

​​I’m argumentative by nature. But just yesterday, I kept myself from arguing — because Carnegie’s ghost appeared from somewhere and reminded me that I make my own life more difficult every time I aim to prove I’m right.

This kind of influence comes down to what’s inside the covers, and not just on them.

So what’s inside? I’ll tell ya.

Each chapter of Carnegie’s book is exactly the same, once you strip away the meat and look at the skeleton underneath. It goes like this:

1. Anecdote
2. The core idea of the chapter, which is illustrated by the anecdote above, and which is further illustrated by…
3. Anecdote
4. Anecdote
5. Anecdote
6. (optional) Anecdote

The valuable ideas in Carnegie’s book can fit on a single page. But it’s the other 290 pages of illustration that have made the book what it is.

In other words, the recipe for mass influence and continued easy sales is being light on how-to and heavy on case studies and stories, including personal stories and experiences.

Maybe you say that’s obvious. And it should be, if you read daily email newsletters like mine. But maybe you don’t read my newsletter yet. In case you’d like to fix that, so you can more ideas and illustrations on how to influence and even sell people, then I suggest you click here and follow the instructions that appear.

My frustrating personal experience reading a well-known marketer’s email a few days ago

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A few days ago, a well-known marketer sent out one of his daily emails. I don’t to make it sound like I’m trying to make my name by repeatedly picking on people with bigger audiences than me, so let me just use an impenetrable alias for this guy. We can call him Gavin Juff.

So Gavin sent out an email a few days ago. The subject line read something like, “The one thing all successful copywriters have in common.”

But then, Gavin opened the body copy of his email with a long and I assume interesting personal story.

I say I assume it was interesting, because I just scrolled through it, looking for that “one thing” payoff.

And you know what? The payoff was, in effect, “We all make mistakes, and it’s okay.”

I rolled my eyes at this.

The fact is, Gavin was actually sharing a worthwhile point. The fact is, he put in a good amount of effort to illustrate his point with an (I assume) interesting personal story. And the fact is, it took me all of three seconds to open his email, scroll to the end, and feel he had wasted my time.

So there you go. That’s my personal story of a frustrating recent experience. I’m not sure what valuable point you can take away from that. Perhaps it’s something like:

“Excessive use of proven direct response techniques in personal daily emails can be more of a liability than an asset.”

Or maybe it’s something like:

“Make sure the transitions between your copy sections (including from subject line to body copy) are congruent and adequately prepared.”

Or maybe it’s just something like:

“The number one problem with daily email copy is a preachy, old-hat takeaway. But if you have to make such a takeaway because it’s actually true and important (like in Gavin’s case above), then sell something else in your subject line. Such as, for example, yourself and your frustrating personal experience.”

Anyways, I realize I haven’t done much to educate you in this post. I will try to do better in the future.

In case you would like to get my daily emails, and witness me trying to educate you more on the fundamentals of email copywriting and persuasion and influence more broadly, click here and follow the instructions.

sold out

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Just a heads up, nearly half of all the artificially restricted copies of Copy Riddles have sol—

Relax. I won’t go there.

A couple days ago, I tapped into a rich vein of discontent by writing about Justin Goff’s “sold out” email, which tried to push an unattractive offer that had “sold out” fewer than half of all available copies.

Many readers wrote in to say they found this kind of marketing sneaky and misleading (“This email had me screaming at my phone”).

And then, among the many “you tell ’em!” replies, I got a message by a reader named Andre, who wrote in with a suggestion for me:

Your email about no real urgency on infinite+ digital copies reminded me of what Tony Shepherd used to do.

Because he had a fairly large suite of digital products…

He ripped a page out of Disney’s marketing book.

What he did was promote a product for a set amount of time and then…

Put it back into the “vault” where it was unavailable until the next time he promoted it.

It’s an interesting strategy to use for digital products.

Not sure if that would ever work for you, or even a creative variation, but hey, there it is.

The fact is, this model is exactly what I was doing with my Copy Riddles program — until yesterday.

I presold and launched Copy Riddles last year in April. I dripped the content out by email day by day — because I was creating it live, day by day.

After that initial launch finished, I placed Copy Riddles inside a heavy trunk and had the trunk locked and brought inside the Bejakovic Cave of Treasures.

​​I then had the cave sealed with a large boulder and guarded by a large man with a large sword, who only ever said one thing, “Hassan chop.”

It was only every few months that I had Hassan move the boulder and open up the cave. Only for a few days at a time did I let people inside to partake of Copy Riddles treasures.

This model worked well. Each time I made Copy Riddles available for a few days, I had new people sign up. And I made good money.

Plus there were other benefits, too.

For example, many people who had signed up during earlier runs signed up again, since they got lifetime access.

​​On that second or third run, some of them finally consumed all the content, which made it so they could finally get the promise of the course — A-list copywriting skills, implanted into your brain.

​​That was good for them and good for me. Because, promise delivered, they were now that much more likely to become my long-term customers.

Anyways, like I said, that’s the model I used — until yesterday.

As of yesterday, Copy Riddles is now an evergreen course. It’s available year-round, and not just during a few launch periods. And it’s delivered through a members-only area of my site (which I might rename The Cave of Treasures) and not through email.

I’m telling you all this because of the ongoing Copy Riddles “launch.”

All the current “launch” really means is that if you do decide to get Copy Riddles before this Sunday, Oct 30 2022, at 12 midnight PST, you will pay less than if you join Copy Riddles after this “launch” period ends. I will increase the price to $400 on Monday as a first step.

But there’s a second reason why I’m telling you about my course model switch. And that’s in case you ever create and want to sell courses of your own.

How you package up and deliver those courses will have a big impact on how those courses are perceived, sold, and consumed — independent of the content and value inside.

But if you are creating your own courses, don’t assume that just because I changed from the launch to the evergreen model that this is the way to go.

The fact is, this switch wasn’t a decision about money or about the number of sales made.

I simply wanted offers I could promote regularly at end of my daily emails. Copy Riddles is now one of those offers.

But this switch means I’ve lost some of the benefits of the launch model. I’ve had to think up ways to try to reproduce at least a part of them.

We will see if the price increase on Monday will work to stimulate the same kind of urgency as Hassan rolling back the boulder on the mouth of the cave.

And as for those other benefits of the launch model — like people actually consuming the content and getting value out of the course — well, I’ve had to think up other things.

I’ll talk about those in future emails during this “launch” period. Meanwhile, if you want to get Copy Riddles now, before the price goes up, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

High-quality content is a bad investment for most businesses

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In a recent newsletter, media watcher Simon Owens wrote that high-end, narrative podcasts are a bad investment for most businesses. Cheap, conversational podcasts are a much smarter bet. This made my long and I believe quite attractive ears perk up.

Why is producing high-production-value, valuable content such a bad idea? Simon shares his own experience:

But here we are just two years later, and most of the narrative shows are gone from my own podcast feed. The transition occurred gradually. I’d find myself looking forward to new episodes of the conversational podcasts, whereas listening to the scripted ones just felt like homework. My mind would drift during crucial plot points, which meant skipping back several minutes so I could regain my narrative foothold. In many cases, the narrative series I listened to died off after a single season, and I just didn’t have the energy to try out new ones. Today, only four out of the 23 shows I regularly listen to hinge on a storytelling structure.

Simon says, of course there is still some space for fancy narrative podcasts like Serial, and there will always be some audience. But for most businesses, investing in this kind of content is a losing game.

Like I said, my ears were very perky after reading this.

“What if it’s not just podcasts?” I said to myself. The question is not about complex storytelling versus unscripted conversations. The question is whether your content feels like homework or not.

Or maybe the question is really this:

Is the high production value you put into your content helping your case — or actually hurting it? This might be something to think about if you have a podcast, or a YouTube channel, or — an email newsletter.

But here’s something else to think about:

People don’t just sign up to conversational podcasts. Not just like that. Nobody sets out looking for a random and unknown person to listen to.

No, people initially start listening to conversational podcast because the podcast is recommended by somebody… or because a snippet of it is surprising or fun… or, most likely, because the podcaster has some kind of standing, authority, or status.

Which brings me to my Most Valuable Email training.

It’s about an email copywriting trick. This trick produces surprising content. Content which gets recommended and shared by readers to other potential readers. And which builds up your perceived standing, authority, and status, by you doing nothing more than writing valuable emails regularly… which don’t feel like homework to read.

In case you have an email newsletter around marketing or copywriting, or want to start one, this Most Valuable Email training might be a good investment. To find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

What’s the best font for making sales?

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A couple days ago, I saw a little study titled, “Best Font for Online Reading.”

Spoiler: there’s no clear answer.

One font, Garamond, allowed the fastest reading speed on average.

But that’s just on average. Not every person read fastest with Garamond. Another font, Franklin Gothic, proved to be the fastest font for the most people, though the average reading speed was lower than Garamond.

So is it time to change your sales page font to Garamond? Or Franklin Gothic?

Or maybe even to Open Sans — the font that came in last in terms of reading speed?

There is an argument to be made for having people be able to read your copy faster. If they get through your copy more quickly and easily, they get your sales message more easily, and they make it to the order button faster. And money loves speed, right?

On the other hand, there’s an equal argument to be made for having people read slower. The more time and effort somebody invests with you, the more likely they are to trust you (one of those mental shortcuts we all engage in), and the more likely they are to justify that investment and trust by buying in the end.

So like I said, no clear answer.

But this did bring to mind a story Brian Kurtz likes to tell about a time he hired Gary Bencivenga.

As you probably know, Brian was the VP at direct response publisher Boardroom. And in that role, he hired some of the most famous and most brilliant copywriters of all time, Gary among them.

Anyways, Brian’s story is about two sales packages, one fast, one slow, both written by Gary Bencivenga, both promoting the same product.

To me personally, this story has proven to be the most fundamental and important lesson when it comes to copywriting or running a direct response business.

Brian’s little story won’t tell you what kind of font to use, or what kind of copy to write, fast or slow. But maybe it will make that choice a lot clearer in your mind.

In case you want to read Brian’s valuable sales and copy study, you can find it at the link below. But before you go read that, perhaps you might like to sign up for my slow but trustworthy email newsletter. In any case, here’s Brian’s article:

https://www.briankurtz.net/how-you-sell-is-how-they-will-respond/

Dude… you gotta read this email

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This morning I was idling on the Internet when I saw a clip of an MMA fight between all-time great Fedor Emelianenko and all-time loudmouth Chael Sonnen.

In the clip, Sonnen managed to get Emelianenko on the ground. Sonnen then did some fancy/silly move to get himself in trouble, with Emelianenko on top, raining punches down on Sonnen’s head.

But what really had me transfixed was looking at the ad on Sonnen’s shorts. It read:

DUDE WIPES

Dude wipes? It turns out to be a real thing. Disposable wet wipes for men, in masculine black packaging.

My first impression was that calling your intimate hygiene product “wipes” is already emasculating, and defeats all the manly branding.

But apparently I’m wrong. DUDE Wipes is a successful business. As proof:

They have many offers on their site beyond just wipes (DUDE bidet)…

They have endorsement deals with pro sports figures (pro golfer: “On the golf course and off it, I’m taking it to the hole with DUDE Wipes”)…

And on Amazon, various bundles of DUDE wipes have tens of thousands of reviews, almost all five-star, though with some caveats (“The wife is always reluctant to have them in the guest bath when we have company because of the, as she puts it, sophomoric name and black package”).

This brought to mind my long-simmering idea to create a business by taking a consumable product and applying it to an affinity or identity group.

The usual order in much of direct response is to take a niche and then figure out, what could we sell to them? What could we create and sell at a high-enough markup and with repeating revenue for long enough to make it worthwhile?

This system clearly works.

But the other way works also, and maybe even better. As Claude Hopkins put it, “It is a well-known fact that the greatest profits are made on great volume and small profit.”

So the idea is to take a consumable product which is a known seller to a mass audience, and brand it for a specific affinity or identity group.

I’ve already seen this done with coffee for Reformed Christians. That brand was called Reformed Roasters, and within two months of being launched, it was making $40k/month.

So why not a line of fine cheeses for militant atheists?

Or air fresheners for QAnon nuts?

Or dog food for dogs of heavy metal heads?

Maybe you say any of these ideas is arbitrary, and much more likely to fail than to work.

I’m sure you’re right. To make this work, you will need good marketing to get your Sunni Soda off the ground.

But if you have capital to invest, I happen to know a good marketer. And if you’re looking for a partner to help you create the next Pepsodent or Palmolive soap — for dudes — then sign up for my email list and then we can talk.