Direct Marketing

Why do scammers say they are from Nigeria?

by

According a site that tracks online fraud, 51% of all scam emails mention Nigeria.

It seems self-defeating. Everybody knows it’s a scam. The “Nigerian prince” has become a stock joke.

So what gives? Are scammers so dumb? Don’t they know that everyone is on to them?

Well, we now have the answer, thanks to Cormac Herley, a researcher at Microsoft.

Herley came up with a mathematical model of the scammer’s dilemma.

And after a lot pencil sharpening… crumpled-up papers… and banging his fist on the desk… Herley finally solved his mathematical equations.

The answer to “Nigerian scammer” riddle is this:

1. Sending out spam emails is pretty close to free.

2. But “selling” the prospects who reply to those emails takes time and effort.

3. And so scammers want their front-end marketing to repel everybody but the most gullible. Because…

Those are the only people who the scammer can hope to profit from. That’s why scammers say they are from Nigeria… exactly because it sets off warning sirens to almost everyone except real prospects.

Ok, maybe this isn’t the kind of mind-blowing conclusion that required a bunch of fancy math.

But still, it sounds like a solid second argument for what Ben Settle calls repulsion marketing.

The first argument is psychological:

By saying things that repel the people you don’t want… you create a tighter bond with the people you do want. Because if you’re not saying anything to piss off a few people, you’re not saying anything to make anybody bond with you, either.

But the Microsoft research gives us a more practical reason to repel.

Because these days, there are a bunch of ways to get a bunch of free prospects. For example:

You can implement Daniel Throssell’s “Referral Magnet” strategy to create a kind of flywheel for new email subscribers…

Or you can post your stuff on your blog and let Google serve it up to the world forever…

Or you can go into popular Facebook groups, and spread your peacock tail for all to admire.

Free. All of it. But then comes the second step:

Fielding questions/requests/offers from prospects… dealing with customer service… handling refunds if you offer them.

All of these things have a real cost, whether in terms of time, actual work, or simply your psychological well-being.

So my takeaway for you is:

Start repelling people. Or get off my list.

Because as freelance forensic consultant Sherlock Holmes once said:

“When you have eliminated all who would be impossible or improfitable to sell, then whoever remains, however improbable, must be your prospect.”

Are you still reading?

Damn. I tried so hard to repel you. In that case, the only thing left for me to do, even though it hurts me to do it, is to offer you a spot on my email newsletter. Click here and fill out the form.

New personality dimension to ask about your market

by

One evening some 50 years ago, a mother showed up at the hospital with her 3-year-old son, who had a large white turban on his head, made of a bathroom towel.

Every so often, the mom would start muttering under her breath.

​​And then she’d smack the boy, hard, on the back of the large white lump on his head.

They were admitted to see the doctor.

​​”What seems to be the problem?”

The mom sighed. She started unwrapping the towel. And there it was:

A bright yellow potty on the boy’s head.

“He jammed his head into it when we weren’t looking,” the mom said. “It’s on so tight that we can’t get it off. We tried everything. Can you help, doctor?”

The point of this story is:

I’ve had doctors in my family.

My mom was a doctor. My grandma was a doctor. In fact, she was the doctor in the story above. (In the end, she sawed the potty off the boy’s head.)

And yet, in spite of this family connection to honest, hardworking, helpful doctors… my knee-jerk, perhaps shocking reaction today is:

You can’t trust what doctors say. Especially as an organized group.

Look at that scandal I wrote about yesterday. Not so long ago, doctors endorsed a specific brand of cigarettes.

And things haven’t changed since. Doctors today might not endorse cigarettes. But as a bunch, the medical industry remains self-serving… short-sighted… and open to corruption.

Again, that’s my knee-jerk reaction. I’m not saying it’s well-reasoned. And I’m not trying to convince you.

I just want to share an interesting idea I read recently:

The US is quickly splintering into two groups, and it’s not the two groups you might think. It’s not Left vs Right, atheist vs religious, Democrat vs. Republicans, vaccinated vs unvaccinated, or even COVID-cautious vs COVID-so-damn-over-it.

The divide between the two groups is this: people whose default setting is to trust institutional narratives, and people whose default setting is to be skeptical of them; people who believe them unless/until proven otherwise and people who disbelieve them to equal measure.

Maybe this idea is not new to you. But it was new to me.

​​I kept going back to it over and over in conversations with friends. I found it much more telling than talking about political views.

That’s why I wanted to share it with you. This “new divide” idea might be valuable to you as a kind of personality test for your audience, market, or niche. Or for yourself.

Anyways, I read this idea in an article by a writer who calls herself Holly Math Nerd.

Holly goes into much more detail and explanation of her theory, and gives some interesting predictions, as well as more examples in attitudes to medicine, education, and media.

So if this idea resonates with you — or if you’re skeptical of it — you can investigate more for yourself here:

https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/on-default-settings-and-the-real

Gary Bencivenga: The best way to create an offer that sells

by

Today I found myself in a hypnotic trance, reading through an article titled,

“Charlie Munger: 20 Book Recommendations That Will Make You Smarter.”

When I got to the end of the article, I slowly started to wake up.

“What the hell am I doing?” I asked myself. “How many thousands of books do I already have on my to-read list? Why did I need to click on this article and why did I make it all the way to the end?”

It might be obvious:

It’s because it’s Charlie Munger’s recommended books. And Charlie Munger is a successful and smart guy… so his recommendations might make me smarter and more successful too. At least that’s how my brain rationalized it.

In my mind, this goes back to the advice of Gary Bencivenga, the man many have called the “best copywriter in the world.”

Gary’s entire copywriting philosophy was built around proof. And Gary believed that, while proof in your copy is great, proof embedded in your offer is even greater.

When I think a bit, I see that’s what got me to click and consume the “offer” of that article today. Because that article could just as well have been,

“Charlie Munger: 20 Negotiation Tips That Will Make You Richer.”

Or, “Charlie Munger: 20 Mental Models That Will Make You Stronger.”

Or, “Charlie Munger: 20 Indian Dishes That Will Make You Fuller.”

With any of those offer variations, but with Charlie Munger again at the core, I probably would have still wound up in a trance.

And vice versa.

Imagine that same article had been titled, “20 Really Fantastic and Valuable Book Recommendations.”

​​And if you go to read the article… there’s a case study right up top of Charlie Munger… and how he made a bunch of money by applying an idea from the first book on the list.

Yes, that case study would be proof. And yes, it would be valuable. But it would be nowhere as valuable as basing the entire offer around Charlie.

But perhaps I’m not making this “proof offer” idea clear. So consider something Gary Bencivenga himself did.

At some point in the 70s, Gary started working for a direct response marketing agency. Gary wrote an ad for the agency itself to hunt for new clients. He ran the ad in the Wall Street Journal — and got his agency swamped with new work.

How did he do it?

Well, there was a ton of proof throughout the entire ad. How the agency works… how they reward copywriters… case studies of past clients.

But all that was nothing compared to the actual proof-centered offer. The entire ad was built around that offer. In fact, it featured right in the headline:

“Announcing a direct response advertising agency that will guarantee to outpull your best ad.”

So there you go. Build your offer around an embedded proof element, and watch your prospects get into a buying trance. But…

Perhaps I’m still not making this “proof offer” idea clear enough.

In that case, you might like to read more about it.

And you can do so in Commandment I of my little book, The 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. Yes, I took Gary’s advice when titling that book. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The old “Simon Lannister”: How to achieve the possible

by

Simon flew through the finish line and immediately collapsed, face down on the track.

“You all right, Si?” It was his sister Margot, standing over him and holding a stopwatch.

Simon lay there on the ground, gasping for breath. “heave… heave… TIME? heave…”

“Oh right,” Margot said. She looked at the stopwatch. “Three minutes, 59.7 seconds. That seems good. Is that good?”

Simon kept heaving for breath, face flat on the ground. Gradually his hands curled into fists and his heaves turned into sobs. “I did it… I DID IT…”

Simon’s Jack Russell terrier, Sergeant, came over and sniffed his master’s feet. Sergeant followed the scent away into the grassy, wildflower-covered field in the middle of the track.

“I don’t mean to rush you Si,” Margot said, “but could you maybe hurry it up? We’ll be late for lunch. And you know how mum gets whenever we’re late.”

And that’s all the detail that’s been preserved about this historic event.

Because historians love to study and celebrate Roger Bannister, the first man to run the four-minute mile, back in 1954.

But practically nobody studies or even remembers Simon Lannister, the 34th man to run the four-minute mile, only a few years later, in 1958.

And I suspect it will be the same with me and my achievement yesterday.

Because yesterday, I got banned from r/copywriting.

The context is that over the past few days, I’ve been rewarding people who share links to my Copy Riddles optin page.

And that’s why Sonam Zahrt-Tenzin, a copywriter who’s already gone through the Copy Riddles program, put together a nice writeup of his experience and posted it on the r/copywriting subreddit.

But when I went to read it a few hours later, it was “[removed].” In fact, a post at the top of r/copywriting said any links to me and any of my stuff are now banned because there have been too many of them over the past few days.

You might think this is a failure but:

I’m grateful to Sonam and to all the other people who shared links to my site.

Like I said, I doubt history will remember our collective achievement in getting me banned from r/copywriting. I’m certainty not the first to break through that barrier — I believe that was Daniel Throssell, and probably other people after him.

Even so, it’s been an achievement for me. And I don’t mean that in a perverse, “good is bad, bad is good” sense.

I mean it in the sense that I’ve seen a nice bump in new subscribers over the past few days.

In fact, I saw a bump on top of that bump after the “banned” post appeared at the top of r/copywriting. And since that post is sitting there still, I’m guessing it will send a few more people to check out my site.

What’s more, I imagine this promo campaign will bring me knock-on benefits and name exposure, which will only be obvious in weeks and months to come.

That’s the achievement I’m happy about.

Now, as you might have noticed if you’ve been reading my emails for a while, I’m not a person who particularly craves attention, controversy, or conflict.

But the fact is, if you do anything in life… besides drumming your fingers on the table and watching the seasons change outside your window… then soon enough, you will run into resistance, whether internal or external.

In my experience, the only thing to do at that point is to give it the old Simon Lannister:

Keep putting one foot in front of the other, if for no other reason than that you’ve set your mind to it. And once you’re done, pick yourself up from the track, and rather than dwelling on your achievement or the resistance you encountered, go get lunch, and then move on to the next goal in your life.

For example:

Even though Daniel was the first to get banned from many choice locations on the Internet… I’m sure other virgin forums, groups, and communities remain.

So if you’d like to help me get the word out about this newsletter, and possibly get banned somewhere new, then take a look at the link below.

I’m offering a bribe in exchange for your help. But if the bribe doesn’t turn you on, ignore it. And if you want to help me out just for the sake of helping me out, I’ll be grateful to you. Here are the full details:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

My fruitful first Clickbank failure

by

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of my first-ever book. Well… book might be a bit grandiose.

It was more like an 85-page pdf. And by publication, I really just mean I put it up on Clickbank for sale.

The title of this thing was the Salary Negotiation Blueprint. The background was this:

10 years ago, I was a dissatisfied office drone working at an IT company. Day after day, I’d sit at my computer, drumming my fingers on the desk, looking out the window as the sun set at 4pm. “And I still have to sit here and pretend to work for 2 more hours!” I wanted to get free.

And then I heard about Mike Geary. Mike was making a million dollars a month selling his own 85-page pdf, The Truth About Abs, on Clickbank.

How could I do the same?

Fortunately, the same source who clued me in to Mike Geary (Tim Ferriss) also clued me in to that most highly revered and valuable guide to direct marketing:

Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters.

Being the bookish type that I am, I got the Boron Letters and I read them. At the time, I wasn’t sure what exactly was so great about them. But I did get one thing from Gary, and that’s when he talks about how to create an info product:

1. Pick a topic
2. Read 5 of the best books on the topic and take notes
3. Write up your own book/85-page report with the best information taken from those other books
4. Make millions!

And here we get to the crossroads.

Because in an unusual move for me… I actually put the Boron Letters down… stared at the void for a bit… and then took a hesitating, first step forward.

In other words, I stopped reading and actually did what Gary was telling me to do. I followed his steps 1-3.

The outcome was the Salary Negotiation Blueprint. I put it up on Clickbank. And then, I rubbed my hands together in anticipation of step 4 aaaand…

Total sales? 0. Total money made? $0. Total learning experience?

Well, with 10 years of hindsight and about 6 years of working as a direct response copywriter, let me highlight a few of the mistakes I made with this first project:

1. Name. I went with Salary Negotiation Blueprint just because every other info product at the time was “something something blueprint.”

But what exactly was the promise in my name? That with my blueprint, you could… negotiate? Not very tempting.

2. “Affiliates will love it!” No, they won’t.

You can see public lists of what Clickbank affiliates love to promote, and salary negotiation guides are not it. This was a lesson I could have learned from the Boron Letters — sell to a starving crowd.

3. My market. What profile of person is going to buy an ebook on salary negotiation?

I can’t say, because I never managed to sell a single copy. But my guess is, these aren’t exactly players with money. More likely to be schlubs on a budget — much like me at the time.

6. The back end. What can you sell to somebody who bought a guide on salary negotiation? A course on networking over the water cooler? Or a guide on Slack tips and tricks, maybe? It feels like grasping at straws.

Ultimately, salary negotiation is a one-time need. Which is bad — because the profits come on the back end.

7. The price. I can’t remember the price. I think I started out at $37, and when I failed to make any sales there, I moved it down to $17, where I continued to fail to make sales.

But whether at $37 or at $17, my price was completely disconnected to the value of my offer. There was zero thought or strategy to it.

So there you go. Maybe you can learn a bit about direct marketing from my mistakes above. Or maybe you knew all this simple stuff before.

Either way, you’re in a good place.

Because there are mountains of people out there who don’t know even these basics of direct marketing and copywriting.

​​And not all these people are as clueless and unsuccessful as I was 10 years ago. Some of them have working businesses — even thriving businesses — in spite of awful, self-defeating marketing.

But you’ve probably heard this claim before.

I know I heard it for a long time. And all I could say is, “Well, where are all these mountains of business owners who could benefit from my growing marketing knowledge? I’m ready to help them out!”

The perverse truth is, they seem to pop up the most when you no longer need them.

A part of it is simply your level of skills. But a part of it is the exposure you give yourself.

In other words, you can shortcut the process somewhat, by giving yourself more exposure. Which brings me to my ongoing offer:

You can get a free copy of my Niche Expert Cold Emails training.

This training covers two cold email strategies that got me in touch with a couple of business owners, one with a working business, and the other with a thriving business.

All in all, these cold emails led to $16k worth of copywriting work. Not Mike Geary money, but an important step on my journey away from office dronedom. And I’m sure I could have gotten more work from these emails, had I just used them more consistently.

The training is yours free right now, as part of a promotion I’m trying out. For the full details, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

My Andre Chaperon-like, Sphere of Influence-inspired optin page

by

Here’s a little riddle for you:

How do three men, one of whom has been mostl—

But hold. This is neither the time nor the place for that.

In case you read my email yesterday, you know I promised that today, I’d reuse something I’d written in my email yesterday.

And in fact, I’ve done just that. But it’s not that tiny bit at the top. And it’s not in this email you’re reading.

Instead, you can find what I promised at the link below. That’s where you can read the scene from the Princess Bride I wrote about yesterday, and see how I made it fit to a completely new purpose.

The purpose, in this case, is to illustrate and set up a valuable lesson from my Copy Riddles program, which I’ll open up again for a few days later this month.

For this round of Copy Riddles, I decided to put a bit of thought into getting the word out.

So I wrote up an Andre Chaperon-like, Sphere of Influence-inspired optin page on the Copy Riddles site.

That means that rather than promising people interesting or entertaining information if they opt in to my list… I put that interesting and entertaining stuff right there on the page. And if somebody really is interested and entertained once they are done reading, they can opt in for more.

So here’s the deal for today:

If you’d like to find out (or be reminded of, in case you’ve already gone through Copy Riddles) a valuable little copywriting secret I discovered hidden inside a bullet by A-list copywriter David Deutsch…

Or if you’d like to see what exactly an Andre Chaperon-like, Sphere of Influence-inspired optin page looks like…

Or if you just want to get closure on my Princess Bride email from yesterday…

Then take a look at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Oh and if you do take a look, I’d appreciate your feedback on this page.

Because starting tomorrow, I’ll be promoting this page (I’ll explain how tomorrow). But that means i still have a bit of time to make changes, to add, and to remove.

So whatever your impression of this page, and whatever your feedback… I’ll be grateful if you write me an email and let me know. Thanks in advance.

“Sign of the Elephant Guarantee”

by

Right now, the top seller in the competitive “manifestation” niche on Clickbank is an offer called the BioEnergy Code.

The VSL for this offer tells the story of Angela Carter, a woman on a journey to find wealth, health, and a feeling of connectedness… by following the golden thread of the elephant.

Elephant?

Yes, elephant.

First, Angela walks into a bookstore in her home town. She closes her eyes and prays for guidance. And she spots a travel guide with an elephant on it.

Next thing you know, Angela’s traveled to Nepal. A boy on the street tugs on her shirt. “Go see the elephants,” he says, and he points across the street.

This leads Angela to a guru who tells her the secret of manifesting anything she wants.

She manifests a new and amazing life for herself. She’s ready to head back home. And she wants to make the guru’s secret public, so others could benefit also. But the guru balks.

“This knowledge stays in Nepal!”

But our hero is prepared. “What if we contribute a portion of each sale to a save-the-elephants charity?”

The guru mulls this over for a second. “Deal!”

This explains why you can now buy the BioEnergy Code for $37 on Clickbank. Pretty standard stuff and not particularly inventive. But this next part is.

When it’s time to close the sale on the set of guided meditation mp3s and chakra-release PDFs, Angela makes the following guarantee:

I call it the “Sign of the Elephant Guarantee”.

Here’s how it works.

Within 24 hours of saying “yes” to The BioEnergy Code…

I guarantee you’ll receive an unmistakable “sign” that you’re on the right path.

It’ll feel like something just got unblocked so you can see your path more clearly than ever.

It may not be an “elephant” like it was for me in Barnes & Noble and the tea shop in Kathmandu…

But it WILL be so clear and so unmistakable, it will be the “Elephant in the Room” – a sign that your fields of BioEnergy are about to be cleared and unleashed.

All I ask is that you give your source 24 hours to manifest this elephant in the room sign.

And if you don’t experience this elephant size sign, simply email me and I’ll promptly refund every penny.

I thought this was genuinely clever. This short bit of copy does so much.

I sat down, and off the top of my head, I wrote 7 good things that come out of this guarantee. I was going to highlight the most valuable of these 7 things in this email, but I realized they are all too important.

So I will make you an offer with a 100% no-questions-asked money-back guarantee… for a full 24 hours.

I call it the “Sign of Clickbank Insight.”

Here’s how it works:

Within 24 hours of reading this email, I guarantee you will receive an unmistakable sign having to do with Clickbank.

Oh, it might not be a big Clickbank logo on a sales page that you visit. But it will be there if you watch for it.

It might be some email newsletter mentioning Clickbank… or it might be an online run-in with a copywriter or marketer, such as Stefan Georgi or Ian Stanley or Chris Haddad, who has been closely tied to Clickbank in the past.

Once you see the sign, you will feel a clear and unmistakable lightbulb moment. “Aha! So this is what that Bejakovic guy was talking about!”

I guarantee this will happen. All I ask is that you give the universe 24 hours to organize this moment of insight for you.

And when it happens, then sign up to my email newsletter.

Reply to my welcome email and tell me about the sign that you saw… and I will spell out the 7 chakras of the “Sign of the Elephant guarantee.”

I mean, I will tell you what I thought was so good about this guarantee… and how you can use this in your own marketing and copy to one day make it to the top of your own Clickbank category.

Or… your money back.

Things “worthy of compliment” in 12 of my competitors

by

I recently finished reading a book called NLP about NLP by two NLP experts, Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.

I’m interested in somehow patching a few Y2K-sized bugs in my own brain software, and so this kind of neural programming stuff is right up my alley and then through a little door.

Anyways, at one point in the book, Andreas and Faulkner advise the following:

“Find what’s worthy of compliment in your competition. Since you have been encouraging yourself to be complimentary to others, your senses have been opened and relaxed. You will have undoubtedly found yourself acquiring the skills of others without directly concentrating on them.”

Too easy? Who knows. I decided to try it out.

But then right at the start, I hit a snag. I had trouble coming up with my “competition.”

There’s nobody I really think of in that way. That’s the whole point of writing daily emails and creating unique offers like Copy Riddles.

But ok — ultimately, I am competing for people’s attention, for space in their inbox, for their hearts and minds, and possibly for their learning and growth dollars.

So I made a list of 12 such competitors. They all either write daily emails or have something to do with direct marketing.

For each competitor, I listed the first thing that came to mind — stuff they do, which I admire.

​​It turned out to be a surprisingly fun and eye-opening exercise. I suggest it to you — whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or freelancer.

Perhaps you’re curious about my list. You can find it below, with the names stripped out. After all, my goal today isn’t to name drop in bulk or to call people out.

But perhaps you can still guess who I have in mind — all are people I’ve mentioned previously in my newsletter. And here’s what’s worthy of compliment in each:

1. Willingness to get on camera regularly in spite of having the charisma of a bag of lentils
2. Community management
​3. High-priced offers
​4. A business built around a single core product that’s been running for years
​5. Emotional copy in spite of being very emotionally flat as a person
​6. Personality-based emails
​7. Writing fast
8. Surprising historical anecdotes
9. List building
10. Self-aggrandizement
11. A deep trove of personal experience and interests
​12. A really unique viewpoint

If you’re in the marketing and copywriting space, all these people will probably be familiar to you.

​​Except perhaps #8. He is well-known, but is not in the marketing space.

A​nd #12. He was once a direct marketer, but is today something… not quite definable. If you’re curious, I’ll tell you more about him, including his name, in my email tomorrow. You can sign up here to read that.

A simple habit for enjoying yourself at parties and inventing almost irresistible offers

by

Today I want to tell you how to enjoy yourself at every party you go to from now on… and how to come up with offers that your market is 98% sure to love.

Let me set it up with a bit of drama:

A few days ago, a friend I have from my decade of living in Budapest, Hungary, forwarded me a screenshot of the following Instagram post.

The post was written by a Lainey Molnar, a Hungarian illustrator now living in the Netherlands.
​
​Lainey became an Internet star recently because of her “women empowerment” illustrations.

As an Internet star, she was fielding some Internet questions recently. One question was why so many Hungarians choose to move away from the motherland and live abroad.

​​Lainey responded:

​Because the mentality is simply unbearable for anyone who aspires for a healthy psyche (and let’s not get stared on the political system, we already clocked in like 12 years with a Trump before Trump)

It’s a culture of mediocrity, always dragging everyone down. They’re jealous, petty, always blame everyone else for everything, They constantly gossip, meddle, and walk over others for gain. Brrrrr, I can’t stand being there for more than a few weeks.

So here’s what got through my skull:

If Hungarians really are as miserable of a people as Lainey makes them out to be — not true in my experience — then going by the tone of her two paragraphs above… she sounds like a perfect Hungarian, whether she lives in Amsterdam or Budapest.

And that’s my point for you today:

Whatever the apparent topic of conversation, people are almost always talking about themselves.

Once you realize this, you can have fun at every party, just by listening to others and asking yourself… what is this guy really saying? What is he revealing about himself that he doesn’t mean to?

And same thing with your customers and prospects.

Everything they say about you… your competition… the world at small and at large… is mostly about them.

And just by listening or, as Ben Settle likes to say, reading between the lines, you can get a lot of valuable intel. Intel you can use to inform your marketing and your offers… and give people what they truly want — even if they could never express it directly.

At this point in my emails, I usually like to take the core idea I am talking about and do a demonstration. But today, we can do the opposite.

If you like, you can probably read this very email, and find I am talking about myself. Maybe in ways that I didn’t even mean to expose, some perhaps quite negative.

So if you have some insights that you’ve gleaned about my personality through this email or other emails… and if you want to shock me with them, I am here, ready.

Just write me directly and fire away with your piercing observations. Do it for me. And do it because you will be starting a habit which will benefit you for years in your personal and business life.

Everything is free

by

I know a lot of people in the marketing world worship at the altar of Seth Godin. I myself have had no contact with that religion, until today.

Today, I read an article that Seth wrote earlier this month, with a provocative title:

“Customer service is free”

Seth says that because of word-of-mouth and the value of loyal customers, you should stop looking at customer service as a cost.

That’s a point I’ve heard Ben Settle make before. Ben says that customer service is the #1 sales skill, which will allow you to charge higher prices… give you an advantage over your competitors… and allow you to make up for your shortcomings.

But here’s something that puzzled my mental squirrel:

Ben Settle has been making this point about customer service for years. It never made as much impact on me as the Seth Godin article. Because Seth’s presentation was more powerful.

Perhaps, and this is just a hypothesis based on my own experience today, the power of “FREE” is greater than the power of “profitable” for getting into people’s heads. Sure, once you open up a path into somebody’s brain with the ice pick of FREE, then you can bring in the “profitable” argument. But not before. And that’s what Seth Godin does — FREE in the headline, profitable in the very last sentence of his article.

But whether that’s a universal truth or not, one thing is universally true:

All your offers, whether ideas you are pitching or actual products you are selling, should be FREE. Of course, not free today. But FREE. Here’s what I mean:

The next time you are faced with a prospect who’s holding your offer in his hands, interested but still not sold, then apply the following free idea, and it will pay for itself immediately:

Put your arm around your prospects shoulders and point to the rainbow on the horizon. Then point back to that product of yours, there in your prospect’s lap. And then once again, point to the rainbow.

“Do you see now?” tell your prospect. “In 9 weeks, it will pay for itself. So really, it’s FREE. And after that, it will even start to make you money.”

Speaking of making money:

I have an email newsletter in which I share money-making ideas about marketing and copywriting. You can sign up to my newsletter today at a small up-front cost. But really, don’t think of it as a cost, think of it as an investment. One that will pay off before the end of the day.