Learning

How to write emails that won’t embarrass you and show off your lack of skill

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Last week, I got an email from a marketer with a big-promise subject line:

“How to hook your reader in 5 seconds…”

Oh, the ironing. It took me all about 1 second to swipe left and get rid of that email without ever opening it.

Clearly, whatever techniques that guy was selling inside his email, they weren’t helping him personally.

That would never happen had he known about my Most Valuable Email trick, which is all about preventing ugly and embarrassing situations like the above from happening.

I last promoted Most Valuable Email 10 days ago. Due to the phase of the moon, I pulled in a surprising number of new buyers then. One was email marketer Illya Shapovalov, who wrote me soon after buying to say:

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Oh. My God.

After slightly more than 2 hours, I still haven’t gone fully through MVE. I’m a tedious notetaker. My head is literally spinning. I feel like Ned Stark (assuming you’ve watched GOT) when he pieced together that the “Baratheon” kids are bastards. I’m gonna take a break and continue where I left off (the riddles)

Even though I’m fairly new to copywriting (7 months in), I’ve been gnawing at this idea of “telling without telling”. For example, how to not have a lead magnet, but make so everyone who lands on the signup form can’t help but join. Basically “show don’t tell”. Because. as you point out in MVE too, stories are getting commoditized. Everyone can spin a story. This however … this answers so many seemingly unanswerable questions I had, or didn’t even know I have.

Easily the best $100 I ever invested in something. This is something I can apply not only to email but to my website copy, to my LinkedIn profile/posts, to name a few examples …

Bottom line: Huge thank you for making this course – and for seriously underpricing it. In hindsight, it’s worth way more than a measly $100. And I haven’t even checked the swipe file yet.

P.S. Yesterday’s email looks completely different – in fact, it did so right after your response. That, and the whole MVE trick … something so pointedly simple, yet so fucking powerful.

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The MVE trick takes less than an hour to learn. (Or more than two hours, depending on how many notes you take.) Point being, it’s quick to grasp.

You can then apply the MVE trick in your subject lines, in your email copy, in your personal positioning, in the way you price your offers, in your funnels, as I’ve done, over and over, a dozen times or more in my emails just this month, and many more times over the past months and years.

Each time I have applied the MVE trick, I have profited, either with sales that I made directly, or indirectly, by learning, and becoming better at what I do, every day, a small but significant step each time.

If you’d like to do the same:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

I saw a funambulist yesterday and I suspect I can do what he does

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Yesterday, I found myself in the middle of a hushed crowd. Everyone was looking up.

Then the crowd collectively gasped, started clapping, and cheered. My girlfriend turned around and started to jokingly shush the people closest to her. “Let the man concentrate!”

Yesterday, a funambulist — a tightrope walker — made his way some 200 meters from one corner of Plaça de Catalunya, the central square in Barcelona, across Passeig de Gracia, the main shopping street in Barcelona.

Halfway across, about 120 feet in the air, the man stopped. He sat down cross-legged on the tight-rope. After a few moments of what looked like comfortable meditation, with the his shirt rippling in the wind, he stood up and kept walking.

Instead of stopping at the end, he turned around and decided to walk back to the start. The crowd underneath was following him like a shadow on the ground.

The funambulist came back to the midpoint of the tight-rope. Slowly and carefully, he lay down on his back on the rope, his arms out to the sides.

This lying down, and the bit of cross-legged sitting before it, looked kind of tricky.

The rest of the time though, the guy was just walking.

He didn’t have one of those balancing poles. Instead, he just kept his arms up and used them to balance. He steadily put one bare foot in front of the other, occasionally shifting his weight a bit, moving his arms a little. That’s it.

I wouldn’t like to be up that high in the air. But really, this tight-rope walking, which I’ve never attempted in my life, looks pretty easy.

Of course, that’s because I know nothing about it. Odds are, if I ever tried to walk on a tight-rope slung two feet off the ground between two trees, I would find it very hard to pull off, very tiring, requiring enormous balance. I would probably find myself falling off over and over, after just a step or two.

Still, it looks easy.

In my email yesterday, I made an unusual offer. I’m trying to get rid of my Copy Riddles course. I’m no longer selling it myself, so I’m looking to find a person who would like to take it from me, along with all the rights to it, and sell it, change it, do whatever with it.

Copy Riddles ties into that tightrope walker’s act. A-list level sales copy looks easy. A bit of intrigue, balanced with a benefit or two, steadily marching towards the order form.

If, like me when I first started writing copy, you think you can do what A-list copywriters do, then you should try to do it yourself.

That’s what Copy Riddles is all about. You get to write copy, starting from the same prompt that A-list copywriters started from. And you find out very quickly how much skill and effort and tricks are involved in producing what they produce.

Surprisingly, I got multiple serious responses to my offer yesterday. I got back to everyone. We will see if any of these negotiations bear fruit.

But I’ve found that, whenever I get several responses to a new offer with just one email, there are inevitably people who didn’t see that email, or meant to reply but didn’t get to it. Plus, since this is an unusual sale, the final details of it are likely to be fluid — depending on who the eventual buyer is and what his or her goals and current situation are.

For all those reasons, I’m writing you again with the same offer. If you are interested in owning the rights to Copy Riddles, so you can sell it and profit from it, then write me, and we can start talking about how that might work.

My #1 takeaway from a $3k conference

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I went to a $3k copywriting conference 4 weeks ago. Since then, my impressions have settled.

What’s left? What ideas did I really get from the high-powered speakers at this conference?

What’s left today is the same as what struck me while I was still sitting in the freezing-cold conference room.

All the speakers kept repeating the word “simple.” Simple business model. Simple deliverables. Simple promises.

But here’s what I realized while listening to all these speakers:

Getting to simple isn’t simple. It takes time and thought and work to figure out what’s essential. It takes discipline and more work to eliminate what’s not essential. And there’s layers to it, so once you’ve made things simple once, you will probably realize that it’s still not really there, and there’s more that you can do.

Mark Ford wrote a post yesterday about how he loves to teach. And he wrote about physicist Richard Feynman, who believed that teaching is the best way to understand anything.

It’s easy to think you understand something, Feynman believed, until you try to explain it simply. And an audience gives you real feedback. Was it simple? Do they understand? Or are they lost?

If they’re lost, it’s because you lost them somewhere along the way.

Writing is a great way to make things simple. And writing to an audience is even better. Then tomorrow, you can do it all again, at a new level of understanding. Does that make sense? Write in and tell me, because it will help me figure things out also.

Kitten doesn’t blink, scientists not surprised

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Imagine the following:

Two scientists and a kitten. The scientists are wearing white lab coats. The kitten is not.

One of the scientists holds the kitten tight.

The other scientist asks, “You ready?”

The first scientist nods.

Scientist two takes a big swing and rushes his large man-hand towards the kitten’s face. He stops right before hitting the kitten.

The kitten doesn’t even blink.

The scientist stares hard at the kitten, then picks up a clipboard, and notes down the results. “Just as we thought,” he says.

The annals of science are filled with strange experiments designed to answer strange questions. Perhaps none is more strange than an experiment performed in 1963, by two cognitive scientists at MIT.

The experimenters took a bunch of newborn kittens. Put them in pairs. Kept them in total darkness. Only occasionally exposed them to light, under very specific conditions.

When it was time for the light, the scientists put a box around the kittens’ heads. This was so the beasts couldn’t see their paws.

One kitten, kitten A, then got to walk around freely.

The other kitten, kitten P, couldn’t control where it was walking. But thanks to a clever mechanism designed by these MIT scientists, kitten P was moved around the floor in a little basket in exactly the same way as kitten A was moving.

Result?

After 21 sessions of this bizarre treatment, all A kittens learned to control their paws properly, and to judge depth properly.

All P kittens on the other hand — well, you can guess. Bring a P kitten to the edge of a table, and the poor thing didn’t know to stretch its little kitten paws out. Take a swing at a little P kitten’s face, and it didn’t even know to blink.

The P kittens were Passive. The A kittens were Active.

The P kittens ended up Pathetic. The A kittens ended up Athletic.

There may be something in there that applies to humans also.

Read, study, observe what others are doing — you may learn something. Or you may not.

Practice, do, apply it yourself — and you are guaranteed to develop.

The choice is yours.

​​For specific opportunities to apply, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

We’re in the fiction business

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I was surprised—

Yesterday I polled readers as to what books they are reading right now.

The responses came flooding in. Lots of business books. Lots of marketing books. Lots of self-help books.

What surprised me is that out of the several dozen responses I got, fewer than five came from people who said they are reading fiction.

A few days ago, I mentioned how I’ve watched lots of Dan Kennedy seminars about marketing and copywriting, and how Dan will often poll the room about who reads fiction.

​​A few hands go up, most stay down.

“You gotta read fiction,” says Dan. “Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non-fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business.”

So read fiction. Even better, write fiction. Dan did it – a mystery novel. John Carlton did it, too — sci-fi. I guess even Gary Halbert did it, maybe romance.

You don’t have to write a novel or even a short story. An email can be it.

​​I’ve done it before in this newsletter. Sometimes I was serious about it. Lots of times it was a parody. In every case, it was valuable.

​​To read the adventures of Bond Jebakovic, secret agent, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/once-upon-a-time/

A tip for deeper concentration and faster learning

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I’ve watched maybe a dozen presentations or seminars by marketing great Dan Kennedy. Dan will often poll the room.

“How many of you read fiction?”

People raise their hands and stare at Dan. “You’d be better off looking around the room at what other people are doing,” Dan will often say.

I took Dan’s lesson to heart.

At the copywriting conference I attended a couple weeks ago, I made a point to look around the room repeatedly, throughout each presenter’s talk. How was the audience reacting? I learned some valuable things. Plus it helped me stay focused.

Other times, when speakers were speaking, I took notes. But not of the “how to” information the speakers were sharing. Instead, I took notes of the claims they were making, the language they were using.

“I’m not looking for clients… I’m looking for success stories.”

There were some hot seats during the conference as well. Trevor “Toe Cracker” Crook picked a copywriter at random out of the audience.

This copywriter didn’t really have a clear problem to solve, but there she was in the hot seat. For the next 15 minutes, seven high-powered, highly paid success coaches went around in circles, trying to identify and then solve a problem that didn’t really exist.

During this time, much of the audience slumped to sleep. I managed to stay awake, and not just because of the three coffees I’d had in the previous two hours. I was taking notes again, of the language the hot seat sitter was herself using:

“I guess I just want confirmation. I want somebody to tell me, ‘Your work is great. You should get paid more. You should work less.'”

That could go directly into a sales letter. And besides, it helped me stay focused, awake, interested in the actual experience of sitting in a chair and listening for hours.

This is something I learned once in a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, by a guy named Tim Gallwey.

I long had prejudices against this book, because I assumed it was all about mindset. “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, you deserve to win tennis matches!”

But that’s not what this book is about at all. I was so pleasantly surprised as I read it. It’s full of practical tips, like the following:

“The most effective way to deepen concentration is to focus on something subtle, not easily perceived.”

The usual tennis coaching advice, if you’ve ever tried playing the stupid sport, is to “watch the ball.”

Most people manage to stick to that behavior for a few seconds, then their eyes wander. That’s why it takes people months or even years before they can reliably hit a tennis ball over the net and into the court.

Gallwey didn’t tell his students to watch the ball. He told them to keep their eye on the spin of the seams on the tennis ball. That’s how he managed to teach people to play serviceable tennis in 30 minutes or less.

And that’s what I was trying to do at that conference also. I wasn’t paying attention. I was focusing on specific, subtle, easy-to-miss things. The reactions of the audience. Repeated words or phrases by the speaker. Sales letter fodder from the hot seat sitter, rather than overt problems.

If you’re looking for deeper concentration, or help with learning anything, maybe this tip can help you also.

And if you want more learning and performance tips, Gallwey’s book has ’em.

Like I said, I was so pleasantly surprised by this book. If you haven’t read it yet, my experience is that it’s worth a read. And it’s worth keeping an eye out for every time Gallway uses the word “rhythm.” Get your copy here:

https://bejakovic.com/inner-game

The fastest, but certainly not the newest, way to cash

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Day 3 of the copywriting conference.

​​You can’t make an omelette without cracking two to three eggs, and you can’t go to a copywriting conference without getting your brain scrambled with hundreds of different ideas, stories, pitches, open loops that never get closed, jokes, not-jokes, cliches, and important takeaways.

Let me pull it together for a moment and tell you about the fastest way to cash. It’s not the newest way to cash. In fact it’s not new at all. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. But maybe you need a reminder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers, Adam Urbanski, said the fastest path to cash, in his experience, is to sell what you know.

The day before, Barry Randall, who I wrote about in my email yesterday, said something similar.

Barry said that what he does is, learn something, keep it simple, and then sell it. On the other hand, what most other people do is learn something, complicate it, and then get stuck.

I’m not sure those are Barry’s exact words. In spite of 51 pages of notes so far, I didn’t write that bit down. I’ll have to seek him out today and confirm it.

Meanwhile, I have a deal for you:

Sign up to my email newsletter.

When you get my welcome email, hit reply and tell me what you have learned that you can sell. I genuinely want to know.

In return, I will reply to you and tell you a practical tip to make your presentation better if you ever do sell that knowledge you have in your head.

This tip is something that popped up in my head yesterday during Adam Urbanski’s presentation.

Adam’s presentation was excellent and very effective. But I believe with a small tweak it could be even more effective.

​​I won’t seek out Adam today and tell him that — nobody wants an unsolicited critique. But if you like, hit reply, tell me what you have learned that you can sell, and I will tell you what I have in mind.

Why I would write daily emails even if they made zero money

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I just sent some feedback to one of my one-on-one coaching students about his email copy.

The core of his email is good. But parts of it are flowery, too clever, confusing.

​​So I told him to make the email simpler and clearer, more direct and less clever. And I rewrote parts of his copy to show him exactly what I mean.

I then sat down to write my own email.

​​I also have a tendency to get clever and confusing. The advice I gave my coaching student applies to me also. So I’m writing this email right now with this exact goal in mind, to make my copy simple and clear.

One of the big benefit of coaching others is to see consistent problems and mistakes across multiple people. This forces you to figure out what the underlying problem is, and what the fix might be. Odds are, these insights will apply to you as well, at least if you also do what you coach others to do.

The bigger picture is the benefit of teaching.

H​​elping others learn makes you better also.

I have changed and become much, much better at persuasion, marketing, and copywriting via writing daily emails about those topics for close to five years.

​​I’ve been forced to seek out interesting and valuable new ideas. I’ve been forced to understand them better, to connect them to other ideas. I remember all these ideas much better, and I sometimes I even remember to use them, by writing about them over and over and trying to present them clearly.

All that’s to say:

There’s great value in teaching what you’ve learned, way beyond the money you make and beyond any positive feedback you might get.

​​A daily email newsletter just happens to be an easy and natural format to do it in.

If you’re interested in learning more about persuasion, marketing, and copywriting, you can sign up to my daily newsletter here. I occasionally sell my courses and coaching through my newsletter. But I would write it even if I never sold anything.

Clicks of the dial

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Another day, another Airbnb.

​​Today I am in Warsaw, Poland because it was one of the few places in central Europe that won’t be raining for the next five days. And five days is how much time I have until I go to Gdansk for my first-ever live event to do with marketing and copywriting.

This morning, I woke up, carefully stepped down the circular staircase from the second floor of the apartment to the ground floor, located the inevitable Nespresso machine, popped in a capsule, and made myself a coffee.

And you see where this is going, don’t you?

If you have anything to do with marketing, you should. It’s a basic topic, so basic that I in fact wrote about it in the first month of this newsletter, back in September 2018.

The same marketing model is shared by Nespresso, by King Gillette’s safety razors-and-blades empire, and by info publishers like Agora and Ben Settle. They all promise you almost-irresistible sign-up premiums in order to get you paying for a continuity offer.

You almost certainly know this. Many people have talked about the same. It’s obvious. I won’t belabor the point.

Yesterday, I promised to tell the bigger point behind such models — models which might seem obvious, when somebody else points them out to you.

There’s a document floating around the Internet, legendary marketer Gary Halbert’s “Clicks of the Dial.”

It’s a collection of Gary’s “Most Treasured ‘First-Choice’ Marketing Tactics.”

I read this document once. I even shared a link to it in this newsletter last year.

But I never really got much out of Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” list. I doubt the hundreds or thousands of my readers who downloaded Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” got much out of it either.

That’s because there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, reading, nodding your head, and saying “hmm good idea”… and, on the other hand, observing, thinking a bit, and writing down your own conclusions.

So my point to you today is to open a new text file on your hard drive. Title it “Clicks of the Dial.” Break it up into three columns to start.

Name one column “traffic.” Name the second “conversion.” Name the third “consumption.”

And then, each time you go for a coffee, or a bagel, or a haircut, observe an obvious business or marketing practice you’re exposed to. Odds are, it’s been proven in hundreds or thousands of different situations. “Chunk up” that practice to make a model out of it. And write it down in your list in the appropriate column.

Gary Halbert’s entire “Clicks of the Dial” list was something like 20 items.

In other words, it won’t take you long to fill up your own “Clicks of the Dial” document to full.

​​Very soon, you can have a list of core business and marketing strategies, that you can cycle through, and solve pretty much any marketing problem by clicking the dial.

​​And since you put this list together yourself, based on your own experiences, it will actually mean something to you. Eventually, you might even appear to others to be a marketing jeenius like Gary himself.

As for me, it’s time to go get a brownie. I have a long list of food recommendations for what to eat in Warsaw, but only a limited amount of time and stomach space to do so.

Meanwhile, if you have no more interest in reading anything from me, because you’ve determined to learn all of marketing and copywriting by observation and thinking, there is nothing more I can tell you, except farewell and good luck. On the other hand, if you do want to hear from me every day, with more ideas and occasional inspiration, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Work on your business and not on delegating, systems, or automation

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Two nights ago I finally finished the 40-page pamphlet I’d been reading for three months, titled Leading With Your Head. It’s about the use of misdirection in magic. It ends with this:

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Tape your performances in front of an audience (either audio or video). Sit down and take notes. What works best for the audience? What doesn’t work (that you thought would)? Is there dead time you can eliminate? What needs to be improved? Keep the material that works, and concentrate on improving the weaknesses. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. It’s simply an excuse to avoid addressing more serious problems. Rehearse your improvements, then repeat the whole process again.

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It’s popular advice to say, work on your business, not in it.

The typical meaning of this is to delegate, build systems, automate the work. I’m sure that’s fine.

But there are ways of making a living — like my own — that are not about hiring and managing other people, not about scaling endlessly, and certainly not about automation. After all, what’s the sense in getting a magic-performing robot to go on stage and perform your magic show for you — if performing magic is what you like to do?

“Work on your business, not in it” is good advice. But in my personal case, I like the meaning above, the one from Leading With Your Head.

Plan and reflect, in addition to performing. It makes you better at what you like to do, and is in fact fun and enjoyable in itself, at least in my experience. And in my experience, it can be profitable too.

Last June 9th, I did an instance of this kind of working on my business. I opened up a text file on my computer and made a list, “10 things I’ve learned to do well over the past year.”

Item no. 2 on the list was “2. write [what I later came to call Most Valuable] emails.”

A couple weeks later, because of that small observation, I created a live training about Most Valuable Emails.

A month later, based on the surprising sales of the swipe file of Most Valuable Emails I offered at the end of the live training, I decided to create a standalone Most Valuable Email course.

I was hesitant — I figured anybody interested had already seen my presentation and wouldn’t buy. But again, I was surprised.

​​4.7% of my list bought the Most Valuable Email course during the launch. And interest hasn’t dropped off since, but has in fact gone up.

​​To date, 5.3% of my list has bought Most Valuable Email, though my list has grown by over 41% since last September, when I first launched the MVE course.

Great, right? — when you look at it from the perspective of how a typical info product sells. 2% or 3% of a qualified list is considered good.

But on the other hand, it also means 94.7% of my list has not yet bought Most Valuable Email.

​​Perhaps this includes you too.

There are many legit reasons why you might not want to buy Most Valuable Email. I list some of them right in the deck copy of the sales page.

On the other hand, there are also several legit reasons why you might want to buy Most Valuable Email. I list those in the deck copy as well.

In case you’d like to read that, and see and decide for yourself whether Most Valuable Email could be most valuable for you too, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/