Direct Marketing Archives - Page 33 of 52

Avoiding sick-at-the-gut customers

August 7, 2021August 7, 2021 by John Bejakovic

As I write this, I’m feeling woozy. The ground is swaying under my feet. My stomach is a little sensitive.

I wouldn’t be surprised that when I lay down for the night and I turn out the lights, I will have to run to the bathroom to throw up.

In case you’re wondering, I haven’t been drinking. But I did spend the whole day on a boat.

It was a beautiful sunny day. Fresh air. Clear skies. The contrast of green olive trees and white cliffs and deep blue sea below.

It was a great experience. I didn’t feel anything but excited during the whole day.

But once the day was over, and I stepped off the boat, tired and happy to be back on dry land, that’s when the whole earth started to move beneath my feet.

Now let me switch to a different topic for a second:

Here’s something valuable that A-list direct response marketer Michael Fishman once said in an interview with Jay Abraham:

“The interesting thing is that your selling copy in the prospecting process can actually impact the longevity of a customer with the company. So what I mean by that is if you make very, very big promises for a self-help product, a health or investment product — if you make very, very big promises for that about quick results and overnight success, etc. — the kinds of people that will find that believable and ultimately will buy turn out to be folks that are not very committed in the long very long run to your company because they’re opportunistic about their purchase.”

Michael is saying that hype can hurt your long-term sales because you end up selecting the wrong customers.

The only thing I would add is that hype can also create wrong customers for your business, out of otherwise good people.

Because your prospect goes for a bright and colorful selling experience, designed by somebody like you or me. He spends a long time with you, enjoying the contrast of cool blue promises and big white warnings and a sparkling offer underneath it all.

So your prospect has a great time while you entertain and sell him. He doesn’t feel anything but excited the whole time. But at the end of it, he steps off the boat — by taking you up on your offer — and that’s when the feelings of wooziness and stomach upset hit him.

A part of this reaction is inevitable. But a part of it is within your control. And I’d like to suggest it’s worth controlling yourself.

Because as Michael said in the same interview, direct response is built on repeat business. You rarely make money the first time.

So if you want a profitable business… rather than just a bunch of sick-at-the-gut customers who aren’t worth anything to you… then you might purposefully make your sailing — I mean selling experience — less long, less colorful, and less enjoyable than you know how to do.

For example, I know several ways to hype people up so they will sign up for my email newsletter. But I won’t use them. Instead, if you like marketing and copywriting ideas that can help you build a profitable business… long-term… then here’s where you can join my newsletter, which gives you one new idea each day.

5 (+ five) easy ecommerce pieces

August 5, 2021 by John Bejakovic

See if you can spot the one green “5” in the picture below:

Wasn’t hard, was it?

But if I asked you how many 5’s there are in the above picture, that wouldn’t be as easy. In fact it might be a pain in the ass, and you might give up rather than count.

Counting doesn’t come natural to us. Our eyes and brain have to work at it.

Not so with contrast.

We’re kind of like that T-Rex in the original Jurassic Park. “Don’t move… it can’t see us if we don’t move.” In other words, create enough contrast, and your prospect immediately sees the message you want him to see.

Of course, marketers have long known about this. And they have long used it to make more sales. As Rich Schefren likes to say, different is better than better.

Anyways, that was my little intro to try to sell you on watching the video below. It’s a recording of a presentation Stefan Georgi gave a few weeks ago. And it’s all about split tests he always recommends performing in ecommerce funnels.

I’ve done a lot of work on the direct response side of ecommerce. And I knew some of Stefan’s split tests. But most were new to me.

And while it’s not guaranteed that any of these split tests will win for any specific funnel, all of them sound reasonable. Because all of them are based on fundamentals.

Stuff like contrast… or reason why… or guiding your prospect’s attention… or cutting down his confusion.

So if you’d like to see all of Stefan’s split tests, along with his breakneck explanations for what exactly to test and why, you can find it at the YouTube video below.

But be careful. Because the first two-thirds of Stefan’s presentation are all about these split tests. But then Stefan shifts gear.

And he gives a soft pitch for the Copy Accelerator live event that’s happening in Scottsdale at the end of this month.

I say be careful because you can get sucked into Stefan’s pitch. For example, it happened to me.

After watching Stefan’s presentation yesterday and hearing his pitch, I found myself excited abuot going to the Copy Accelerator event. Even though I’d have to fly halfway around the world to do it (what a contrast and a pain)… and even though I’d have to laboriously count out a bunch of simoleons for plane tickets, hotel rooms, and for the event admission itself.

We will see how that ends up.

In the meantime, if you’re already planning on going to Stefan’s event, let me know. So far, I’ve only met 2 people in real life who read my email newsletter. I’d like to maybe bring that up to 3, and meeting you there might sway me to go.

(Whaat? You’re not signed up to my email newsletter? You can fix that here.)

And if you’re not going to Copy Accelerator (yet), or if you just want to see Stefan’s ecommerce optimizations, here’s the money-making video:

Here’s an extra $5,000

August 4, 2021 by John Bejakovic

Today more than ever, money is what counts. The cost of living is mounting month by month. You can’t get along on what you have been making.

Somehow you’ve simply got to increase your income.

Fortunately for you, thousands of other men and women have proven there is an unfailing way to do it.

Train yourself in timeless sales psychology, learn to write copy well, and businesses will be glad to pay you real money for your special knowledge.

You can get the training that will prepare you to be a copywriter in the niche you like best, whatever it may be.

You can get it without sacrificing a single day or a dollar from your present occupation.

You can get it at home, in spare time, through the International Copywriting Schools.

It is the business of the I.C.S. to prepare people in just your circumstances to become copywriters and make more money.

They have been doing it for over 102 years. They have helped tens of thousands of other men and women. They are training over 100 now.

Every day, many students write, to tell of big royalty checks and breakthrough controls already won.

You have the same chance they had. What are you going to do with it?

Can you afford to let a single priceless hour pass without at least finding out what the I.C.S. can do for you?

Here is all I ask — without cost, without obligating yourself in any way, simply take a look at this first free lesson:

https://bejakovic.com/ics

Become a scheme man

August 2, 2021 by John Bejakovic

“How the Grecian Mother Bathed her Baby”

“Fine oils were cleansing agents for young and old. The Grecian mother used nothing else to bathe her babies, together with soft, tepid water. Modern science prescribes the same method for new-born infants.“

That’s from a 1915 ad for Palmolive soap. The ad was written by Claude Hopkins, who was on the Palmolive account back then.

Copywriters today are told to study Hopkins’s ads like this one. For the intriguing headline that gets attention… for the appeals to self-interest… for the proof in the form of reason why copy.

Fine. That’s all important stuff.

But you know what? Hopkins wasn’t primarily a copywriter. Primarily, he was a scheme man.

That was the term at the time for somebody we might call a marketer today. Because what marketers today do is really just apply and adapt ideas that guys like Hopkins invented at the start of the 20th century.

For example, do you know how Claude Hopkins took Palmolive from a product with almost no sales… to the biggest soap brand in the U.S.?

He didn’t do it with clever copy. He did it with a scheme.

Local grocery stores at that time didn’t stock Palmolive. Why should they? Nobody had ever heard of Palmolive, and there were plenty of other decent soaps.

So Hopkins ran ads. First, in one local market. Gradually, all over the country.

“This Coupon Gets You Something Worth 10¢”

The “something” was a bar of Palmolive soap. It cost 10¢ in 1911, and that was something. Something women wouldn’t throw away. Something they would demand from their local grocer.

Hopkins knew that they would do this… so he sent the same ad to grocers before running it in the newspaper. The message was clear:

“Women will come to you asking for their 10¢ gift of Palmolive soap. If you don’t have it, they will still get it, even if they have to go across the street to your competitor.”

So grocers stocked up on Palmolive soap before the newspaper ad ran.

And Hopkins’s initial Palmolive campaign… after the free giveaways were paid for… well, it created a 4-to-1 return on ad spend. With that kind of math, Hopkins soon had almost every woman in America holding a bar of Palmolive in her hand.

Frighteningly clever.

Because at the heart of it wasn’t the appeal to the fine “cleansing agents for young and old.” Sure, Palmolive soap was good enough for women to keep buying. But that wasn’t the key thing that sold it in the beginning.

It also wasn’t the free 10¢ Palmolive bar giveaway. That was important, but it wouldn’t have worked if women couldn’t get their hands on the actual soap.

No, the key was something else.

The key was the fear that Hopkins drove into the hearts of grocers across the country.

Because Hopkins didn’t try to appeal to the grocers’ greed. He didn’t say, “We have a great new soap. Stock it and you will profit.”

Nope.

He effectively threatened. “Stock Palmolive,” he quietly said, “or else you will lose your existing business.”

That’s a scheme. And if you’re a marketer, it’s a scheme that might be worth applying and adapting to your own brands and businesses today.

Anyways, that’s just one foundational thing I’ve learned from Claude Hopkins.

And clever as it is, it’s not nearly the most important thing I’ve learned from him.

The most important thing is something I wrote about in Commandment VI of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

That commandment is not about copywriting tactics… not about marketing schemes… but about something much more fundamental that Claude Hopkins preached.

And yet, if you follow this one commandment, you will become a success… even if you’ve failed in everything until now… and even if you make all the mistakes you want going forward.

But you gotta read the book to find out the full story. Because if you don’t, other copywriters will. For more info:

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

The power of accusation

August 1, 2021 by John Bejakovic

Yesterday was the first time I ever got excited to watch a sales message. But I wound up bitterly disappointed. Aye, even offended.

Quick background:

I talked to a friend the day before. He’s a doctor. “We’re headed for a new round of corona lockdowns,” he said. He gave me reasons why, based on Israel and the rise in infections there. All this was news to me.

Then yesterday, I got an email with the subject line, “COVID’s return.” My ears pricked up because of my friend’s warning. I opened the email.

“Corona is all about control,” the email said. This tapped into my recent interest in mechanisms of control. So I clicked the link and found—

Ron Paul! Telling me the truth about corona!

Now in my eyes, Ron Paul is a genuine celebrity. He’s a former U.S. Congressman… a well-known libertarian figure… and three-time presidential candidate.

So that’s the quick background. New corona lockdowns… mechanisms of control… Ron Paul. That’s why I was excited to watch this sales message. For the first time ever.

Sure, the message came from Stansberry Research. So I knew what the conclusion would be — buy our newsletter and protect your money, or even prosper while the rest of the country goes to hell.

Still, I thought I might hear something new and interesting along the way. Something that would give me context for puzzling things I’ve been seeing. Something that might make me say, “A-ha, it makes sense now!”

But I didn’t get any of that. Even though the email promised to tell me “what’s actually going on in America”… and even though the sales page warned “Something BIG Is Coming”…

All I got was a bit about Ron Paul (it turns out he’s a doctor by training)… and then a bunch of stuff about out-of-control government debt… and how we are giving too much money to stupid things like the National Endowment for the Arts.

“But there’s nothing new here, Ron!” I finally yelled at the screen. “Why are you wasting my time with this? But don’t answer, I know. Because they are paying you. Still, Stansberry’s been saying this same thing for what, 20 years? Why should I buy it now? Couldn’t they come up with something a little fresh? A little stimulating?”

Hm.

Maybe you agree with me that Ron Paul and Stansberry should both go to the Devil, where they came from. Maybe you’re glad I finally voiced that.

Or maybe you’re puzzled by my negativity, and you’re wondering why I’d yell at my own computer screen.

Or maybe you’re put off. “All right, Bejako,” I hear you saying, “since you’re so holy, what fresh and stimulating thing did you say with this nasty email?”

To which I could pretend I’m not selling anything here. But you and I both know that’s not true.

So let me leave you with a quote from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible:

“Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God’s fingers? I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem – vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

The Crucible is a morality play about judging and accusing others. But it’s a morality play because it’s not just about a bad episode in Massachusetts in 1692… but about something fundamental in human nature.

So here’s the new and maybe stimulating bit I offer you:

I’m not suggesting you blacklist people. But if you set yourself up as an accuser in your market, at least some of the time… there is power in that.

Power?

Yes, power. The chance to write the law. The keys to the kingdom. Particularly if you accuse somebody new… and if you are genuine in your outrage and your vengeance.

By the way, I know of several other direct response companies that are guilty of deadly marketing sins. I’ve seen them at night, walking with the Devil. And I will name them. But if you want to read more about that, sign up to my newsletter here.

Early success

August 1, 2021July 31, 2021 by John Bejakovic

The gangly young man stepped inside the office and froze. He took a step to the side and pressed up against the wall.

His eyes darted from desk to desk. But nobody took notice of him.

Finally, he spotted somebody even younger than himself at one of the desks. He walked over.

“Hey buddy,” he said. “Maybe you can help me. My company has an account with you guys. They sent me down here because we just got some new business. I’m supposed to buy more ads. Can you tell me who I should talk to?”

The even younger man at the desk blinked a few times. “Actually,” he said, “that’s something I can help you with.”

The year was 1900. The place was the Lord & Thomas advertising agency in Chicago.

The young man who came looking to buy more ads worked for Collier’s Publishing. And the even younger man he approached was a 19-year-old Albert Lasker.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Lasker already. At 18, he started work as an office boy at Lord & Thomas. At 19, he became an accounts man. At 23, he became partner. At 32, he became CEO.

Under Lasker’s tenure, Lord & Thomas ran breakthrough campaigns, building brands like Palmolive, Pepsodent, Sunkist, Kotex, and Lucky Strike. And today, Lasker is known as one of the greatest advertising men of all time.

Lasker had natural talents that made him such a success in advertising, and at such a young age. But none of it would have happened — so Lasker claimed later — were it not for a few early successes. Like that Collier’s account, which landed in his lap thanks to his look of inexperience.

Early success.

I recently looked at the areas of my life where I’ve persevered and achieved something. This includes copywriting.

I made a list of common elements. There turned out to be three crucial things.

The first was an experience of early success. It gave me the belief to persevere when things got hard.

And vice versa. When I look at things where I failed… I find I didn’t have any early successes. Maybe I was following a process that was supposed to work. But without a signpost to tell me I was on the right path, it felt like wandering in the wilderness. So I gave up.

My point is that an experience of early success can be transformational.

Keep this in mind when you’re trying to retain customers or clients… or manage yourself.

An early success can come from blind luck and land right in your lap, like it did for Albert Lasker.

But with a bit of preparation, scheming, and maybe downright fakery, you don’t need luck. You can create an experience of early success with near certain probability. For your clients or customers or yourself. And once that happens… who knows how far you will go?

By the way, would you like to know about the other two crucial ingredients I found for long-term success in copywriting?

It’s something I haven’t written about before. But if and when I do, it will go into my email newsletter. You can sign up for that here.

A red hot deal on a pain in the ass product

July 21, 2021 by John Bejakovic

At the start of this month, a few days before I launched my Copy Riddles program, I naively decided to make some changes to the sales page.

I’d gotten testimonials back from people who had gone through the test round. I just wanted to paste those in.

So I opened up my page builder and —

It looked like the fridge scene in Ghostbusters. The one where Sigourney Weaver opens her fridge, and instead of shelves with salami and cheese, she sees a vortex of evil energy and a demon hound growling, “Zuuuul.”

I immediately closed down the page builder and pretended like nothing happened.

After a few moments, I carefully opened it up again. I peaked in.

“Zuuuul,” I heard the hound say again.

My sales page had completely collapsed. All the text, supposed to flow from top to bottom, had gotten crushed down and was running to the right, off the page. The images were piled on top of each other. It was unreadable and unusable.

Yesterday, I mentioned GrooveFunnels. That’s the new marketing funnel software looking to compete with ClickFunnels.

Well, I built the sales page for Copy Riddles using GrooveFunnels.

My reasoning was this:

I know how to build a webpage. That’s easy.

But what I don’t know is how to build an order page and upsell pages… how to connect to payment processors like Stripe and PayPal… how to integrate all this with affiliate tracking so I can get other people to promote my stuff and become a millionaire in the process.

I’m sure there are tech solutions for all these problems. But I didn’t feel like researching them. And I didn’t feel like paying hundreds of dollars a month to try them out, especially since Copy Riddles is still a small and experimental project for me.

So I went all in on Groove. It does everything. Builds your webpages…. creates the sales funnel… processes payments… handles affiliates.

It sounded great.

The reality of course was a mess of supernatural proportions. Lots of glitches, confusing design, and a vortex of evil energy in my fridge.

And yet, like I said yesterday, I’m actually recommending GrooveFunnels. If you are a marketer or copywriter, and you expect to ever need a new site for a project, I believe it makes sense to try GrooveFunnels out. Here’s why:

1. My sales page ended up working just fine. In fact, it fixed itself, or the little Groove elves working behind the scenes fixed it. In fact, whenever I contacted the elves with questions or requests, they were very responsive and helpful.

2. Even though simple stuff (like changing the size of a headline) was almost impossible in Groove, the hard stuff (like handling affiliates across different pages) was instant. All the stuff I didn’t know how to do came ready to go out of the box.

3. Groove is free to use. Did I mention that yet?

Fact is, Groove is a huge project. Along with the page builder and the affiliate stuff and the sales funnels, they are also working on an email service and a shopping cart and membership site software.

And since they are working on a million things in parallel, everything is full of glitches and bugs.

But those bugs are getting worked out. Groove as a project is very hot and growing. Money is being poured into development.

And one day, or so I hope, Groove will be a stable, reliable platform, which actually gives you all you need to run a business online.

So that’s why I say it makes sense to try Groove out. And to do it now.

Because Groove won’t always be free, but it still is. There are no restrictions on the free program, except you can only use Groove for three websites max.

The only thing is they put an ugly black bar at the bottom of your site, saying “This site was built with Groove Funnels.” But if you sign up for a free Groove account today, and forward me your confirmation email, I will even tell you how I got rid of the ugly black bar on my site, while still being on the free Groove account.

Oh, and I will give you something else too. But this post is running long, so I’ll tell you about that tomorrow, when I finish my Groove promotion. (Or you can find out today, by sending me your confirmation email.)

For now, if you’d like to try out Groove, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/groove

A new way to cook up ads that entice and reward your prospects

July 17, 2021 by John Bejakovic

A few years ago, a friend of my dad went for vacation on a touristy Adriatic island. It was high summer. Ripe fruits and vegetables were drooping off branches and vines everywhere. It smelled and looked wonderful.

So he sat down at a little family-run restaurant. He ordered a meal, hoping for a taste of the local bounty.

His meal came. And sure enough, it had a side dish of mixed vegetables. Except…

The vegetables turned out to be tiny diced carrots, corn, and zucchini… straight from the freezer aisle of the local supermarket.

My dad’s friend called the restaurant owner over to his table. She was a large, lusty woman.

“Excuse me madam,” he asked her, “is this also what you eat at home?”

The restaurant owner looked at the plate of frozen veggies with contempt. “Of course not!” she said.

My dad’s friend stood up. “So why do you think I should eat it?” And he walked out of the restaurant.

A reasonable reaction. And yet, I often find myself in the position of the contemptuous restaurant owner.

After all, a part of my job is to help my clients cook up ads. I get paid well to do it.

But if somebody showed me one of my client’s Facebook or YouTube ads and asked me, “Is this also what you also eat at home,” I’d pull back in disgust. “Of course not!” I’d say.

So let me tell you about a different way to cook up ads. It’s something I heard recently from marketer Maxwell Finn.

Max looks very young. But he has already launched and sold several million-dollar ecommerce companies. He also co-founded a Facebook ad agency with Kevin Harrington of Shark Tank. He’s behind the Facebook ads of big corporations like 3M and sexy products like the Joe Rogan-backed Alpha Brain.

So Max shared his new way to create ads that entice and reward your prospects. Ads that increase engagement, shares, and sales. Ads that, Max says, your prospects enjoy consuming.

Sounds impossible?

It’s really not, as long as you do a bit of research first.

Not competitor research. Not product research. Not prospect research.

In fact, not a type of research I’ve ever done. But I’ll change that going forward. Because as Max says, and I believe him:

Cook up ads like this and your prospects will dive in, spoon in hand… instead of pulling away with suspicion and disgust.

Perhaps you can guess what kind of research I’m talking about. After all, it’s painfully obvious in hindsight, even though I never thought of it myself.

In any case, if you’d like to find out for sure, you can find it in this month’s issue of Steal Our Winners.

As you might know, I plug Steal Our Winners regularly in this newsletter. That’s because:

1) I think it’s an incredible source of great new marketing ideas each month, and

2) Because I bought a lifetime subscription a while ago, so I have a stake in proving that was a wise decision.

In other words, I’m not impartial in recommending Steal Our Winners. The good news is, you don’t have to get as committed as I did.

Because you can test out Steal Our Winners for yourself, and I believe still watch Maxwell Finn’s segment from this month, for a grand fee of one (1) dollar. So if you’ve got a dollar, and you’re curious about a new way of cooking up delicious ads, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/sow

The future of break-em-down selling?

July 11, 2021 by John Bejakovic

Imagine tomorrow you see an ad for a magical job opportunity:

“$6k a month, only requiring 3-4 hours of work every week.”

The job is with a new video game company. The work is easy. You can do it successfully as long as you have the digital skills of somebody born after 1980.

Plus you can work whenever you like, wherever you like, as much or as little as you like. All you need is your phone. And if you want to work more and make as much as $10k or $15k a month, that’s fine too.

There will be a presentation, the ad tells you, at the local Cheesecake Factory this Friday. Anybody interested can get all the info there.

So on Friday, you show up to the Cheesecake Factory, both hopeful and cautious.

“What’s the worst that can happen,” you tell yourself. “If it’s some sort of scam, I’ll just up and leave. But if it’s for real, it could be life-changing.”

A dozen other people are there with you. Soon enough the presenter arrives. He chats to everyone for a few minutes. Funny enough, it turns out his sister went to the same college you went to.

“But it’s too noisy here,” the guy announces. “We’ll actually go to go to a different location where the presentation will be held.”

So you all load onto a bus. And that’s when the ride really gets going.

If you’re wondering why I’m painting this picture, it’s because situations like this happen for real. Bob Cialdini once told his own personal experience of it.

He got on the bus. And he and the others interested in the opportunity got taken from one town… to another… and back. It took many hours, and they never got a chance to up and leave until it was over.

To help them make the right decision, the bus was covered with inspirational posters. Eye of the Tiger kept playing over and over. Meanwhile, the presenter pitched the amazingness of his pyramid scheme, while the bus bounced and rumbled along the highway at 55 mph.

Result:

Except for Cialdini, who had a little bit of self-defense thanks to his knowledge of persuasion techniques, everybody else signed on for the pyramid scheme.

My point is that a controlled, live selling environment, particularly one that lasts for hours or days, and one where you can’t leave… well… it can sell anything.

So if you are looking to get rich in the pyramid scheme business, it’s time to invest in a bus.

But what if you’re not selling pyramid schemes? And what if you do your business online?

It might seem hopeless. How can you control people’s environment… how can you keep them from leaving… how can you break them down… unless you can physically isolate them?

It might seem hopeless. But social factors are working in your favor. And I’m not even talking about the corona lockdowns, though those certainly help.

The real thing is we all carry our own Eye-Of-The-Tiger bus in our pockets these days. We allow it to create a completely controlled and engrossing environment for us. We take it with us wherever we go, even to small, isolated spaces like the toilet.

And in case you think I’m trying to make a joke, I’m not.

For the past year or so, I’ve been watching Ben Settle promote his build-your-own-mobile-marketing-app business.

I thought it’s stupid. Because I myself refuse to install anything on my phone except Google Maps and this thing that helps you identify trees. And even those have all the notifications turned off.

But I will eventually break down. That’s how the world is moving.

So if you are looking to get rich in any business, it might be time to invest in a mobile app. One with lots of notifications and an inspirational poster background. If I’m right, this is the future of break-em-down selling… and it can help you sell anything.

Meanwhile, the best you can do is get people onto your email newsletter. I’ve got one here. It’s not the same as a bus… so I have to compensate by being entertaining and informative.