Creativity

One roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer

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This morning I found out that Active Campaign has this spreadsheet view of campaign results.

It allows you to sort and compare previous campaigns rather than just looking at the results for each campaign individually.

So I looked at the past three months of my emails. I was curious to see my most unsubscribed-from email over that time.

It turns out I sent this toxic email only last week. The subject line read, “The secret spider web of money and love opportunities.” It had more unsubscribers — both in actual number and as a percentage of the people who got the email — than the other 90+ emails I sent over that period.

Why was this email so reviled?

Maybe the subject line was too good, and it sucked in people who wouldn’t normally open.

Maybe the content was truly awful.

Maybe my unsubscribed readers didn’t like my tone. Maybe they felt I didn’t deliver on promise of love opportunities (all the unsubscribers were women, judging by names). Or maybe they just realized my list is not for them (several came from a classified ad I ran a few days prior).

So what’s my point?

I’m not sure. I don’t really have a smart conclusion to draw from this experiment.

Instead, let me share an interesting idea with you that I read in Jack Trout’s and Al Ries’s book Positioning:

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For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.

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Maybe I should take Ries & Trout’s advice. Let me try it right now:

If you want one roadway to success as a copywriter and marketer, then you can find that inside my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is based on an exercise devised by legendary copywriter Gary Halbert. Top marketers and copywriters, including Ben Settle and Parris Lampropoulos, have praised this exercise and said it’s how they got good at the craft and how they started writing winning ads and making lots of money.

If you’d like to find out what this exercise is, or even start practicing it yourself, click on the link below and start reading the page that opens up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The secret to better pizza, better emails

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Back in 2020, I reported on a saucy story involving Jack Trout.

Trout is one half of the team that wrote Positioning, which I still think is one of the best and most interesting books on marketing.

Once upon a time, Trout was in meeting with John Schnatter, the “papa” in Papa John’s Pizza.

Schnatter’s chain already had 1,000 locations around the country. But I guess he wanted more, and so he was talking to Trout.

Schnatter explained how Papa John’s makes pizza. “… and then we put the tomato sauce, which we get from Dino Cortopassi…”

“Hold up,” said Trout. “I know Dino. He doesn’t sell to chains. He only sells to small mom-and-pop shops. His stuff is fresh-packed and there’s not enough for chains. You’re telling you get your sauce from Dino?”

Schnatter nodded. A call to Dino himself confirmed it.

And so was born Papa John’s positioning:

“Better ingredients, better pizza.”

Is Papa John’s Pizza truly better? I can’t say. I’ve never had it. But the company grew five-fold in the years following the positioning change, and is worth some $3 billion today.

So let’s see how many billion I can make with the following positioning statement:

Better ingredients, better emails.

My claim is that, as for pizza, so for long-term marketing.

More interesting stories and more valuable ideas make for better emails. Independent of the copywriting pyrotechnics you invest in. Independent of the rest of your public persona, which builds you up into a legend worth listening to.

Maybe the fact that you are reading my email now, or have been reading my emails for a while, is proof of that.

But you gotta pay the piper somewhere.

Better ingredients for your emails are not free — free as in just sitting there in your head, right now, ready to be used.

The good news is, better ingredient are not hard to come by, and are not expensive.

They have been collected and sorted, organized and prepared for you, in low-cost receptacles known as books.

If you read the right books, you’re likely to find lots of interesting stories and lots of valuable ideas.

I had more to say on this topic. But I reserved that for people who are signed up to my email newsletter. If you are able to read, including books, then you might like to join my email newsletter as well. Click here to do so.

$2.5-billion Renaissance man’s advice for how to spend your evenings and afternoons

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Back in August, I wrote about Paul Graham. Graham is worth an estimated $2.5B.

That’s because a part of what Graham does is invest in early-stage startups, such as Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox. But Graham is more than just an investor.

He is also an entrepreneur himself — he started and sold multiple businesses. He is also a computer scientist and somewhat of an inventor — he created his own new programming language. He also paints paintings, writes books and essays, and for all I know, sings opera.

In other words, Graham is as close to a Renaissance man as you can get in 21st century.

Anyways, a couple days ago, Graham wrote a new essay in which he made the following argument:

In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious “tapes” would load it into one’s brain like a program being loaded into a computer.

That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn’t just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write.

Would that matter? If we replaced reading, would anyone need to be good at writing?

The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.

Cue my Insights & More Book Club.

This is a bonus I am offering with the Age of Insight live training.

With the Insights & More Book Club, you can get exposed to new books that I will choose specifically because they are likely to be insightful and perspective-shifting.

You can also see the kinds of notes I take and ideas I have as I am reading the book — I will share them with you as I go along.

And of course, you can read yourself. ​And then, we can get on a call every two months to discuss what we’ve read and how to use it.

​​In this way, Insights & More is both a book club — with quilts and tea and cookies — and a mastermind where we can talk about ways to apply ideas from the reading to your marketing and content and even offers.

By the way, I’ve realized over the years I am very good at getting info and ideas out of books. But I am also very, very slow. Hence, only one new book for the Insights & More Book Club every two months.

So if you are interested in ideas, writing, or making money, then you might be interested in joining my Age of Insight live training, and the Insights & More Book Club.

Registration closes in three days, on Wednesday 12 midnight PST. But I am only making this training open to people who are on my email newsletter. To get in before the doors close, sign up for my newsletter.

It may be a long time since you read this subject line

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I was standing in the kitchen this morning, making coffee for myself, when I had the idea for this email. I had to stop the coffee making and go write the idea down. Here it is:

A few weeks ago, a science paper went viral on the internet. It was titled, “Consciousness as a memory system.”

The paper gives a new theory of consciousness:

We don’t experience reality directly, the paper claims. We’re not looking out through any kind of window onto the reality outside.

We don’t even experience reality in any kind of real-time but transformed way. We’re not looking at a colorful cartoon that’s generated live, based on what’s going on outside right now.

Instead, we only have conscious experiences of our memories and of our imagined memories.

What you’re really looking at, right now, is a sketchbook, full of shifting drawings and notes of things that happened some time ago, or that never happened at all.

Maybe this new theory turns out to be false or obvious. Maybe it turns out to be profound and true. I personally find it interesting because it speaks to a practical experience I keep having:

If you don’t remember it, it might as well never have happened.

​​That’s why I had to stop the coffee making and go write down my idea for this email.

I’ve been writing newsletter for four years.

It’s more difficult than it might seem to write a 500-600-word email like this every day.

There are lots of stops, starts, discarded sentences and paragraphs.

To make it more complicated, my best ideas don’t happen while standing at my desk and trying to work. My best ideas often happen in a dim flash, while I’m in the shower, while driving, while trying to make coffee. Sometimes entire phrases, arguments, outlines for things I want to say, names, product concepts, inspired analogies, light up in my head. A moment later, that dim flash fades away.

You’ve probably heard the advice that, if you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of interesting thoughts or observations you have.

It’s good advice, so let me repeat it:

If you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of the interesting thoughts or observations you have.

And then, figure out a way to organize and store those notes into something that will be useful tomorrow, a month from now, even a year from now.

Now, get ready, because you’re about to have a conscious experience of a memory of a sales pitch:

I write a daily email newsletter. Many people say it’s interesting and insightful.

Search your memory banks right now. See whether you have a conscious experience of a memory of wanting to read more of my writing. If you find the answer is yes, then click here and fill out the form that appears.

Breaking News: I have an email surplus

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Yesterday, I was sitting on the couch trying to work.

The girl who was sitting next to me had her phone out. Suddenly, it started blaring with an English woman’s voice:

“I came into office at a time of great economic and international…”

I waited for a second, hoping that the noise would die down. The phone continued to blare:

“… instability. Families and businesses were worried about how to pay their…”

I frowned, both at the level of noise and the level of fluff. “What is this?” I asked the girl.

“It’s breaking news,” she said. “The UK’s Prime Minster just resigned.”

“Who cares?” I asked, hoping she would get the hint and turn the noise down.

“It’s breaking news!” she repeated.

I’m telling you this not to highlight how little I care for breaking news, though that’s certainly true.

I’m telling it to you to set up the fact that yesterday, when the UK’s Prime Minister resigned, was Thursday October 20.

Today, as I write this email, is Friday October 21.

And tomorrow, when this email will actually be sent out so you can read it, will be Saturday October 22.

In other words, I am a day ahead in my emails. I have an extra email written and scheduled — for the first time in something like 18 months.

The last time this happened was during my trip to Colombia in January 2021.

​​I was traveling with friends, and I was unsure that I’d have time each day to sit down and write a new email. So when I did find time to sit down, I’d write several emails at a time. By the end of that trip, I ended up with a surplus of a few days’ worth of emails.

The same thing happened this time.

​​I was traveling to London with a friend this past weekend. ​​Again, I was unsure when I might have time to sit down and write. Again, as a result of this, I wound up with an email surplus.

Which brings me to the paradoxical mathematics of email copywriting:

I find it’s often easier to write two, three, or 10 emails than to write one.

I can think of a few diff reasons why this is:

* More time spent on research…

* Less time spent on fiddling…

* And an overall tighter, clearer, faster structure for the emails in a batch of 10 than for a lone, lonely, and possibly bloated single email.

So my takeaway for you is, if you’re having a hard time writing a single email, set yourself the goal to write 10. Paradoxically, you might have an easier time of it.

And now, here’s some real breaking news:

Next week, I will be releasing my amazing Copy Riddles program for all the world to marvel at. I’m planning to throw a big and loud launch party in this newsletter, starting next Thursday and ending next Sunday. Maybe it will be a costume party, and if it is, I’ll dress up as Po the Kung Fu panda.

In case you’d like to be invited to that party, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter. Click here for the application.

The six-word email, with examples

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I’m sitting on the couch as I write this, next to the open balcony doors, in my underwear, eyes bleary, hair looking like a lawnmower went over it, in a press to write a personal and yet valuable email to you before.

Before what?

Before it’s time for me to rush out of the house and go pick up my rental car and then drive up the coast for the day. The idea is to give myself a chance to burn in the sun, on a beautiful beach I will visit for the first time in my life.

But what to write about?

Fortunately, I wrote down a concept for today’s email almost two weeks ago:

“The six-word email, with examples”

That concept is based on an idea from Hollywood.

​​Your story should fit into six words, say Hollywood screenwriting . Here are a few examples from Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work, a series from Scott Myers’s Go Into The Story blog:

1. Human Spy on an Alien Planet

2. Loner cop. New partner. Police dog.

3. Infatuated boy. Dream girl. Find condom.

“Fine,” I said to myself when I read this idea. “Let me put it into action and try it out.”

So ​​I made a list of 10 possible email ideas, each just six words. And then, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly sending them out. Example:

1. Emails without offer: stupid. Hence, consulting.

2. Results of my “rape” subject line.

3. What’s working on Substack right now?

And of course today’s email is another example of the six-word email.

Because it’s not that the email has to actually be six words itself. But rather, the core idea should be simple and easy to express, in just six words.

In some of my example emails above, I ran on too long and covered up the core message with too many words.

I won’t make that mistake today.

So let me just say, if you think you have no time to write daily emails, then do what I did.

Make a list of 10 six-word email concepts. Flesh them out a bit in an interesting and insightful way, and then send them out.

And if you say you don’t know how to come up with interesting six-word email concepts… or a way to quickly and easily flesh them out in an interesting and insightful way, then you might like:

A free presentation I will be putting on in the next week. It’s called the Most Valuable Email.

The details of this presentation will come tomorrow. If you’d like to read those details when they come out, or even sign up for my Most Valuable Email presentation, you can do that by getting onto my email newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Spoons and forks considered harmful

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Earlier this morning, I had what I can only generously call breakfast.

​​I tore off a chunk of baguette and stood barefoot on the balcony, gnawing on my bread and looking over the city.

Then I went back to the kitchen. I have two cans of sardines. I also have a small ceramic bowl, but no forks. I considered opening one of the cans, pouring out the contents into the bowl, and eating the sardines using my fingers.

I got near to the can, then stepped away. I got near again, stepped away again. “I’m better than this,” I convinced myself. The sardines will have to wait.

I then took a small pot and boiled some water. I took a package of espresso coffee and cut it open — thank God I bought scissors this morning.

But I don’t have anything resembling a spoon. So I shook the coffee package over the boiling water.

Was that about a teaspoon of coffee? Or two? Maybe add some more? The coffee came out cocaine-level strong.

All this is to say that last night I moved into my new apartment.

The apartment is furnished — there is a bed and a couch and things like that.

But many of the absolute necessities of daily life — spoons, forks, shot glasses — were not included. I have to buy them. And in the meantime, I have to make do, or do without.

Some usual things are an absolute no-go. I can’t wash clothes until I get a rack on which to dry them.

Other things, like those fingery sardines, I decided to postpone for later.

Still other things, I figured out some new method of doing, like shaking out half a pound of coffee over a boiling pot of water.

I don’t mind any of this. In fact, I find it kind of stimulating.

In another few days or weeks, I will buy the necessaries, get used to this apartment, get back in the usual groove, and live here much like I’ve lived everywhere else.

But right now, I’m very awake. I’m seeing and experiencing new things and having new ideas — even if they’re terrible, like eating sardines with my hands — that I never would have had otherwise.

But you know what? I have a lot of shopping to do. And later today, I have to send out the first batch of postcards to my Most Valuable Postcard subscribers.

So let me get to the idea I want to share with you quickly and without much ado:

One of the people I’ve long admired the most is computer scientist Alan Kay.

He’s the guy who said a change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points, which is a hope I keep clinging to desperately.

Kay is a bit of a tech visionary. Much of the technology we take for granted today and that underlies our world, like windows interfaces and object-oriented programming, was Kay’s work.

Kay is also interested in design and education and creativity. And he has many interesting things to say.

For example, back in 2009, Kay gave a talk titled, Normal Considered Harmful. In it, he said the following:

“You don’t want to think every time you take a step. You can cripple yourself by questioning everything that you do. But on the other hand, every once in a while, instead of doing meditation on a flower, meditate on all the assumptions you’re making about the world that you’re just taking for granted for efficiency reasons.”

Kay says he performs this exercise every day. Literally every day, 15 minutes to think about all the assumptions he’s making and that he’s taking for granted.

Sure, sometimes you’re forced into this situation, because there’s just no spoon in your apartment.

But like Kay says, there might be value — even big value, maybe 80 IQ points worth of value — in making this no-fork, no-spoon meditation into a daily habit.

So try it.

Or don’t.

Maybe you’re smart enough already. In that case, you definitely won’t enjoy my email newsletter. Otherwise, you can sign up for it here.

Sales copy written by hallucinatory voices

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True story:

An otherwise healthy woman, identified only as AB, suddenly started hearing voices in her head.

The year was 1984. The place was England.

The voices reassured AB they were medical professionals trying to help her. They even gave AB some convincing secret info to prove their claims.

But AB concluded she was going insane. She went to a psychiatrist and was prescribed an antipsychotic medication.

The voices stopped. AB, relieved and happy, went on holiday.

​​But then the voices returned. They told her to head home. They sent AB to an unknown address. It turned out to be a medical center specializing in brain scans. The voices told AB to get one of those brain scans on her own noggin.

AB’s doctor was initially reluctant — brain scans are expensive and the woman was crazy — but in the end, AB got her brain scan. And then another.

It turned out that, even though she showed no symptoms, she had a large tumor inside her skull.

One brain surgery later, and the tumor was removed.

After AB regained consciousness following surgery, the voices told her, “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.” AB never heard from them again, and she continued to live a normal and healthy life.

AB’s psychiatrist, who wrote up this report, said that his colleagues fell into two camps:

Group one thought this was proof positive of benevolent telepathic communication.

Group two thought AB was a big ole grifter, and that she was inventing this story as a way of getting free access to the UK’s health services (AB wasn’t born in the UK, but she had lived there for 15 years before this case).

The psychiatrist offered a third explanation. Even though AB wasn’t manifesting any symptoms, it’s likely that the large tumor in her head made her feel somehow off. It’s possible that her unconscious started slyly gathering relevant information and making its own diagnosis. Eventually, this erupted in AB’s head as hallucinations.

I find this third explanation plausible. And I bring it up for two reasons.

First, it meshes well with how I imagine my sense of self. And that’s a flimsy wooden raft, floating on the surface of a dark and deep loch.

Reason two is that this might help reduce your workload.

Because writing is work. But you know what’s not work? Having ideas pop up in your head without any effort.

For example, I sometimes just “visit” what I want to write. I look over the topic and any research I might have collected. I then go do other stuff and allow the monsters under the surface to digest that information.

For me, there’s no work. I don’t have to do it. All I have to do is simply write it down.

Maybe you can try the same. Just put a lump of an idea into your head. Then go about your day. When you start hearing voices, calmly reach for a writing apparatus and take dictation. And when the voices finish, don’t forget to say thank you, and invite them to visit you again.

“Sign up,” a voice in your head is saying right now. “Sign up to this guy’s email newsletter. He has interesting and valuable things to say.”

What’s that? You say you want to sign up to my email newsletter? Well, I don’t usually do this, but all right. Here’s how you can get in.

Rescuing the Dread Pirate Roberts from a creative shipwreck

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“There will be no survivors… my men are here, and I am here… but soon, you will not be here…”

Here’s a little riddle for you:

How do three men, one of whom has been mostly dead all day long, storm a castle gate guarded by 60 soldiers?

Inconceivable, right?

​​Even if one of the three men happens to be a giant, and another a master swordsman… the enemies are too many. Success is inconceivable.

But what if you also throw in a wheelbarrow among your assets? And what if you even have a magical, fire-protective, “holocaust cloak”?

Suddenly, the inconceivable becomes easy. Because here’s what you do:

Just load one of the three men — preferably, the giant — into the wheelbarrow. Wrap the holocaust cloak around him.

Then start rolling the wheelbarrow towards the gate… and have the giant yell death threats at the soldiers as you approach.

Finally, just as fear and doubt start to creep into the hearts of the castle defenders… set the holocaust cloak on fire. Have your burning giant yell:

“The Dread Pirate Roberts takes no survivors… all your worst nightmares are about to come true… the Dread Pirate Roberts is here for your souls…”

Presto. The soldiers scatter in a panic, and you have taken the castle.

Perhaps you recognize this as a scene from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride, written by William Goldman.

But perhaps you also recognize it as something else, written by me in 2021.

Because about a month ago, I wrote an email about pirates. In that email, I was re-telling another scene from another William Goldman script, titled Sea Kings. That other scene had many of the same elements as the scene above:

First, a giant all-black figure who appears on the horizon at dusk, and who keeps floating nearer and nearer…

Then, the deep voice rumbling out from the figure… “Death or surrender… surrender or die… the Devil bids you choose…”

And finally, smoke and flames that erupt from around that black giant… to truly identify the legendary pirate you’re meeting face to face:

“Run up the white flag… It’s Blackbeard…”

It turns out Goldman reused a bunch of elements from Sea Kings (written some time in the 70s, never produced) to The Princess Bride (written some time later in the 70s, produced into a movie in 1987, became a giant hit and a big cultural icon).

The bigger point is that if you write a lot, you will eventually come up with a good idea, phrase, joke, motif, trick, transition, or image… which is part of a big creative shipwreck.

​​​Maybe that’s a book you never got published… or a video you made that nobody ever watched… or a daily email that ran too long and failed to make a clear point.

So why not reuse that good element a second, or a third, or a fifth time? In the right context, that rescued element might become highly influential, even though it was part of a disaster initially.

Take my email today, for example.

I hope you liked it. But maybe you didn’t.

If so, would you like me to try again?

As you wish. I’ll try again tomorrow, by rescuing an element of the copy I used today… and fitting it to a new purpose and a different format.

Good night, dear reader. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely write you an email in the morning.

A-list Copywriting Commandment no. 8, in D-minor

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“She was shocked because she was expecting us to play another concerto. So when I started the first bar of the D-minor concerto, she kind of jumped and panicked like an electric shock. And she couldn’t even consider moving ahead with playing.”

If you would like to see what real despair looks like, go on YouTube and search for “Maria Joao Pires wrong concerto.”

Pires is a concert pianist. She went on stage once, in front of a large live audience.

As soon as the orchestra started playing, Pires realized she had prepared the wrong piece. The orchestra was playing something other than what she had been rehearsing.

Result?

Panic. Sickness. Despair. I mean, imagine the situation.

You’re in front of a live audience.

The orchestra is mercilessly pushing on.

A few moments more, and it will be your turn to start playing as the star of the evening. Except you are completely unprepared and unable to perform.

And the time before everybody realizes it is three… two… one…

I’m not 100% sure why I decided to tell you this particular story. But in my mind, it tied into a question I got a few days ago from a reader named Randy:

How long did it take you to start writing daily emails like Ben Settle suggests and to always have something interesting to say?

(I’m asking you this since I’ve been trying my hand at writing daily emails. But even when I always come up with stories to tell, I find it difficult is to always have a lesson to add at the end)

My advice to Randy, and to you in case you want it, is to keep two lists.

One is where good ideas go.

Another is where fun/sickening stories go.

And rather than having a good story (“concert pianist realizes she prepared the wrong piece”), and then trying to pull out of your head a moral to that story…

… or rather than having a good idea to share (such as “keep two lists”) and then trying to pull out of your head a fun way to illustrate that idea…

… use your lists.

Because not everybody has a memory like Maria Joao Pires. In those 30 seconds from the icy and disgusting realization that she had prepared the entirely wrong piece… Pires managed to summon the right concerto from the depths of her mind. She played the whole thing flawlessly.

I am not that talented. And perhaps you aren’t either. No matter.

You can use paper — or a computer file — to outsource your memory. And your creativity too. Go down your lists, and come up with connections that you couldn’t make if’n you just relied on your raw brainpower.

“But two lists!” I hear you saying. “That’s twice the work of one list!”

True. And it goes back to something A-list copywriter Jim Rutz said:

“You must surprise the reader at the outset and at every turn of the copy. This takes time and toil.”

This simple idea has been super valuable to me. It’s one of the main standards I keep for these emails I send you each day. And also for copy that I write for clients.

In fact, I would like to say this one idea is the most important thing to what I do… but there’s no “one thing.” So I put this Jim Rutz idea as no. 8 in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

If by chance you haven’t seen this book yet… and you want to know what the other 9 commandments are… here’s where you can get the whole desperate and surprising lot:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments