Direct Marketing

“Controversial search engine” may be a good business model

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Two years ago, I signed up to get emails from Newsmax. Since then, I’ve seen over 50 sponsored Newsmax emails for the same unusual offer:

“Controversial search engine goes viral — have you searched your name?”

So today, when another one of those emails arrived, I finally clicked on the ad and went through the funnel.

I didn’t search my name, but I typed in a friend’s name. I also gave the town he lives in and his estimated age.

And then I waited. And waited.

The search engine worked furiously in the background, combing through public records, government databases, and various social networks to dig up everything it could on my — so I thought — squeaky clean friend.

I say “so I thought” because while I waited, I kept getting notifications like, “You might be surprised by [FRIEND]’s criminal record!” and “You might be shocked by [FRIEND]’s dating site profiles!”

A few times, I was prompted for more info or to confirm info I had put in already. At one point, the search engine asked me whether I planned to make use of my UNLIMITED access to reports, which I would get after getting [FRIEND]’S report. I thought this was a strange question, but I answered “YES.”

Meanwhile, loading bars kept loading, time kept passing, and I kept getting more notices that I will be “very surprised” or “shocked” by what’s inside [FRIEND]’s report.

After about 10 minutes of leading me by the nose like this, the search engine finally finished. One final checkbox appeared:

“Please confirm once again that you are ready to learn the truth about [FRIEND].”

I sighed and clicked yes.

An order page opened up, giving me the option to access the report on my suspect friend (and as many other reports as I want) for $27.78/month.

I found this whole experience interesting, for a couple reasons. First off, even though this offer is unusual — it’s not a supplement or a newsletter — it’s built upon direct response fundamentals like curiosity, consistency, and continuity.

Second, I started wondering where else you could use the same business model. That model in a nutshell:

Create an online tool that takes in some personal information… churns and whizzes while it applies proprietary algorithms to secret sources of data… and finally spits out a shocking and surprising report — which is only available through a paid monthly subscription.

Off the top of my head, I thought of a tool for generating the horoscope of a person… the historical coat of arms of a family… the feng shui of a property… or an auspicious name for a baby born on a given date.

If you have other ideas, let me know. Or if you like any of the ideas above, they’re yours to use. And if you want a copywriting partner in your new endeavor, get in touch. If you can handle the proprietary algorithms, I can write up the teasing notifications that pop up while your algorithms run — and we can become the next Google together.

The neverending quandry of direct response ethics

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“‘Children who made fun of me?’ Bastian repeated. ‘I don’t know of any children — and I’m sure no child would have dared to make fun of me.'”

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was The Neverending Story, which the above quote is from.

They made a movie out of the book, but the movie leaves out most of the important stuff. Such as the fact that Bastian (the boy reading the book inside the book) gets sucked into the storyland he’s reading about.

Once there, Bastian, who was fat, clumsy, and unpopular in real life, is transformed into a handsome prince. Even better, anything he wishes for becomes reality.

Bastian goes on like this for a while. He enjoys his new powers, and goes around the world of make-believe, telling fantastical stories.

But then the side-effects of all this wishing become obvious. Each time Bastian makes a wish, he loses a memory. By the end, he can’t remember who he is, what he wants, or how to get back home.

I always thought this is a metaphor for how direct marketing is supposed to work.

First, you massage your reader’s insecurities so he gets uncomfortable without knowing why. Then you get him hot and bothered with a giant promise that fulfills his deepest desires. Finally, you hit him with fantastical success stories, from the 0.1% of people who had the best results using your offer.

At this point, your reader pretty much can’t remember who he is or what he wanted in life prior to seeing your sales page. You can now give him all the legal disclaimers — “results not typical; you’ll have to work hard.” But it won’t matter, because he won’t be able to think logically any more. Any logical thinking will just support his desire to buy your product.

Of course, it doesn’t always work like this. But if it does work, then it seems to me like a pretty sleazy, shady, manipulative way to deal with people.

That’s something I think about on occasion. It doesn’t bother me too much, but it does bother me a bit. And if it bothers you a bit too, then I want to tell you another story:

It’s about copywriter and marketer Stefan Georgi. Stefan recently told an anecdote about one of his successful diabetes businesses.

Now, if you’ve ever read Stefan’s copy, you’ll know it fits the model I laid out above. It’s filled with dramatic life-or-death stories. It pushes emotional buttons hard. It’s over the top.

Anyways, Stefan said that for some reason, he decided to handle the support calls for this business one weekend. In other words, potential customers who were still undecided would call in, and Stefan would answer their questions.

And here’s the kicker:

These potential prospects would call and say things like, “Well, your sales letter sure was pretty over the top… but I found it entertaining. But can you tell me now for real… do you think this supplement really can help me?”

So people fully knew what they were in for. They weren’t really being manipulated… they were being entertained. This echoes something I heard Dan Ferrari say:

“Direct response is a hobby, not just as practitioners but for the buyers as well. The more you play that game, the more fun they have.”

Maybe you buy this. Maybe you don’t. But if you ever find yourself questioning what it is you’re doing with your life, then tell yourself you’re basically providing entertainment for people. And, of course, getting paid well for it.

Bringing direct back into direct response

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Today I want to tell you the number one problem my copywriting coach kept pointing out about my sales copy. If you avoid this problem in your own sales letters, your response will skyrocket, particularly if you are selling to cold traffic.

To set it all up, let me tell you a couple personal stories:

Around 2004, my friend got a job in Boston. I went to visit him. We wound up at a house party, standing next to two girls from Harvard.

My friend leaned over to the girls. “Are you guys best friends?” he asked. “Here, let’s find out.”

And then he gave them the “best friends” test. He’d read about it in The Game, the book by Neil Strauss about the pick up artist community.

The “best friends” test is an indirect way to start talking to girls. “Girls will blow you off if you hit on them right away,” the indirect school of pickup says. “So you gotta snake your way into a conversation.”

Sure enough, the best friends test worked. The Harvard birds loved it. We talked to them throughout the evening. “Do you live far away from here?” they asked at the end of the night.

“Very, very close,” my friend answered. But let’s leave that story, and let’s fast-forward about ten years:

I was walking down the street with another friend when I noticed a girl. I ran up and stopped right in front of her.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I was just walking with my friend when I noticed you. I thought you looked very nice and I wanted to meet you.” The girl’s eyes widened. We talked for a few minutes before I asked for her number. Later, she became my girlfriend and we stayed together for a couple of years.

You might call this a direct way to start talking to a girl. “Girls always know if you’re hitting on them,” the direct school of pickup says. “You might as well man up and own it.”

Which brings us to the topic of copywriting, and that lesson from my copywriting coach. He would scroll down through my sales letter, down to about page four, and he’d say, “This is the first place where you’re giving me a really hard, direct claim.”

His advice was that, all throughout the headline and lead, all claims need to be “on the nose.” As in, imagine you’re a boxer. Don’t feint… don’t bob and weave… don’t go for body shots to soften the guy up. Instead, hit him straight “on the nose” with hard, direct claims that he has zero chance of missing or misunderstanding.

I bring all this up because of my post yesterday. Looking back on it, I see I was asking when indirect persuasion makes sense, and when direct persuasion might be better.

But I didn’t express myself well. It sounded like I was questioning the indirect approach. So a few people wrote in to say that indirect persuasion definitely does work and that it’s very powerful.

No doubt. Indirect persuasion works. But so does direct persuasion. Sometimes people need to be told how it is, without vagueness, indirectness, or room to make their own interpretation.

The lead of a sales letter is one such example. At least according to my copywriting coach – but he should know, after all the millions he’s racked up writing sales letters for cold traffic.

What about other situations? I don’t know.

For meeting girls, there are some guidelines when it makes sense to be indirect, and when direct. But in many cases, either approach could work. It’s also a matter of personality and preference.

Maybe it’s the same with direct vs. indirect marketing. But I don’t find that answer satisfying. I’m still hoping for a better model.

So if you have a “best friends” test which tells you when to go indirect in marketing and when direct is better… then hit me up. I’m just standing here, swirling my drink around, hoping somebody cool will talk to me.

Planning out your offers: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday

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Last summer, I was talking to copywriter Dan Ferrari about joining his coaching group.

“Where do you see yourself in 18 months?” Dan asked. I told Dan then what I will tell you now:

I have no idea. 6 months is kind of my horizon. I can’t see much in life beyond that.

Over the years, I’ve tried making long-term goals. But when the long-term rolls around, it always turns out that either 1) my goals were stupid or 2) I changed in the meantime.

That’s why I now feel that projecting more than a few steps into the future is a waste of time.

In fact, you might call it mental masturbation. That’s the term marketer Travis Sago uses to describe “jam tomorrow” plans — not plans for yourself, but for your customers.

I alluded to Travis yesterday. He makes millions in profits each year, and he’s got some unorthodox ways of doing it. For example, the way he plans out his offers.

Most businesses only focus on their current offer. If they’re smart, they think one offer beyond that. If they’re really smart, they think two offers beyond.

But not Travis. Travis says this “smart” way of planning your offers — two offers ahead — is infinitely better than not having any plan. The problem is, it’s hard to guess what people actually want ahead of time.

So Travis advises looking two offers back.

First, figure out who the clients are you want to work with long-term. Then work backwards to figure out what offers you’d need to sell those clients…. so the final, big offer you really want them to take becomes a-no brainer for them.

This might sound like a trivial shift in thinking. But Travis claims this “two offers back” strategy brings in huge results in his business and in the businesses he advises. It means 50% conversions or higher on the back end… and more importantly, it means Travis’s seminars and continuity programs, all of which cost multiple thousands of dollars, always sell out.

But maybe you’re not convinced. Maybe this still sounds vague. Maybe an example would help.

If so, write in and let me know. I’m applying Travis’s “two offers back” approach to a business idea I currently have. If there’s enough interest, I’ll go ahead and share my personal example in a future email.

A marketing executive, two brothers, and a $35 million business

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Kay Kamen ripped the lining out of his coat and spread the money across the table.

“If you hire me,” he said, “all this money is yours. I don’t know how much business you’re doing right now, but I guarantee you that much, plus 50% of everything I do over that amount.”

At the other side of the table, the two brothers grew silent. They retreated to the window to quickly consider Kamen’s offer.

The offer was good and they could definitely use the money. Their business, while popular with customers, was strapped for cash. And it being 1932 and the height of the Great Depression, things weren’t looking up.

So they turned around to shake Kamen’s hand and accept his offer. Only one problem:

Kamen had fallen asleep while Roy and Walt Disney were conferring at the window.

This is a true story of how Disney the company survived and thrived.

Fact is, Disney was struggling in 1932. Cartoons are all right, but the costs are high, the risks are significant, and when you don’t have a new cartoon, you don’t eat.

That’s where Kay Kamen stepped in.

He was the owner of a marketing firm in Kansas City, and he had the idea of licensing Disney characters for merchandise. Roy And Walt were open to Kamen’s idea. They invited him to visit them in California.

So Kamen withdrew his entire life savings, sewed them into the lining of his coat, and got on a train to Los Angeles. He was so afraid somebody would steal his coat that he didn’t sleep for the 48 hours it took to make the trip. That’s why he dozed off during the meeting.

But the deal got done. A year later, there were 40 licenses for Mickey Mouse products.

Two years later, and Kamen was selling $35 million worth of Disney soap, hairbrushes, candy, baseball cards, and of course, watches. Keep in mind this was Great Depression dollars. The merchandise became a much more lucrative and stable source of income than the cartoons themselves.

The marketing lesson of this story is clear:

If Kay Kamen hadn’t created the merchandising machine for Disney in 1932, there’s a good chance none of us would know the Disney brand today.

The problem is most businesses — pre-Kamen Disney included — only focus on their current offer. They struggle and they wonder why. It’s because many front-end offers are not profitable.

That’s why it’s much better to plan a business a couple offers in advance. The first thing you sell to your customer… and then the thing after that… and then the thing after that.

That’s what Kay Kamen did for Disney. But here’s the thing:

There’s another way of planning out your offers that might be even better than this “two steps ahead” method.

In fact, according to a marketer who pulls in multiple millions of dollars of profits each year, this other method is much more reliable, and therefore much more lucrative. But my email today is already running long like a train from KC to LA — so I’ll tell you all about this other method tomorrow.

My little-known history as an Amazon ebook hack

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A-list copywriter Bob Bly just sent out an email about the National Emergency Library. I’d heard of this initiative but I didn’t bother to look it up until now.

Turns out, the Internet Archive is scanning books and making them freely available online during the corona situation. That’s the National Emergency Library. To which Mary Rasenberger, director of the Authors Guild, said (and I quote from Bob’s email):

“[It is] no different than any other piracy sites. If you can get anything that you want that’s on Internet Archives for free, why are you going to buy an ebook.”

I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds like the old argument about sex and marriage. Why buy the cow, when there’s an app that hooks you up with free milk, even at 3am.

And yet… plenty of people are still getting married these days. How come? Riddle me that, Mary.

But seriously, here’s a little-known fact about me:

For about a year of my life, I eked a meager living by writing ebooks and selling them through Amazon Kindle publishing. (Don’t search for the books because they were all published under pseudonyms.)

I actually sold thousands of copies of these books — but it didn’t mean much. Kindle ebooks sell for a couple of bucks each.

Thing is, had I known as much about marketing back then as I do now, I wouldn’t have failed or given up on my Kindle publishing dreams.

That’s because selling books on Amazon (or really, on any outside platform) is not a good way to make money. It is, however, a fantastic way to get highly qualified leads who have tried a glass of your milk, and who want more.

That means you can get these folks over to your site and sell them more milk — maybe at a higher price than what Amazon encourages you to charge.

Why stop there though?

If somebody likes you and knows you and trusts you, why limit your offer to a carton or two of milk?

Instead, take your new-found customer by the hand to the back of your property… open the barn door… and introduce her to your gorgeous cow. It might be just the bovine your customer has been looking for all her life.

In other words, if the National Emergency Library, the National Milk Authority, or any other pirate institution starts giving away samples of your money-maker for free, it might not be the end of the world. It might even be the start of something great. As multi-millionaire marketer Joe Sugarman once said:

“Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem & turned it into an opportunity.”

How to blend SEO and daily emails

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For the past yea​r and a half, after writing a daily email to my list, I’ve been going on this site and pasting up the email content as a blog post. ​​There are over 420 such posts by now.

These posts don’t have much value to me. Google doesn’t send truckloads of traffic to them… and the readers who do stumble in are very particular (mostly, they wanna read about Tom Selleck and his non-existent boner pill, as advertised in Newsmax, which I wrote about last February).

So from now on, I will try something different:

It’s a combination of what I was doing until now (pasting up emails as blog posts) and standard SEO (writing 2k-word articles and kowtowing to Google, which I don’t have the time or drive to do).

​​If you’re curious about how this will look, just sit tight. I’ll have the first of these “new SEO” posts ready in a couple of days, and I’ll share it with you then.

In the meantime…

My point is not just to announce that my website will soon look different (you probably don’t care). But I think this merger of SEO/daily emails is an illustration about something you might find valuable.

I’m talking about a fundamental insight about how to come up with new ideas, approaches, and solutions. You might call this creativity — but a better word might be connectivity. It’s a simple, light, almost mechanical process that a monkey can do. Here’s legendary copywriter Gene Schwartz on the topic:

“What is creation? Creation is a lousy word. It’s a lousy word that confuses what you really do to perform a simple little procedure. Creation means create something out of nothing. In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. Okay, only God can do that. We can’t do that: We’re human.

“​​So let’s throw creation out, and let’s talk about connectivity. What you are trying to do is connect things together. You’re trying to practice connectivity. You’re trying to get two ideas that were separate in your mind and culture before, and you are trying to put them together so they are now one thought. You want something new to come out, but new doesn’t mean it never existed before, it means never joined before. New – in every of discipline – means never joined before.”

BTW, all this means I won’t be pasting my daily emails on this site any more. But I will continue writing them and sending them to my newsletter subscribers. If you want to read these emails, you can subscribe for free here:

https://bejakovic.com/copywriters-hero/

Marketing riddles I’m not smart enough to solve

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I was at the grocery store a few days ago and I saw a mindboggling sight. It was there on the shelf, in the coffee and tea aisle.

The local brand of coffee, called Franck, has two varieties:

1) Regular, which comes in a blue bag and costs 29 Croatian Weasels, and…

2) Delicious, which comes in a red bag and also costs 29 Croatian Weasels.

My forehead scrunched up as I tried to compute an answer to this puzzle:

What kind of idiot would choose regular blue coffee when you can get delicious red for the same price?

And yet…

I don’t think this is an example of branding stupidity on the part of the coffee company. Instead, I think it’s been well-tested and shown to increase sales.

One reason I think this is cause I saw something similar when subscribing to a paid newsletter a few days ago. My options were:

1) Platinum subscription: 4 free bonuses + digital newsletter + print newsletter, at the low price of $79

2) Excellent subscription: 4 free bonuses + digital newsletter, for $49

3) Premium subscription: digital newsletter + print newsletter, without bonuses, at a reasonable $119

I remember staring at my options in confusion for a few minutes.

“What am I missing here?” I thought. “Why is the Premium $40 more expensive than the Platinum, when it’s a strict subset of the other offer?”

I guess I’ll never know. But I’m sure this company tested it, and found this kind of customer confusion increases sales. Which makes me think that, like regular and delicious coffee, marketing has two flavors:

The first is intuitive, common-sense marketing. Sell people what they want at a price they can stomach… Make the offer crystal clear… Focus sales messages on benefits from the buyer’s point of view. And so on.

And then there’s the second flavor.

That’s the minboggling stuff that gets revealed through testing. Odds are, we’ll never know why a significant enough portion of people, lying in bed with their phones pressed against their faces, make some of the buying decisions that they do. All we can do is accept it and profit from it.

So what does this all mean for you?

When you’re just starting to develop your direct response palate, you’ll probably prefer the comforting, familiar aroma of common-sense marketing.

But as your business grows, it might make sense to start blending in spoonfuls of mindboggling marketing.

​​After all, you never know if an irrational dollop, mixed into an otherwise deliciously common-sense sales pitch, could increase your sales by 20%, or take an unprofitable offer and make it profitable.

It probably won’t. But it might be worth a test.

Agora finally gets into Internet marketing

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I remember back in 2006, when Amazon announced its new Amazon Web Services.

How clever, I thought. Like Donald Trump selling golden mailboxes at Trump Tower to entrepreneurs who want the ritzy mailing address.

After all, Amazon already had all of the computer boxes and wires and know-how for connecting them together. Other businesses didn’t have this — but wanted it. So Amazon could make a nice business by making its internal IT resources publicly available on a per-use basis.

And what a cash cow it turned out to be. AWS is now estimated to bring in $25B a year — more than McDonald’s — and is one of the main profit centers at the famously profit-free Amazon.

Now here’s a puzzle for the marketers out there:

What’s lying around your desktop (literal, computeral, or mental) which you could sell like Amazon sold AWS?

Don’t just shrug if off, but think for a minute.

Because even some of the most successful marketing businesses out there don’t collect this free money. Case in point:

Agora.

Agora is probably the biggest direct response company, with dozens of subsidiaries, and hundreds (thousands?) of offers, mostly financial newsletters.

You can bet that with all this experience selling high-margin info products online, the people at Agora know a thing or three about copywriting and Internet marketing.

And yet, in spite of its tremendous proof elements and branding, Agora doesn’t have any offers in the profitable and growing copywriting/IM niche.

Or at least… they didn’t.

Right now, Agora is spinning up a new division focused on Internet marketing.

I’m not sure what it’s called, but they have an email newsletter called Daily Insider Secrets.

On different days, you can read insights from Evaldo Albuquerque, one of the most successful copywriters at Agora Financial in the past few years…

…from Peter Coyne, also a successful copywriter and the youngest publisher inside Agora…

…and finally, from Rich Schefren, a big name in the IM space for the past decade or two.

I’ve been signed up to these emails for a few days. So far, it’s been like they say — IM secrets you can’t get nowhere else.

Except perhaps, in my own email newsletter. After all, my only fun in life is scouring the Internet for new marketing and persuasion ideas, and then giving them away in my daily newsletter. Usually packaged up in some kind of story.

If that sounds like the kind of thing you might be interested in, then you can try out my (FREE!) email newsletter here.

How to never run out of daily email marketing topics

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I felt like vomiting.

About 15 people were looking at me as I stood there at the front of the classroom.

3 of them were judges, in charge of evaluating my speech.

I looked at them with fear. I was sweating. I was trembling. I felt sick.

Not because I had to give a speech. After all, this was a debate tournament. I had given speeches like this hundreds of times before.

I felt sick because the night before, I’d had way too much to drink (a debate tournament tradition). Even though I’d vomited earlier in the morning and I’d slept a couple hours, I still felt wretched.

Now as you might know, a competitive debate speech is supposed to last exactly 7 minutes. Most debaters have way more to say than that, so it becomes a game of trying to fit their best arguments into 7 minutes.

But not me. Not that morning.

My mind was a black hole. All I wanted to do was to sit and close my eyes. I certainly didn’t have 7 minutes’ worth of persuasive arguments.

So I spoke incoherently for about a minute…

I looked around for help, which didn’t come…

And then, to the shock of the debate judges, and to the dismay of my debate partner, I shut up. And after a moment of silence, I dragged myself back to my seat and crumpled down in the chair.

In case I’m not communicating it properly:

This was a humiliating, borderline traumatic experience. I felt stupid. I felt humiliated. And I knew the whole room had just witnessed my unique failure.

Perhaps you feel something like this when it’s time to sit down and write.

Sure, writing isn’t as stressful as public speaking. But if you have to come up with new ways to sell the same thing, again and again (such as in daily emails), it can be stressful enough.

So what’s the fix?

Well, rather than spelling it out for you, let me point you to a video that illustrates how to come up with all the content you will ever need, at least for daily emails.

This video stars a guy named Mike Rowe, who is now famous as the host of a bunch of TV shows such as Dirty Jobs.

​​But back in the early 90s, Rowe had the 3am slot on QVC (a cable shopping channel). And he had to sell all sorts of shit, which he did in a pretty hilarious and inspiring fashion.

Don’t watch this video if you’re hoping for some sort of magic solution. But do watch it if you want to see a demonstration of all the selling (and non-selling) techniques you will ever need in daily emails: