Direct Marketing Archives - Page 48 of 52

Dirty deeds done at premium, non-negotiable rates

April 8, 2019 by John Bejakovic

Here’s a little story to warm you up:

“There are two bums sitting on a park bench. They had just woken up from a long night’s winter sleep covered up with newspapers. And the one bum had found a butt of a cigar on the ground. As he was lighting it, he said, ‘You know Bill, one good thing they can say about us is we always have the lowest price in town.'”

This story comes from Jim Camp, one of the world’s most influential philosophers of negotiation.

So what’s Camp’s point?

Well, let me tell you using Camp’s own words. First, here’s Camp’s thinking when he’s on the buying side:

“If you want people to be responsible, all you have to do is pay their asking price. Once you begin to cut their price or drive their price down, if there’s any glitches of failures, it’s your fault. [The other side can just say,] “I’m finding out I can’t deliver what I thought I could.'”

Maybe you’re not impressed with Camp’s unwillingness to haggle. In that case, prepare to be shocked, because Camp is unwilling to haggle in either direction. Here are his thoughts when he’s on the selling side:

“I have a price when I’m selling, and my price is never compromised. […] Everything I deliver is personal service. And if I discount that, I don’t like myself. I don’t feel good about what I’m doing. If I don’t like myself and what I’m doing then I’m not going to perform to my highest level of capability.”

So is Jim Camp right? Or wrong?

I think it’s really a question of what kind of business you want to run, and what kinds of people you want to deal with.

I personally don’t like haggling, and I don’t like working with people who do.

That’s why my attitude from the start of my copywriting career has never been, “Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.”

Instead, it’s been, “Dirty deeds, done at premium, non-negotiable rates.”

Of course, I’ve had to improve my skills along the way in order to justify my ever-increasing rates. The surprising thing is, the more I charge, the more value I wind up delivering to clients.

Just something to think about when you’re thinking of discounting your own prices.

And here’s something else to think about:

I’m generally fully booked up with client work these days, because I have 3 clients with ongoing projects and never-ending need for copy.

In other words, I’m not hungry for more client work.

But I also want to keep in touch with potential new clients. So I’ve set aside two one-hour slots each month to talk to clients, share whatever advice I can, and see if it makes sense for us to work together.

I haven’t yet automated this whole process, but if you’re interested in taking me up on one of these two slots for the month of April, you can get started by taking me up on the following offer:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Making money is even easier than achieving nuclear fusion

March 26, 2019 by John Bejakovic

How’s this for overachievement?

Little Jackson Oswalt daylights as a normal 12-year-old from Tennessee.

He lives with his parents, goes to school (I presume), and works hard on keeping his moppy hair out of his face.

After hours, however, this pre-adolescent is a bonafide nuclear scientist.

No joke.

The kid converted a playroom in his parents’ home into his own little laboratory.

And using parts off eBay and open source plans from some nuclear scientist website…

He actually seems to have built a working nuclear reactor.

If this is confirmed by the nuclear powers-that-be, Jackson will go down in the record books as the youngest person to ever achieve nuclear fusion.

I bring this story up to illustrate how easy it’s become to do formerly difficult things.

I mean, I’m sure this kid is smart.

But 10 or 20 years ago, the knowledge and parts he needed to build his own working nuclear reactor simply weren’t available publicly.

And 50 years ago, it took teams of the world’s most able scientists — who had access to the most ridiculous resources — to do what this kid did in his playroom.

Of course, this also applies if you’re running a business today.

Many tasks that used to be impossible or unreachably expensive are now free or trivially cheap.

Having your own website.

Making payments online.

Sending additional advertising to your customers at no cost.

Sourcing and delivering your products.

In other words, it’s a great time if you have a business. Much of the technical and ugly stuff has been taken care of for you.

What’s left is the need to build relationships with your customers, and to persuade people to do what you want.

This stuff can be difficult.

Fortunately, not as difficult as achieving nuclear fusion.

Hell, even I can do it. And if you want some of the insights I’ve gained by helping big direct response businesses build relationships and persuade customers, you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

How Trump outsmarted Mueller

March 25, 2019March 25, 2019 by John Bejakovic

During the last election, I spent a lot of time reading Scott Adams’s blog.

Adams was one of the few people to bet on Trump very early. And as Trump kept winning, first the primaries, then the election itself, Adams often talked about “cognitive dissonance” — that disorienting feeling when external evidence contradicts our mental models of how the world works.

Well, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance floating around the Internet today, following the release of the Mueller findings over the weekend.

People simply cannot figure out what went wrong, and how it is that Trump isn’t already under indictment or even in jail.

Well, I’ll tell you how.

It’s because Trump outsmarted Mueller. He was ahead of Mueller every step of the way. He had the Democrats by the nose and Mueller looking in all the wrong places.

And you know how Trump outsmarted them all?

It’s straight out of Limitless. He used a new smart drug called Reviva (which he also used during the election). According to Trump, “Your brain deteriorates as you get older, this pill keeps my brain young & sharper than ever.”

Ok, it’s time to take a moment to breathe.

None of the story above is true — well, except for the cognitive dissonance surrounding the Mueller findings.

The rest of it — the bit about Trump gobbling down a designer smart pill — is something I’ve just read in a very successful, currently running advertorial.

And here’s why I bring it up.

An ad like this could never run on TV.

These days, it also cannot run on Facebook or Google.

And yet I’ve seen this same ad a half dozen times over the past few weeks.

No FTC injunction. No White House cease-and-desist order. Nobody to stop whoever is running these ads from making mountains of golden, shiny shekels. How is this possible?

It’s simple:

Email drops.

In other words, paying for placement in an email newsletter (in this case, Newsmax).

Email drops still seem to be a kind of Wild West of advertising. They make it possible to reach large numbers of people, often using the kind of copy you want (instead of what Facebook wants). And that’s why they can be a great option for advertisers who are looking for new (or alternate) sources of traffic.

Of course, you don’t have to use email drops to sell shit products.

And you don’t have to tell lies to sell whatever it is you are selling.

You can also use email drops to successfully sell decent products with more-or-less ethical marketing. And if this is something you’re interested in, you might find valuable ideas in my upcoming book:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The obvious secret to creating blockbuster products

March 15, 2023March 19, 2019 by John Bejakovic

I talked to a potential client a couple of days ago.

He’s selling a prostate supplement. It’s going well. And he now wants to create other products he could sell to the same audience.

So he wanted to know whether I could give him advice about which products to develop based on what I’ve seen working. I told him the truth:

I don’t know that I can predict which marketplace will sell the best. But I do know of a formula for almost guaranteeing that a product you create will be a blockbuster.

It’s a secret I learned from master copywriter Gary Bencivenga. In Gary’s own words, great products are “those with a clear-cut, built-in, unique superiority supported by powerful proof elements.”

Now, this might sound obvious. Or maybe too abstract. So let me give you a few real-world examples of what “powerful proof elements” really mean in practice:

# 1. RealDose Nutrition is an 8-figure weight-loss supplement company that I’ve written for. Their main product is called Weight Loss Formula No. 1. It’s a combination of four ingredients, each of which has been shown in clinical studies to improve a different hormone related to weight loss.

RealDose sources their ingredients in the same way as in the clinical study and they use the same dosage (hence RealDose). At core, their marketing simply consists of saying, “Our product works, and here’s the science to prove it.”

# 2. Another supplement company I’ve written for is Vitality Now. The face of that company is Dr. Sam Walters, who at one point formulated nutrition bars for NASA.

Unfortunately, Vitality Now isn’t in the business of selling nutrition bars. If they were, they could make a killing simply by saying, “The same nutrition bars used by NASA!”

# 3. I’m currently going through a magalog written by another famous copywriter, Parris Lampropoulos. This magalog is for a boner pill called Androx. One of the ingredients in Androx is cordyceps — a mushroom from Tibet that was used at the emperor’s court in China for its libido properties.

Thanks to this, Parris can open up the sales message by talking about how the Emperor had to have sex with nine different women every night, and how this was the supplement that made it possible.

With products like these, which have such powerful proof elements built in, the marketing writes itself. Or as Gary Bencivenga put it:

“It’s your mission to come up with a product so inherently superior that, as soon as it’s effectively explained, demonstrated, or sampled, your prospects have no conclusion to draw except “I want it!”

I hope that’s the kind of product you’ve got (or are looking to make). And if that’s the case, and you just want good ways to explain and demonstrate to your buyers WHY your product really is superior, then you might like my upcoming book:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Computing the average cost of trash

March 14, 2019 by John Bejakovic

Here’s a quick quiz for you.

Imagine you go to a cafe and you see two options on the menu:

Option A is a cup of coffee. Option B is the same cup of coffee plus a muffin. Except the muffin comes with a clear disclaimer:

“This muffin is either fresh or left over from yesterday”

Now here’s the quiz question:

Let’s say that both option A and option B cost somewhere between $2 and $6. How much do you think option A — coffee only — costs…

And how would you rate the cost of option B — coffee and a possibly fresh, possibly stale muffin?

Think about it for a second.

And while you think, I want to make it clear this isn’t just a fanciful, hypothetical question.

In fact, it represents a very common situation in online marketing, where people regularly have a standard offer, like an ebook (that’s the coffee in the example above)…

And then they tack on a free bonus, like a second, less valuable ebook (that’s the muffin).

The thinking goes, if people want what you’re selling, they will only want it more in case you give them anything as a free bonus as well. Right?

To answer that, let’s go back to the quiz above. What value did you put on the two options?

Perhaps you said the coffee alone was $4…

And the coffee plus muffin was $4.25.

Even if those aren’t the exact numbers, odds are, you didn’t think option B could be worth less than option A. It just wouldn’t be logical.

And you’re right. Only one problem, though. People are not logical.

We know this because psychologists have run an experiment very similar to the scenario above.

To start, they presented both options A and B as above.

In this case, people reliably evaluated option B — coffee + questionable muffin — as being slightly more valuable than the coffee alone.

But here’s the twist.

If people were shown only one of the options and asked to evaluate how valuable it is…

Then they would value coffee alone at, say, $4…

But if they were shown the coffee + questionable muffin, they would value it at something like $3.25.

Did you catch that?

The coffee + muffin, evaluated in isolation, is perceived as less valuable than the coffee alone.

The issue, of course, is that the muffin could be trash left over from yesterday. And nobody wants to pay for trash.

This isn’t really logical — because the trash shouldn’t take away from the solid core offer.

But like I said, people aren’t logical. They don’t add up the value (so say the psychologists) of the perfectly good coffee with the possibly crappy muffin.

Instead, they seem to average out the value of the good coffee and the suspect muffin — making the total offer worth less than the coffee alone.

I think the message is clear if you’re considering tacking on bonuses to your core offer.

Either make your muffins fresh, or don’t add them in and spoil the coffee.

And if you want more freshly roasted marketing ideas that are not trash, you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

How to be courteous to trolls

February 12, 2019February 12, 2019 by John Bejakovic

There’s a scene in The Office where Dwight Schrute does battle with a sentient computer.

Dwight and the sentient computer (actually a couple of his coworkers in disguise) are competing to see who can sell more paper by the end of the day.

At one point, Dwight loses his cool. He tells the computer to “011 1111 011 011” (which apparently spells the letters “F” and “O” in ASCII).

The sentient computer doesn’t flinch, however.

Instead, it replies to Dwight:

“While you were typing that, I’ve searched every database in existence and learned every fact about everything. And mastered the violin. And sold more paper!”

I got a chance to apply a similar kind of response today for an ad I’m running on Facebook.

This ad is promoting a free ebook titled The Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams. One of the sections in this ebook covers the two big MLM essential oil companies, doTerra and Young Living, which have a lot of ardent supporters.

One such supporter commented on my ad:

“You are showing your own ignorance! You promote oils and don’t know the difference between what’s pure and what’s not, and yet try to bash other companies. You couldn’t pay me to waste my time on your book!”

Until recently, I’ve ignored trolls like this.

But then I thought to myself, why be so lazy?

I should take the advice of expert troll-tamer Ben Settle, and try to profit from this.

So I decided to ignore what the troll said, misconstrue it as something positive, and then self-promote. I wrote in response:

“No need to pay for this book, it’s free. And I agree that essential oil quality is important. That’s why I write about several best-selling companies that have been shown to sell adulterated oils.”

Well, the troll didn’t like being misunderstood.

She wrote more angry comments. But I had no intention of engaging with her further. I think one serving of “misconstrue then self-promote” is all each troll is entitled to.

So what’s the point?

I believe it’s possible to deal with trolls with courtesy, as long as you misconstrue or ignore what they have to say.

And then, you can turn it to your advantage and self-promote.

It’s much like the scene from The Office above.

Don’t engage with trolls directly. And take the attitude that you’re winning no matter what.

If you do this, you will find opportunities for subtle self-promotion everywhere.

Speaking of self-promotion: If you read all the way to the end of this post, you might like my upcoming book on email marketing. You can sign up to get a free copy when it’s out by going to the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

I screwed up yesterday

February 8, 2019 by John Bejakovic

Yesterday, I was sending out an email to my aromatherapy list when the Internet died.

Normally, I write my daily email in a text editor.

I then paste it into ActiveCampaign, tweak the formatting, and then click “Send.”

Yesterday, however, between the pasting and the clicking, the Internet died.

I restarted the router, finished sending out the email (so I thought), and got on with my merry day.

It was only later I realized I’d screwed up. Because the Internet had died at the proper moment, the email body didn’t get saved in ActiveCampaign.

So I managed to send out an email with a tantalizing subject line, “This essential oil treatment only works for 25% of people”…

… But the body of the email talked about something entirely unrelated (it was the template copy, from an email I had written two years ago).

Most importantly, the email wasn’t promoting what I wanted
it to promote (Essential Oil Quick Start Guide, my book on aromatherapy).

Shamezul.

What to do?

Well, I simply waited. And then today, I sent out another email saying, “I screwed up yesterday.”

I explained what had happened.

And I pasted in the correct email body from yesterday’s email below my explanation.

Many people opened this “penance” email.

Some read it.

And a few might even buy through it, as tends to happen when I include the right link.

Now, you might wonder why I’m mentioning all this. It’s to illustrate a principle I first heard from email marketing guru-in-chief Ben Settle. Says Ben (I’m paraphrasing):

“Nothing bad ever happens to you when you write emails”

In other words, everything can be turned and twisted into a good email.

So far, I’ve gotten new email content out of negative Amazon reviews, doubts about my credibility, and accusations thrown at me on Facebook.

And as you’re currently reading, out of a story of how I botched my actual email sending.

All of which illustrates that it’s not hard to come up with fodder for daily emails, once you get in the groove.

Of course, you can’t send out an “I screwed up” email every day. You’ll need some other email ideas to keep things interesting for your audience.

If you want my ideas for the kind of email content you could be sending out to your list day after day, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing. For more info or to sign up for a free copy, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

5 marketing lessons from the most boring writer who ever lived

January 16, 2019 by John Bejakovic

I advise you not to read this post.

It’s long, and it deals with a very boring topic. And that’s the poet Kenneth Goldsmith.

Goldsmith practices something called “uncreative writing.”

For example, he’s written a book called “Day.” This is a typed-out edition of the New York Times from September 1, 2000. “Day” is 836 pages long, and it took Goldsmith a year to type.

Goldsmith then wrote “Weather,” a transcript of a year’s worth of weather reports from a New York City local radio station.

After that, “Traffic” followed. And then “Sports.” You get the idea.

So is Goldsmith just a boring crank?

Maybe so.

But he’s definitely a successful, well-paid crank.

He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He read to Obama at the White House. He gets paid $500 for 30-minute readings of his works. And in 2013, he became the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art.

But who cares about all that?

Instead, it turns out there are a bunch of instructive parallels between what Goldsmith does and what marketers and copywriters should do. Let me tell you about the top 5:

#1 Format rules

Speaking of his book “Day,” Goldsmith wrote:

“When you take a newspaper and reframe it as a book, you get pathos and tragedy and stories of love.”

Very true, in poetry as in direct-response copy. That’s because changing the format of your sales message — a sales letter vs. a video vs. a book — tends to have a much bigger impact on conversions than changing your headline, your offer, or any other aspect of your copy.

#2 Repulsion marketing

Goldsmith calls himself “the most boring writer who ever lived.”

He honed his boring chops working as a disk jockey for a radio show called Unpopular Music. That’s where he learned that challenging someone not to listen (or read) makes the person pay closer attention. And then your content either drives them away, or drives them more closely towards you.

Nothing new, you might say. This is a well-honed positioning strategy in the marketing world as well — email marketing guru Ben Settle being one well-known proponent.

#3 Branding done right

Goldsmith makes a personal spectacle out of himself. He wears paisley-patterned suits, sometimes with a long flowing skirt over his pants. “Every time I’m in public, I’m a persona, and people really hate that.”

Mind you, this isn’t traditional branding.

But exaggerating his natural tastes makes Goldsmith noticeable and memorable, and it’s something anybody (including internet entrepreneurs) can use as well.

#4 Troll management

The article I read about Goldsmith was full of comments by detractors, who were complaining about various aspects of his work.

Meantime, Goldsmith was off somewhere, busily devising the agenda for his upcoming projects — which will no doubt draw more criticism and negative reactions.

And there’s more.

When he was widely condemned of misappropriating racially sensitive material (the autopsy report of Michael Brown) for one of his readings, Goldsmith responded with his own thoughts — but didn’t apologize.

What better way to deal with online trolls as well?

#5 Moving information

Goldsmith says about his work:

“Moving information is a literary act, in and of itself […] How I make my way through this thicket of information — how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize it and distribute it — is what distinguishes my writing from yours.”

Well, moving information is a sales act as well. In fact, Goldsmith’s attitude above echoes something copywriting genius Gene Schwartz said:

“Copy is not written. Copy is assembled.”

In essence, Gene was saying that sales copy is simply a collection of good sales arguments. And those sales arguments don’t come from introspection. Instead, they come from research, deep into your market. In other words, much of your copy can come straight from forum posts, Facebook comments, and testimonials written by your target audience.

And on that note, I’m signing off from today’s episode of Unpopular Copywriting.

If you want more unpopular ideas, sign up for my newsletter by using the page below. I’ll even send you a link to a free promo of my upcoming Upwork book (ETA 1 week):

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

The capitalist running dog responsible for a billion-dollar industry

January 15, 2019 by John Bejakovic

I started a new gym routine today.

And I’m finally trying some kettlebells. Which is rather odd, when you think about it.

Ten years ago, almost nobody had every heard of kettlebells.

Today, these lumps of iron are probably a billion dollar industry. Every gym around the world literally has dozens of them — and they ain’t cheap.

So what explains this explosion in kettle-interest?

In one word, Pavel.

In two words, Pavel Tsatsouline.

AKA “The Evil Russian,” Pavel Tsatsouline popularized the kettlebell in America, and was directly responsible for the fact that I was using one this morning.

Of course, Pavel didn’t do it alone.

There was also John Du Cane, owner of Dragon Door Publications, a direct marketing publisher that sells martial arts and fitness programs, including Pavel’s original Russian Kettlebell Challenge.

Over the years, Dragon Door has had other promising fitness stars in its stable.

But none of them have had anything close to the mainstream impact of The Evil Russian.

Which raises the question, why?

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might be able to guess my thoughts on why Pavel was so successful.

In a nutshell, it’s his origin story.

Born in Minsk, raised in Riga, Pavel was supposedly a physical training instructor for Spetsnaz, the elite Soviet special-forces unit.

He then emigrated to the U.S., and after a string of odd jobs, became a “capitalist running dog,” selling Soviet military training secrets to pudgy middle-class Americans.

Of course, not everybody can claim to be peddling military secrets.

But with a bit of work, different elements of Pavel’s origin story can be applied, with surprisingly good effect, to any product, service, or brand.

This is something I’ll talk about in more detail in the future. For example, in my upcoming book on email marketing.

If you want to get notified when that book is out, and even to grab yourself a free copy, then comrade, you have but one task. Go to the page below, and subscribe to my newsletter:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/