Persuasion

The reputation benefit of a bigger list

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My own email list — this one, about marketing and copywriting and influence — is tiny. But some of the people on my list have much bigger lists than I do.

One such person is Russell Nohelty. Russell is a bestselling author of fantasy books and comics. He also writes about the business of writing, and he runs Writer MBA, a membership program to help writers make more money.

Russell’s audience on Substack is over 70,000 people.

Last week, when I started writing about my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic, Russell reached out. He offered to share his experiences spending $30k since February to grow his audience.

Russell and I got on a call this past Monday. It was interesting and valuable throughout, but one thing in particular stuck with me, something Russell said about the reputation benefits of various list sizes. In Russell’s words:

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There were a couple of break points where everything felt different.

10,000 emails felt different than 8,000.

30,000 emails felt way different than 20,000 emails.

From my experience, talking to other people, 50,000, 80,000 — there’s different break points where people go, “Oh you’ve got 45,000 people on your list! Yes, I want to get in front of them!”

Promotions become easier. When you’re a Dream 100 guy like I am, you can reach out to almost anyone and be like, “Hey, do you wanna be in front of my 35,000, 45,000, whatever the number is, people.”

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I can imagine that somebody somewhere has just crossed his arms and frowned. “Well, I’d much rather have a small but mighty list than a stupid big list that doesn’t read or buy from me.”

Sure. It’s my policy as well with my own list. That said, you can have both a large and a mighty list — Russell does.

But here’s the sneaky thing:

All of us constantly use mental shortcuts to evaluate the people around us and the choices we have.

On the one hand, a large list is an immensely valuable asset for its own sake.

On the other hand, a large list is also an immensely valuable asset because of its reputation benefit. Because people treat you differently if you get one. Because opportunities open up which would be closed otherwise.

All that’s to say, if you got a business, and a list, but it’s not quite going how you’d like… then the solution might just be to get a bigger list. Maybe if you can make it to the next break point, like Russell says above, then your problems now might just go poof.

Which brings me back to my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while we work alongside each other.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497 to get started, plus $10-$15 a day for ads. If that doesn’t deter you, hit reply and tell me so, and I can give you more information.

From the archives: DON’T VOTE FOR A NEGRO

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An angry Seth Taft stood up in front of the crowd and held up a tear sheet from a newspaper.

The year was 1967. Taft was the grandson of former U.S. President William Howard Taft, and was running for mayor of Cleveland. He held up the tear sheet to show a full page ad that had recently run in local papers. In large, bold letters, the headline read:

“DON’T VOTE FOR A NEGRO”

That ad had been paid for by Taft’s opponent in the mayoral race, Carl Stokes.

The odd thing was that Stokes was black and Taft was white.

And yet, here was Taft, the front-runner and shoein for the office in predominately white Cleveland, angry and complaining about how unfair this ad was. And it was the folks behind Stokes’s campaign who had paid for an ad seemingly telling you not to vote for their guy.

The long and short of it is that Stokes won that election. In the process, he became the first black mayor of an American city.

​​It’s impossible to say whether this ad won Stokes the election. Nonetheless, the ad is a brilliant example of effective messaging, and of a general principle that holds as true in political propaganda as it does in other influence disciplines, including sales and copywriting.

What’s the general principle? And more importantly, how might you apply it in your business?

For that, take a look at link below. It’s a post I wrote a couple years ago, inspired by this ad.

​​In case you’re looking for a slight edge in your business… or in case you have a significant disadvantage relative to your competition… this post might give you some good ideas:

https://bejakovic.com/dont-listen-to-me-im-just-some-guy/

Do you want to play the Questions game?

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Have you ever heard of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead?

Did you read the play? Or did they make you watch the movie, like they made me, in high school English class?

Do you remember the Questions game that R+K play?

Was it more like badminton? Or more like tennis?

What were the rules? I mean, what else was forbidden, besides lobbing a statement over the net?

Why were repetitive questions not allowed? What counted as out-of-bounds “rhetoric”? And how long was an invalid hesitation?

Most importantly, why am I telling you all this?

Do you think it might have something to do with persuasion and sales and marketing?

Would you be surprised if I told you it did?

Have you heard me talk recently about sales trainer David Sandler?

Have you heard of Sandler’s “Silver Dollar” game? Can you see how it’s basically the same game as the one that R+K played?

And can you think of at least a few good reasons why a hard-nosed salesman like Sandler would encourage his students to spend time fooling around like this?

Do I have you confused? Would an example help? Why not click below then, and see if this clip makes things clearer?

The very first con artist

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On July 8, 1849, The New York Daily Herald published a fateful Sunday issue.

It started rather unpatriotically, with a front page full of news from across the Atlantic.

The French had just invaded Italy and were attacking Rome.

But the “effeminate,” “emasculate,”” and “degenerate” Italians, “upon whom it is the fashion to heap every stigma,” managed to repel the attack of the mighty French.

Further down the page, there was a revolution quashed in Paris.

The Berlin correspondent reported on military action against an uprising in Prussia.

In Ireland, things were quiet, and the Dublin correspondent simply wrote, “I have not any news of importance to communicate.”

With the grand European news covered, the Herald moved to smaller, more local matters.

First, there was an attack by Spanish pirates. Then a steamboat accident. Then theater news (“more dull than ever”).

Turning to page two, the Herald advised its readers of the arrival of the steamship Tennessee to town. Then it tallied up the progress of the cholera epidemic (67 new cases, 22 deaths). Next came sporting news (“the great trotting contest” at the Union Course race track).

And then, finally, deep in the middle of page 2, after several notices of curious deaths (an Irish woman had suffered “death by intemperance”), readers got to the “Police Intelligence” section.

That’s where our story starts. Because it was there that a small, insignificant, 351-word article appeared under the headline,

“Arrest of the Confidence Man”

This tiny article was the first known use of the term “confidence man” in English, which later gave us such terms as con man, con artist, and con game.

The Herald article told of a certain William Thompson, a “graduate of the college of Sing Sing.” Thompson had made a habit of stealing watches from wealthy New Yorkers, on the street, in broad daylight.

What was newsworthy was that Thompson didn’t steal through threats and violence, or through stealth and speed.

​​Instead, he stole in full view of his marks, calmly, with a big smile on his face, using just words.

Thompson’s con involved approaching a stranger on the street and starting a conversation. Then, after a few moments, Thompson would ask if the stranger had the confidence to lend him his watch for a day.

The crazy thing is it worked.

Contrary to all logic and reason, many marks did as Thompson asked. Thompson walked away, laughing, with the stranger’s watch in his pocket. One gold lever watch stolen in this way was worth $110 in 1849 money — about $4,300 today.

The story is so bizarre that it doesn’t quite sound real.

​​Sure, 1849 New York was a very different place from today. But strangers were still strangers, and valuables were still valuables.

Why would Thompson’s marks be so gullible? Why would they just do what they were asked to do? Why would they give their confidence to a complete stranger on the street after just a few moments of talking?

I’m hoping you can help me figure this mystery out.

​​I’m asking you because, if you’re interested in direct marketing and copywriting, I imagine you’re smart and well-read.

​​If you have any clues, hints, or ideas for me, write in and let me know. It will help me prepare a new book I’m working on. Thanks in advance.

The final bit of Jim Camp gossip

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This past Tuesday, I wrote a behind-the-curtain email about negotiation coach Jim Camp.

​​Camp is widely respected and cited as a negotiation authority. His ideas are quoted in books and on TV and by dudes like me.

But if you dig a bit, it seems most of Camp’s advice about negotiation was swiped, often verbatim, from sales trainer David Sandler.

Problem:

The claim that Camp swiped Sandler’s ideas is based on textual analysis, by looking at Camp’s book side by side with Sandler’s book. It could be just one hell of a coincidence, or maybe there’s some kind of other explanation than plagiarism.

Solution:

I got a reply to my email on Tuesday from a reader named Ron, with some first-hand experience. ​​I’m reprinting it here in full because it’s juicy, and because there’s an interesting bit of human psychology hiding on the surface of it.

​​Take it away Ron:

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Thank you John, I’ve tried to tell the same stories to the IM crowd for years and no one seemed to notice.

For a backstory, I took his Camp Negotiation coaching program back in 2009 and it was pretty silly, just a guided text followed by a quiz website (basically rereading the book to you), and my “advisor” was Jim’s oldest son.

At the end of the course, ironically, the module was “no closing” and it was on how closing sales was so 1950’s and you should just ask what do we do next and the prospect should tell you they’re in.

Well after finishing the course, his son called me to show me their new software (which was just a clunky CRM and with little negotiating tips pop-ups to remind you of the techniques) and after the demo, he tried to get me to buy it and I said no thanks.

He goes all weird and tells how I’m going to miss out on all these profitable deals and blah blah blah, and he’s getting pretty aggressive. I chuckled and said “so, no closing right?” He got all butthurt and hung up.

Anyways, I later found out Jim Camp was a franchisee for Sandler (the sales training business was sold city to city as a franchise model) and when his contract was up, Jim just rewrote the book and made up his own terms and sold his programs that way.

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So there you go. That’s the gossip. I can’t confirm or deny the franchisee part of it. All I can say is it makes sense to me personally. And with that, I’ll leave off this Sandler/Camp drama.

But what about that interesting bit of psychology I promised you? It’s there in Ron’s first sentence:

“I’ve tried to tell the same stories to the IM crowd for years and no one seemed to notice.”

This is a curious human quirk that I’ve noticed a few times before.

For example, back in the 1970s, a man named Uri Geller seemed to be blessed with the supernatural powers of telekineses and telepathy. Geller was making the rounds of TV talk shows, bending spoons and reading the insides of sealed envelopes.

Audiences watched with their mouths agape, certain that Geller was living proof that there’s more to life than we see, and that there are enormous untapped powers latent in all of us.

Then Geller was exposed as a fraud by a magician named James Randi.

Randi replicated Geller’s act completely. He also worked with TV producers of the Tonight Show to devise a scenario where Geller couldn’t do of his supposed telekinesis or telepathy.

Geller came on the show, unaware of what was going on. And for 20 awkward minutes, while Johhny Carson patiently smoked his cigarette and waited, Geller tried and failed to do his usual routine.

And the result?

Nothing. Geller’s fame, and people’s belief in his supernatural powers, remained untarnished.

You can draw your own conclusions from this, in particular about how it relates to marketing and money-making and persuasion.

I’ve drawn my own conclusions. And the most important and valuable one is the one I wrote about in the inaugural issue of my Most Valuable Postcard, two years ago. If you’d like to find out what that is:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp1/

Jim Camp, A-list copywriter

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Right now I’m reading a book titled You Can’t Teach a Kid To Ride a Bike at a Seminar.

The book was written by David Sandler, a 20th-century sales trainer.

I wrote an email about Sandler last year because of his connection to famed negotiation coach Jim Camp. That email ran with the subject line, “Jim Camp, plagiarist.”

Camp must have studied under Sandler, because the ideas inside “You Can’t Teach a Kid” and Camp’s book “Start With No” are as close to identical as two brown, “L”-sized, farm-fresh eggs. (For reference, Sandler died in 1995, Camp published Start With No in 2002.)

If you ask me, Camp did three things right.

First, he took Sandler’s system out of the world of sales — water filters, life insurance, and whirring hard drives — and he applied it, word-for-word, to the world of billion-dollar negotiation in corporate boardrooms.

In other words, Camp took Sandler’s valuable but provincial knowledge and brought it to a bigger, more prestigious arena, not encumbered by the slumdog baggage that’s attached to the word “sales.”

Second, Camp co-opted what Sandler taught and made it his own. He turned the Sandler Sales System into the Camp Negotiation System, without ever mentioning or crediting Sandler except once, in the middle of a list of 20 other mentors, in an appendix to his “Start With No” book.

You might think this is despicable, and in a way it is, but it’s also a necessary part of the positioning of the guru at the top of the mountain.

And then there’s a third thing that Camp did right.

It’s completely in the presentation, the messaging of his book and of his Camp Negotiation System.

You can see this messaging change in the title Start With No. It’s also present on almost every page of the book.

This messaging change is what built up the mystery of Jim Camp, and it’s why Camp’s book has sold so well and spread so far, and why so many sales folks and marketers and copywriters know Camp today, and why so few know Sandler.

Now ask yourself:

If you knew what change Camp made, and if you could apply it to turn your message from unknown to bestselling, from slumdog salesman to mysterious and yet celebrated negotiation guru…

… what could that be worth to you?

I don’t know. But you do know, and maybe the truth is it would be worth a lot — thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more.

I’m asking you this question because you can find this messaging change, the technique that Camp used to make himself and his system fascinating, in my Copy Riddles program.

It’s there in round 15.

If you own Copy Riddles and it’s not 100% clear to you how Camp applied the technique in that round to his messaging, write me and I will clarify it.

And if you don’t own Copy Riddles, you can find out more about it at the link below.

I can tell you upfront, at $997, Copy Riddles is an expensive program.

But maybe in your case will be worth much more than I’m asking for it. Here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

You won’t make money by reading this email, but you might become a bit smarter

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True story:

I once knew a girl who was in the last year of law school. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, who owned some kind of online business.

The guy wasn’t willing to accept the breakup. So he called the girl and texted her, asking that they meet again so he could plead his case.

The girl said no.

The guy kept texting and asking for them to meet.

The girl politely but firmly still said no.

Finally, the guy, clever and successful businessman that he was, wrote her a message saying how he understood she is a poor law student, and that since we are all self-interested creatures, he would be willing to pay her a nice and fair hourly rate, fit for a full-fledged lawyer, if she would only meet with him for a coffee and a chat.

At this point, the girl stopped responding to the guy.

But she did tell me this story. And she laughed as she told it, as if to say “What was I doing with him?” She rolled her eyes at how warped his brain had become, and how he thought he could buy her.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Travis Sago lately. And Travis likes to say that money is tertiary.

As in, yes, money is important to most of us. But in the grand scheme of what we all want, two categories of needs are even more important.

And in fact, there are situations where money is even at odds with those two other categories. In those situations, offering money completely spoils the appeal.

Perhaps you heard how last week, after the CrowdStrike IT snafu interrupted life-saving surgeries… disrupted millions of people’s trips… and caused panic and days of extra work for businesses around the world, CrowdStrike went into damage-control mode.

They sent an email to key partners to apologize. And in addition, to show how truly bad they feel about the whole thing, they also included a $10 Uber Eats voucher.

“Your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!” CrowdStrike wrote.

Unsurprisingly, backlash and mockery followed all over Internet.

There’s no doubt in my mind that no backlash or mockery would have happened had CrowdStrike simply sent an apologetic email and left it at that.

So keep that in mind.

Money is tertiary.

As for what’s secondary and primary, if you think a bit about your own motivations in life, with respect to work in particular, I’m sure you will be able to figure that out.

But if you want to see how top copywriters make appeals to those primary and secondary needs, you can find that round 19 of my Copy Riddles program, which is titled:

“A sexy technique for writing bullets that leave other copywriters green with envy”

For more information on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

A grateful reader succeeds in making me blush

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Last night, I got an email from marketer and copywriter Shakoor Chowdhury, who wrote:

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Hello John,

I wanted to take a moment of my day to say “thank you”!

Besides Dan Kennedy, you have played the most impactful role in growing my revenues every single day

most of my NEW cashflow can be directly attributed to you and your courses “MVE” & “influential emails”…

I write emails daily now and they always bring more money or book appointments with high ticket clients…

This year I decided to focus on building relationships with my customers and not just ‘direct selling’ one time…

And I have to say, nobody is able to teach the concepts of email marketing better than you have…

It is simple, straightforward and teaches the FUNDAMENTALS of what it takes to be an email copywriter

I am a lifelong fan and customer.

Hope many more people and great things find their way to you, you are a bit of a ‘best kept secret’ in the copy world

which is perhaps why you are the best… the mystic ‘guru at the top of the mountain’

I found you because OTHER copywriters spoke so highly of you

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Like I said in the subject line, Shakoor succeeded in making me blush, and I’m blushing now having to write about it. So let me change the topic immediately.

I recently heard business coach Rich Schefren say that he often gives presents to his mentor Mark Ford, because Mark doesn’t like to be in anybody’s debt, and so he always gives presents in return.

Let me do the same with Shakoor:

Based on what little I know of him, he sounds like a guy who gets things done and would probably have been successful one way or the other.

Last October when Shakoor and I first exchanged a couple emails, he was already working with a number of clients as a kind of full-service marketer for ecom businesses.

With just one of those clients working on a performance deal, Shakoor was taking in $10k+ per month. Overall, at that time, he was driving $300k+ in sales for his clients each month.

Somewhere along the line, Shakoor also had time to run his own dropshipping businesses, one of which got up to 100k+ buyers.

All that’s to say, after Shakoor decided to build up his personal brand and to start writing daily emails, I’m guessing he would have been successful with Dan Kennedy or without Dan Kennedy, with me or without me.

That said, I do appreciate Shakoor’s kind words.

​​I also do appreciate that I have been able to help occasional people learn something about direct marketing and copywriting… and even make transformations in their lives, whether that meant making more money, or getting going with daily emailing so they can build a personal brand and stop relying on cold outreach.

And on that topic:

I’m not currently selling the Influential Emails program that Shakoor was referring to. But I still am selling my Most Valuable Email program.

Most Valuable Email pulls back the curtain and shows you, in less than an hour, how to perform a specific email copywriting trick, one I use regularly in my own emails.

Emails using this trick are different from emails you might be familiar with, like story emails, or “hot takes,” or how-to emails, or personal reveals.

Unlike those other kinds of emails, Most Valuable Emails happen to work well whether you have authority or not, whether you’re just getting started with your personal brand or you have had a following for years.

And yet, none of that is the reason why these kinds of emails are most valuable.

The real reason is that Most Valuable Emails make daily emailing fun and educational for me personally, and easy to stick with for the long term.

And it seems for others like Shakoor also.

Maybe for you too?

I don’t know. But if you’d like to find out more about MVE, and see if it makes sense for you:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How to hide secrets in plain sight using an ordinary razor

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Sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay studied card cheats, because cheating at cards is a sister discipline to close-up magic.

Jay once did an entire evening for a few friends, showing various card-cheating techniques. At the end of it, he also told a story.

The story involved a poker player who, when it was his turn to deal, reached into his coat and took out a straight razor.

He opened up the razor, made it glint in the light to show how sharp it is, and put it down in front of him on the poker table.

He then slowly looked around the table at every other player. And he said, with menace in his voice, “There will be no cheating in this game.”

Newsflash:
​​
I don’t like playing poker. I’m also not a magician. I can’t do even do a single basic card trick.

I got interested in magic, and by extension card cheating, because I felt there was something about a magician’s misdirection that’s common to copywriting and effective communication in general.

When most people think misdirection, they think somebody waving a red scarf somewhere in the corner of your eye so you look away, and so you don’t see the secret action.

And that is one kind of misdirection. But there are many more kinds.

A good card cheat, magician, or just effective communicator, can do his secret trick right in front of you, without ever diverting your gaze. In fact, he can even make a big deal of the mechanism behind the secret trick, drawing your attention to it.

Which brings us back to the razor on the table. It’s an old card cheater’s trick known as “the shiner.”

The shiner can be a razor, like in the story above, or a large flat ring on the hand, or even a smart phone in more modern times, lying on the poker table.

The key is simply that the it’s an object that makes sense in that given context. It also has to be shiny, so the cheater can use it to get a quick glimpse of the underside of each card as he deals.

So now you know how to hide secrets in plain sight using an ordinary razor… or hairbrush (Parris Lampropoulos)… or gold necklace (Gary Bencivenga).

In other news, voting for the Best Daily Email Awards continues furiously. Today’s email will be the last email I send out before the deadline to cast your vote, tomorrow at 8:31pm CET.

If you know what I’m talking about, get voting so you don’t miss the deadline. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are the details from my email yesterday:

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I would like to announce the formation of the Best Daily Email Awards.

This is a new yearly award for merit in the daily email format.

Each year, the Best Daily Email Awards are selected by the prestigious and exclusive Daily Email Academy, which you are a member of by virtue of being a reader of this newsletter.

If you would like to nominate a particular daily email for a Best Daily Email Award, simply forward it to me before this Sunday, July 28, at 8:31pm CET.

Any daily email by any brand or person, in any market or niche, is eligible. You don’t need to explain your reasoning for nominating this particular email. The only restriction is you may only submit one entry, and that it’s actually a daily email.

And then, I, as the current acting Director of the Daily Email Academy, will collect the results, and announce the winners at the inaugural prize ceremony next week.

And yes, I’m 100% serious about this. So start forwarding now.

Announcing: Best Daily Email Awards

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Over the past few months, I’ve gotten addicted to listening to a Japanese woman’s YouTube channel, on which she puts out collections like, “1963 Billboard Top 100 Countdown.”

These collections feature hit songs I know, and are also a good way to discover something new, or at least new to me.

But the real reason I’m listening to this woman’s YouTube channel, as opposed to a million other YouTube song collections and playlists, is that her collections feel somehow authoritative, vetted.

After all, the included songs were all hits at the time they came out. People loved each of these songs then, even if some of the songs fell into obscurity later. The Billboard rankings prove it.

My own addiction reminded me of something I read in the Robert Collier Letter Book.

At one point, Collier was selling a subscription to the Review of Reviews, a monthly magazine that I guess was similar to Reader’s Digest.

The problem was few people really like committing to a subscription.

The solution of course was a series of attractive bonuses, which could appear and disappear on command.

But how to make a bonus instantly attractive?

One solution was to again defer to authority and vetting by others. The winning bonus was a little book that collected 64 stories that won the O. Henry prize for the best short story of the year.

Result? ​

​​​30,000-40,000 new subscribers with one sales letter, bundling a stupid magazine subscription with this sexy bonus.

You can do the same, by the way.

Maybe your niche already has some objective measure of authority to it — best-selling books, top-ranked ClickBank offers, investors who made the most money.

Or if there is no such objective measure, you can always invent a new prize or award.

You can use this authoritative or vetted status to create an attractive bonus or offer, and of course, to put yourself in the middle of the action.

And with that, I would like to announce the formation of the Best Daily Email Awards.

This is a new yearly award for merit in the daily email format.

Each year, the Best Daily Email Awards are selected by the prestigious and exclusive Daily Email Academy, which you are a member of by virtue of being a reader of this newsletter.

If you would like to nominate a particular daily email for a Best Daily Email Award, simply forward it to me before this Sunday, July 28, at 8:31pm CET.

Any daily email by any brand or person, in any market or niche, is eligible. You don’t need to explain your reasoning for nominating this particular email. The only restriction is you may only submit one entry, and that it’s actually a daily email.

And then, I, as the current acting Director of the Daily Email Academy, will collect the results, and announce the winners at the inaugural prize ceremony next week.

And yes, I’m 100% serious about this. So start forwarding now.