Persuasion Archives - Page 28 of 61

What never to swallow at the start of your newsletter

January 17, 2023 by John Bejakovic

No, I’m not talking about swallowing your pride. Read on because it’s important.

Last night I was reviewing a newsletter. The newsletter was full of valuable content, but the author didn’t try to sell me on that content in any way. He meant for it to sell itself.

This brought to mind something I heard marketing wizard Dan Kennedy say:

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We sometimes take the attention of the people with whom we communicate with all the time for granted. That they will give us attention because of who we are and our relationship with them. It’s a bad presumption. It was not a bad presumption a decade ago when there weren’t as many of us showing up every day, asking for their attention. But now there’s a lot more of us showing up every day, asking for their attention. And so we gotta earn it, every single time.

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If you’re anything like me, then your brain will try to feed you excuses, all day long, just because it wants to stop thinking. It will say:

“They opted in to my newsletter. They expressed interest. They want to hear what I have to say.”

“They like my persona. They read my emails in the past. They bought stuff from me!”

“I’m sure they will read this too. It’s good enough.”

Don’t swallow your brain’s excuses. Don’t take your readers attention for granted. That’s not good enough.

Not if you want the best chance to influence people, to present yourself as an authority, to get your readers to buy or share or do whatever it is you’re after.

The more closely people read your stuff, the more of your story and your arguments they swallow, the more you manage to spike their emotions in the minutes they spend with your content, the better it is for you. And in a way, for them.

As a Big Pharma salesman might tell you, the most expensive drug is the one that doesn’t work.

And as I, a Big Copy salesman, will tell you, the most expensive 3 seconds for your reader are clicking on your email and skimming straight through to the end because he’s not properly engaged. That’s 3 seconds wasted for nothing.

On the other hand, 3 or 13 minutes reading every word you wrote because you sold it properly ahead of time — that can be both valuable and enjoyable.

So how do you pre-sell your valuable content?

That knowledge is something I don’t pre-sell. That’s something I sell.

Specifically, that’s what I sell inside my Copy Riddles program. In case you’re interested:

Copy Riddles shows you A-list copywriters sell and pre-sell valuable but dry information. But Copy Riddles does much more. It gets you doing the same.

This doesn’t mean you have to go all John Carlton on your newsletter readers.

You can be subtle or savage in the way you pre-sell your content and your information. It’s your choice.

What is not your choice is how people’s brains work, and what kinds of messages they respond to. And the most condensed and powerful way to create messages that people respond to is inside Copy Riddles.

As I mentioned two days ago, this is the last week I am giving away two free bonuses with Copy Riddles. The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until Saturday Jan 21 at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.

After then, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.

To get the whole package:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Daniel Throssell, Daniel Kahneman, and a robot lawyer walk into a bar…

January 14, 2023 by John Bejakovic

A few minutes ago, I got my coffee ready, I set my timer, and I got down to writing this email. As a first step, I checked some news headlines and bingo — I saw it:

“AI-powered ‘robot’ lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court”

Maybe you’ve heard the news already. A startup called DoNotPay is helping people fight speeding tickets.

Before, DoNotPay used AI to write a letter that you could mail in to contest your speeding ticket. But now, DoNotPay will help one lucky defendant in court.

The DoNotPay app will run on the defendant’s phone. It will listen in to the court proceedings. And it will tell the defendant what to say to get out of his speeding ticket in court.

“This courtroom stuff is more advocacy,” said Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay. “It’s more to encourage the system to change.” Browder says he wants to give access to law to people who can’t afford it.

As you might guess, this noble mission isn’t very popular with lawyers themselves.

When Browder tweeted about his new courtroom “robot”, lawyers jumped on him, and threatened he would go to jail if he followed through with this plan.

And verily, a courtroom robot is not legal in most places. In most places, all parties have to agree to be recorded. But I doubt good will and keeping Browder out of jail is why lawyers jumped all over Browder’s tweet, telling him to stop this project immediately.

Lawyers still have a bit of time.

Right now, courtroom AI robots just handle speeding tickets. And Browder admits even that took a lot of work.

His company had to retrain generic AI for this specialized task. “AI is a high school student,” Browder said, “and we’re sending it to law school.”

Law school… and then what? because Being a good lawyer is not just about knowing the letter of the law.

Specifically, I have in mind a passage I read in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.

Kahneman says there are two fundamental ways lawyers argue.

These two ways are actually illustrated perfectly in the little debate Daniel Throssell and I had last week, in emails talking about newsletters and who wants ’em.

So I will make you an offer right now, which you are free to refuse, in case you’d rather go read Thinking Fast and Slow yourself.

My offer is a disappearing bonus.

It’s good until 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PSST tomorrow, Thursday, Jan 12 2023.

If you’ve already bought my Most Valuable Email course, and would like me to spell out Kahneman’s two lawyer strategies, write me before the deadline and ask.

I will write back to you, both with Kahneman’s passage, and the specifics of how Daniel and I each took one of the two approaches.

And if you haven’t bought my Most Valuable Email course, then my offer is the same, except you have to also buy the course before the deadline.

Buy just to get the bonus?

If you find yourself desirous of the disappearing bonus, but reluctant to buy a course just to get that bonus, then I will argue that desire itself is a reason to get MVE.

Because this desire is something you too can create in others. It’s something I talk about in the course itself, specifically inside the 12 Rules of Most Valuable Emails, specifically Rule #10.

For more info on this course, or to get it before the deadline:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Dan Kennedy was hoping for a laugh, but when he finished his joke~!

January 11, 2023 by John Bejakovic

I was listening to an awkward moment from a Dan Kennedy seminar this morning.

First, a bit of background is in order:

If you don’t know much about Dan, he is a marketer who has influenced more marketers than anybody else.

Dan got his big break back in the 90s, going around the US as part of the Peter Lowe Success Tour.

That was a bunch of famous and influential people — former US presidents, Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, Suze Orman — giving motivational speeches to an audience of tens of thousands, in a different city every night.

At the end of each night, after the famous and influential people had finished their speeches, Dan would get up on stage as the last speaker. He would then deliver a blistering 60-minute standup routine that sold you on buying his Magnetic Marketing product.

If you’ve never listened to Dan’s speech, it’s fantastic. It’s worth searching around the Internet to dig it up.

The thing I listened to this morning was something else – a recording of a $12k/head seminar that Dan gave many years later, to a small group of select customers and proteges.

Dan was talking about the audience for the Peter Lowe Success Tour, and how politically conservative they were. So conservative that when Mario Cuomo, the liberal New York ex-governor, joined the Tour, the audience booed.

So far, so good. At least for Dan’s story.

And then, Dan, who is practiced at selling through humor, shifts into an exasperated tone of voice:

“… Mario Cuomo comes out, and everybody’s booing! By the time he’s done, I’m booing too, cause the schmuck’s thirty five minutes over, and people are streaming out in droves, you know???”

Beat.

Nobody in Dan’s seminar reacts. On the seminar recording, there’s a pause. You can hear Dan swallow hard and then move on to the next bit of his educational material.

That’s an illustration of something I just read in a book called Comedy Writing Secrets. “Humor in front of a small audience is very hard to bring off because each individual is afraid to laugh for fear of being conspicuous.”

Sitting at home and listening to Dan’s presentation, the image of him booing put a smile on my face.

In a large 10,000 person arena, the same bit would almost certainly draw laughs, and maybe loud laughs.

But in a small seminar, made up of 12 or 15 people, all it drew was a moment of awkward silence, and a gulp from Dan Kennedy.

That’s something to keep in mind if you’re ever trying to give a humorous speech.

But the bigger point is that the response you draw is not only a function of your message… of the audience you are talking to… or even your relationship to that audience.

There’s an extra thing, and that’s the context in which you are delivering your message.

Big room, small room, medium room… seminar stage, webinar, bus.

Maybe that idea seems super obvious to you. But the only thing that’s super obvious is that even masters of influence, people like Dan Kennedy, will forget about this crucial element to their own embarrassment and loss.

But enough about embarrassment and loss. Let’s talk about gain instead.

Specifically, my Most Valuable Email training, and some most valuable Dan Kennedy ideas.

In the Most Valuable Email training, I pull back the curtain on my Most Valuable Email trick.

And then, at the end of the training, I give you 10 riddles to ponder. These are valuable and interesting marketing ideas, each of which you can use as a prompt for creating your own Most Valuable Email, and applying the Most Valuable Email trick.

Two of those ideas come from Dan Kennedy. And in typical DK style, they are both very ugly truths, but also very insightful and practical…

You know???

To find out more about MVE:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Announcing my new course: Somewhat Good Email

January 9, 2023 by John Bejakovic

Last October, I wrote an awesome email to promote my awesome Copy Riddles program. The subject line read, “Why would you ever say anything that’s not awesome?”

After I sent that email out, I was flying high for a bit. But then I was rudely brought down to earth. Because in response to my awesome email, reader Frederik Beyer wrote:

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Mr Bejakovic,

Is there a use for wildly understated testimonials?

’cause then I’d like to say: “Your emails are somewhat good”

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Somewhat good? Somewhat???

After the initial trauma to my ego, I thought for a moment.

And I realized that of course there is a use to testimonials such as this. You are looking at it right now.

Thankfully, I am not at the moment promoting Copy Riddles.

So I can get to promoting my first love, which used to be called Most Valuable Email, but which I will soon rename to Somewhat Good Email.

Somewhat Good Email shows you how to take important but dry marketing ideas and turn them into cool and insightful emails. Somewhat.

That’s what I did with today’s email, which uses the Somewhat Good Email trick.

Perhaps the underlying important but dry idea is not obvious to you. No matter. You can find that idea spelled out in Somewhat Good Email Riddle #10, at the end of the Somewhat Good Email training.

If you’d like to get your hands on that riddle, and on the rest of the Somewhat Good Email training, head to the link below. Don’t allow the old course name on the sales page to confuse you. I’ll change that soon enough.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Bare metal: Poor single mom risks death to feed her family

January 8, 2023 by John Bejakovic

A couple days ago, I sent out an email about charging out, King Arthur-like, to fight dragons on the borders of your kingdom. That was my metaphor for defending your business interests.

I got lots of interesting replies to that email, and none more so than from Shawn Cartwright. Shawn runs TCCII, an online martial arts academy. He wrote:

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While I sympathize with your position on this, I’d just like to ask this question…

Why are dragons always made out to be the bad guys?

Seriously…

Imagine you were the millenia old beast who woke up one day to find a bunch of unwashed simian descendants using your pristine mountain stream as a latrine?

Or erecting god-awful ugly structures made from your trees they took without so much as a please or thank you.

And shot at you when you went down to have a little chat with them to sort it out.

And then organized some sort of genocidal campaign to eradicate you and take all your stuff.

Is it any wonder they might be a little ill-tempered?

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Shawn asks a great question. In response to it, my mind jumped to a tense scene from the 2015 Disney documentary, Monkey Kingdom.

The scene shows a tiny and cute macaque monkey dangling from a vine a few inches above some murky water.

This monkey is a single mother, the narrator tells you. But not only that. She’s also at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Higher-caste females are safe up in a tree eating figs. But even though there’s plenty to go around, these higher-caste females are not willing to share any food with the low-born single mom.

So she is forced to roam deep into the jungle to feed her family. That’s why she’s now dangling above the murky water, so she can harvest some water lily seeds.

And then the scene shifts. It suddenly shows a monitor lizard.

The lizard is huge. It’s seven feet long, three or four times the size of the tiny monkey mom.

The lizard is ugly. It’s thick and black and scaly, with a long flame-like tongue flickering in and out of its mouth.

And worst of all, the lizard is treacherous. At first it’s lurking at the edge of the water. But then it slips in silently, and swims under the surface to where the water lilies are.

So why are dragons always made out to be the bad guys?

Because our race and their race have been at war since time immemorial. Because this feeling is baked into us. Because it’s bare-metal.

Bare-metal is my term for the fact that if you keep asking why long enough, you eventually always get to the answer, just because. Because it’s how we humans are. Because it’s right, whether or not it’s historically fair to the dragons, whether or not it makes sense in today’s world.

If you want to influence people, then write about bare-metal topics.

It’s not just slimy, treacherous serpents.

I gave you a few other bare-metal topics above, in that monkey scene setup. But there are many more.

I rewatched Monkey Kingdom last night. And because I’ve become obsessive through writing this newsletter, I took notes every minute or two.

I found 40+ bare metal topics in Monkey Kingdom. They are brilliantly illustrated because it’s monkeys. Monkeys are close enough to us to be relevant, but different enough to illustrate each bare-metal topic distinctly.

So my advice to you is, watch Monkey Kingdom. And take notes.

If I ever create my mythical AIDA School, this movie will be a part of the first-semester curriculum.

And now for something completely different:

Specifically, my Most Valuable Email course.

That course is connected in some way to today’s email, though only lightly.

That don’t change the fact that, as the name of it says, this course is about a type of email that has been most valuable for me.

If you also write about marketing or persuasion or copywriting, this type of email might be just as valuable for you.

To find out more about it — and about love, death, and politics — go here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Keep doing a good job

January 7, 2023 by John Bejakovic

A few weeks ago, I was at the gym on the elliptical, getting in my weekly hours of Zone 2.

I was staring out the big gym windows to distract myself. Out on the street, I saw a family of three in a miserable scene.

At the head of the pack was a mother, standing, weighed down by several heavy bags of groceries, looking exhausted.

Staggering towards her was a five-year-old boy. He was pulling his hair in a gesture that seemed to say, “I can’t do this any more.”

And a few steps behind him was his three-year-old brother, the cause of all the misery.

He was rooted in place and obviously throwing a tantrum. What killed me was that he was wearing a rainbow-colored t-shirt that said, “Keep doing a good job.”

All of which is to say, be careful of what behavior you encourage.

I had more to say on this topic. But I reserved that for people who are signed up to get my daily emails. Maybe you’d like to join them, so you can get my entire messages, including some special offers that I never make outside my newsletter. In that case, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Threats and shaming in early-morning emails

January 3, 2023 by John Bejakovic

Two mornings ago, I found myself on the street outside my house, in the dark. There were no cabs because it was 4:30am on New Year’s morning. I took my phone out to rent a city bike as the first step of catching my 7am flight, but instead of opening the bike app, I automatically opened my email inbox.

“Hello,” I said. “This will be useful.”

It turns out I’d gotten a new email from marketer Ben Settle. The subject line read:

“Why my ‘no coming back’ policy will inevitably be the new normal”

Ben was talking about his policy of never allowing people who unsubscribe from his paid newsletter to resubscribe.

I have no doubt that Ben’s prediction is right, and that this policy will become more and more common.

After all, newsletters are the Ford Edsel of the information publishing industry.

As Agora founder Bill Bonner, who has sold billions of dollars’ worth of newsletters, supposedly said once, nobody wakes up in the middle of the night, heart racing, pajamas wet from sweat, with the sudden realization, “Good God… we’re all out of newsletters!”

Newsletters are something that the marketer dreamed up, because they provide continuity income, automatically, without the need to keep getting credit card details.

Newsletters are something the market doesn’t really want, not without a huge amount of bribes, indoctrination, and in Ben’s case, threats and shaming. From his email about his “no coming-back” policy:

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“Plus, practically speaking, if the trash lets itself out why take it back in?”

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Whatever. People will justify anything to themselves out of self-interest.

Fortunately, my self-interest isn’t aligned with selling you a newsletter, because I tried it and found I hate it, even before I had to give a single thought to retention.

The good news of that is, I don’t have to threaten you or shame you, which is something I find personally distasteful.

The bad news is, I don’t ever hear the satisfying sound of shopping-cart notifications telling me I’ve made a bunch of sales on autopilot.

Instead, I have to keep sending emails, writing sales letters, and doing my best to tempt you into buying the offers I’m selling.

That’s okay. Like I keep saying, I’m okay with working a bit, regularly, and for the long term.

And I’d rather have my freedom, both from the fixed schedule of publishing a paid newsletter, and from the psychological toll of barking at my subscribers and cracking my whip at them.

Perhaps you also value freedom over automatic shopping cart notifications. Perhaps you can understand where I am coming from. In that case, you might like to sign up to my (free) daily email newsletter.

You can try it… find it doesn’t work for you… unsubscribe… and later, if you change your mind, you can subscribe again. No threats or shaming.

To get started, click here and fill out the form.

It’s the thought that counts

December 27, 2022December 24, 2022 by John Bejakovic

I’ve been living in Barcelona for the past six months, and it’s been more or less normal until a few weeks ago.

That’s when Christmas prep started, and things got bizarre.

I’ll tell you just one bizarre thing, and that’s the appearance of the poop log.

The poop log – aka caga tió — is literally that:

An actual wooden log, propped up on two wooden sticks for arms, with painted-on googly white eyes and a big smile, wearing a traditional red hat, covered with a little blanket for warmth — and for privacy.

Yes, for privacy. Read on.

The poop log goes in homes. It’s a Catalan tradition, the equivalent of the Christmas stocking that goes above the mantel in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic traditions.

Every night, kids are supposed to “feed” the poop log with sweets and dried fruit to fatten it up.

Then, on Christmas Eve, kids hit the poop log with a stick — gently and lovingly — and sing it a threatening little song, which apparently translates to:

“Shit, log, shit nougats, hazelnuts and mató cheese, if you don’t shit well, I’ll hit you with a stick, shit, log!”

No, I poop you not, this is all for real.

The beating and singing complete, the poop log relieves itself, and children lift up the bulging red blanket in the back to find the usual mess — candies, small toys, and other things I prefer not to write about.

Catalans laugh and wave their arms to try to explain away the poop log. But really, there is no explaining.

There’s just the fact that, when it comes to most things humans do, it’s really the thought that counts.

I mean, without being too vulgar about it, here they’ve managed to take a log, and one that shits, and turn it into a kind of cute and heartwarming winter tradition that brings the family together.

If they can sell that, imagine what you can do.

And with that thought, let me wish you a merry Christmas.

And now let me lift up the bulging blanket in the back.

Because if you thought you could get to the tail end of this email, and avoid the usual mess — well, Christmas is no time to stop selling. But it’s the thought behind the selling that counts.

So in case you want your nougats, hazelnuts and copy riddles, dig in here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

I’ve written about this before, but you probably missed it

December 23, 2022 by John Bejakovic

This morning, I talked to a business owner who is interested in joining my email coaching program. Interested… but also wary.

“I was talking to my husband,” she told me. “And I realized, John writes good emails. But who is he? I don’t really know anything about him.”

About that:

I’ve been writing this email newsletter for four years. I’ve shared plenty of personal stories.

I’ve also shared plenty of specifics from my copywriting career — lessons learned, successes earned, endorsements spurned, like the one I wrote about yesterday.

And yet, people still don’t know almost anything about me. Because the problem is this:

I shared all those stories and successes and endorsements once, or twice, or maybe frice.

That ain’t enough.

So here’s my message to you. It’s a message I’ve shared before, multiple times. But you probably missed it, even if you’ve been reading my emails for a while.

You have to repeat yourself over and over and over. And if you want people to “know” you, you have to create a legend – a simplified cartoon version of your life, and you have to hammer that home, week in and week out.

“I was a blessed child born into a billionaire family… but a tragic and violent attack left me an orphan… and then one day, I fell into a cave full of bats.”

You tell that story. And then next week, you tell it all over again.

“I was made an orphan after my parents were brutally gunned down… I was lost, and all the billions I had inherited meant nothing… until one day, when I fell into a cave full of bats.”

You might wonder why I don’t take the opportunity here to talk about my own background, instead of that fantasy with the cave and the bats.

That’s because these emails are not primarily about selling, or even about building authority where you look at me as a leader in my little niche.

You might wonder what these emails are primarily about in that case. I’ve actually written about that in the past, and multiple times, but you probably missed that too.

No matter. I will probably write about it again one day.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there are certain messages that I cannot allow to slip through the cracks of your awareness.

For example, last week, while I was promoting that coaching program for which I’m interviewing prospects now, I got the following fat-fingered reply from a reader:

What annout copyriddles John? Still selling?

Of course I’m still selling. In fact, I spent a good amount of time just a couple months ago, writing and sending a sequence of two dozen emails to sell Copy Riddles.

And yet people forget, and quickly.

So if you’d like to join Copy Riddles, let me repeat you can do that at the page below. And let me repeat the following, even though I’ve said it before—

Everything I’ve just told you is actually part of a fundamental copywriting technique. It’s a technique covered in Copy Riddles Round 4, with riddles based on bullets by Clayton Makepeace, Gary Halbert, and Parris Lampropoulos.

For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/cr