Persuasion

“You’re pretty funny”

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A few days, I ago got an email from copywriter and business strategist Nadia Dalbani, who wrote:

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John.

I’ve read 3 of your emails in a row. I haven’t had time to read them the past few days, so I had to have a read-a-thon (a John-a-thon!).

Anyway, I’m so close to buying Daily Email Habit even though I totally read the sales page and you DID say don’t buy this if you don’t plan to *actually* have a Daily Email Habit – I only email my list once a week, so I initially left like yup, NOT for me.

But I can confirm, even reading your emails in reverse order, I am definitely more convinced to start an every single day email habit due to your pitches.

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I remember hearing a story once about how Bill Murray and Chevy Chase got into an actual fist fight on the set of Saturday Night Live.

The two apparently hated each other. It all came to a boil one day when Murray said to Chase, “You’re pretty funny.”

Chevy Chase then started swinging.

I’ve always wondered why “pretty funny” is such an insult, at least if you think of yourself as funny. It’s much more insulting than, say, “not funny.”

(If you have any insight on this for me, write in and let me know.)

In any case, that’s a little how I felt after reading Nadia’s email.

“Pretty good email. Pretty, pretty good. Almost got me. But not quite.”

Nadia lives in London. After I read her message, I started getting ready to buy a ticket so I could fly there, confront her in person, and maybe start a fight.

Fortunately, yesterday I got a new message from Nadia, just in time:

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Alright, alright, it took, like, 3 more emails, but you got me. I’m mega excited to start Daily Email Habit 😄

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Like I say, this is particularly fortunate, not only because it will prevent an ugly confrontation on the streets of London, but because it also backs up the very premise of Daily Email Habit.

For one thing, the emails Nadia responded to were based on prompts I sent out as part of Daily Email Habit. (I eat my own dog food most days.)

For another thing, this little case study backs up the general principle of putting out a daily email… gradually building up desire… gradually chipping away at objections… all while keeping readers interested enough that they keep opening and reading your emails.

This is really what Daily Email Habit is there to help you do.

And if you are thinking of getting started, I can only recommend you act now.

My Prospective Profit Price event is coming to a close tonight at 12pm midnight PST.

After that, the price for Daily Email Habit goes up from a modest $20/month to a wallet-busting $30/month.

Also, Daily Email House, the lively community that I’ve created for those who write more or less daily emails, will stop being a free bonus tonight at midnight.

If you have any questions, or to join now, take a look at this pretty good sales page:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

You’re one mediocre, unread sales letter away from charging 40x more than the competition

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Comes a long but interesting question about magic words that bring you riches:

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Im asking you this for two reasons: A) Your Course on Bullets and B) You’ve been on Ben Settles List, who I’m going to reference.

Long story short I saw a marketer reference a Book and said he was thinking about summarizing and making a Course, that he could probably charge upwards of $300 dollars for.

I have been re-reading ” Ogilvy on Advertising” and was thinking, it’s $25 New on Amazon and is recommended by virtually every top copywriter, marketer etc… Yet Ben Settle and many other sell their info ( and I’m not saying their info is not good and maybe worth every penny they charge ) for MUCH More Money. But on the surface aren’t even in the conversation with the Ogilvy’s, Hopkins’ and many others whose works are supposed to be the Holy Grail.

In your opinion, What’s the difference? Is it Positioning or could it simply be the use of Bullets to create curiosity and build value that allows them to charge So much more?

I mean back to Ben Settle, do his $800 to $1000 products have more useful info in them than ” Ogilvy on Advertising ” or many of the other so-called classics? Im guessing NO

Could the ability to charge so much more just come down to the power of a Good Sales Letter?

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That last part of the question is a reference to a supposed quote from famed direct marketer Gary Halbert, which goes something like, “You’re one good sales letter away from never worrying about money again.”

I don’t know if that was ever true, even for Gary.

I doubt it’s true for anybody today.

One thing I’m sure of, as sure as that the moon is in fact made of cheese:

There’s no “one good sales letter” that will allow you to sell a book for $1k in any mass-market way.

I’ve bought Ben Settle’s stuff before, including books he charges hundreds of dollars for. I never once read the sales page when I bought, except as much as was unavoidable to locate the “Buy Now” button.

Why did I pay Ben so much? Particularly since he makes a big deal about the fact that none of the stuff he teaches is secret or new? Without me even bothering to get the full details of what I was buying?

Positioning, if that’s what you want to call it. But not positioning of the product itself. That’s secondary or even unimportant here.

Rather, it was the gradual, patient, and strategic positioning of the person selling. As Dan Kennedy writes, “The higher up in income you go, the more you’re paid for who you are, rather than what you do.”

That’s the psychological effect.

The mechanism to get there was daily emails.

Emails that, day after day, month after month, year after year, built Ben up as somebody to listen to and respect… put him in a marketplace of one and gave him a mini-monopoly… and did enough teasing of his product to allow me to ignore the fact that there’s nothing new or secret in there, and probably nothing that a careful reading of Robert Collier’s book couldn’t give me.

Ben sums it up himself:

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Don’t get me wrong, sales copy is important.

But if I had to choose between having the world’s best copywriting skills or having top notch email skills, I’d choose email every time. It’s made me (and certain clients who hired me for emails, when I had clients) far more money.

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Email is how you charge 40x more than the competition.

It’s how you can sell at a premium with a mediocre sales page, or even no sales page at all.

Ben’s done it… I’ve done it… maybe you’d like to do it too?

If you would, and if want my help in getting there, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

David Ogilvy endorses the Daily Email Habit approach

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This morning I found myself reading “Quotations of David Ogilvy,” put out in 2023 by the Ogilvy agency, on the 75th anniversary of its founding.

Here’s a quote from Ogilvy that caught my eye:

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Dr. Gallup reports that if you say something which you don’t also illustrate, the viewer immediately forgets it. I conclude that if you don’t show it there is no point in saying it. Try running your commercial with the sound turned off; if it doesn’t tell without sound, it is useless.

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I’m sharing this with you for two reasons.

One is that it’s a useful reminder, even if you never write a TV commercial. Really, it comes down to effective communication. If you don’t illustrate, the reader will forget it. If you don’t show it, there’s no point in saying it.

Reason two is that I was lucky to have somehow learned that lesson early in my copywriting career. Somebody must have shown it to me, because I also remembered it over the years.

The basic idea above — illustrate, don’t just say — is the underlying idea of pretty much everything I’ve done in the marketing space.

It’s the underlying idea of my Copy Riddles program, and its try-and-compare method of learning to write copy, instead of just a bunch of “here’s how” instruction.

It’s the underlying idea of thousands of sales emails I’ve written, both for clients and for myself, and the way I teach others to do that inside my Simple Money Emails and Most Valuable Email programs.

And it’s the underlying idea of my Daily Email Habit service.

Because on most days — not all, but most — I don’t just send a daily prompt for to help you write your own daily email. I also use that prompt in my own daily email, to show and illustrate how it can be done.

About that, I got the following feedback from Chris Howes, who runs a successful music teaching memebrship, Creative Strings Academy. Chris subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and he had this to say:

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But more importantly, I now get TWO LESSONS from you every day. And I often learn as much or more from your regular daily free emails. Together, hand in hand, they feel like someone dropped off a shopping cart from Sams Club full of gifts at my front door and said here you go…

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As David Ogilvy said, “We sell — or else.”

I don’t know what the “else” is. I don’t want to find out.

So if you’d like to buy a month’s worth of daily email puzzles, in order to write your own daily emails, and to get additional inspiration and illustration from my daily emails, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Don’t read this before bed

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A gruesome and depressing email today. Read at your own risk:

Last night, of course right before bed, I saw a real-life clip online that I really didn’t need to see.

It showed a heartbroken mother wailing. She had just called 911 after she discovered some rotting human remains in her 19-year-old son’s closet.

The rest of the clip showed the police confronting the son.

He calmly and articulately admitted that, yes, that is a human head and a pair human hands in his closet, and yes, he did murder somebody with a knife. Asked why, he replied, “I always wanted to know what it would feel like.”

Of course, rather than closing my laptop at this point and going to drink some chamomile tea to maybe bleach this from my mind, I investigated this case further.

The murderer looks to be as close to pure evil as you can imagine. Cold, remorseless, shark-like.

He was arrested and then tried. His lawyers went with an insanity defense. It didn’t fly.

He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The jury felt he was not insane, in the sense that he could clearly distinguish between right and wrong.

But if you see the guy confessing to the murder or talking about the details of it, it’s clear that something is not right in his head. He might not be insane in the legal sense, but he’s certainly not sane in the everyday sense.

If you would dig into the neural pathways, chemicals, bits and blobs of his brain, I bet you’d find they were different to what a normal person has. Maybe this guy was born deficient in some way, or something went wrong early in life, or wasn’t there when it should have been.

I feel like I’m digging myself into a hole with this email. It’s too late to stop now, so let me dig a bit deeper:

I don’t know if we have free will, or like I wrote a few weeks ago, “free won’t.”

But even though the murder case above is as clear of a black-and-white, good-vs-evil, open-and-shut case as you would ever not want to see right before bed, I personally still feel there’s probably much more to it for anybody who would take the trouble to look closer.

Does that mean that the guy is not guilty of murder?

Smart people, such as Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, argue exactly this. Sapolsky says that assigning guilt doesn’t make sense when you actually look at what’s happening in the brain.

I personally don’t know.

One thing I do know is that my “shades of gray” way of looking at the world is a handicap, probably for my own happiness and certainly when it comes to influencing others. Because the more black-and-white you see things, the easier it makes it for others to identify with you, to fall in line with your views, to berserk on your behalf, as Ben Settle likes to say.

This black-and-white stuff also works if you write sales copy. (Yes, I have to somehow try to clamber out of that hole I’ve dug for myself.)

The more extreme, contrasted, polarized you make your claims, the more likely you are to draw attention to and to create desire for them.

This is something I go into much more detail in my Copy Riddles program. Copy Riddles gives you source material from info products of years past, and sales bullets from A-list copywriters who promoted those products, to drill this black-and-white stuff into your brain, such as it is.

In case you’d like to find out more, and maybe bleach this email from your mind:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Glamourous and profitable #1 ranking in an impossible category

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In 1987, Hatton Gardens Hotel in Upton Saint Leonards won the inaugural Loo Of The Year award.

The Loo Of The Year is awarded each year to the best public toilet in the UK, based on criteria such as adequate flushing frequency, urinal privacy, overall cleanliness, lighting, lack of vandalism, and, best of all, a “wow factor.”

The Loo Of The Year awards were set up in 1987 by the communications director of a washroom service company.

That first year, only 50 guests attended, and awards were given in only two categories, hotels and restaurants.

There are now 63 categories, and over 300 guests attended the prestigious event and dinner last year.

Yesterday, I talked about the transformative effect that winning the race at Le Mans had on Jaguar, the car brand. To my mind, there are three key elements in something like winning a top-tier car race:

1. A ranking with a clear number 1

2. An incontestable result, a matter of performance, not popularity or opinion

3. An element of glamour

But even if you cannot get all three, two out of three can still be great for business.

Awards and arbitrary “Top 100” listings only offer #1 and #3, ranking + glamour. The results are definitely a matter of popularity or opinion, but so what?

I wrote an email back in 2019 about the impact that the World’s 50 Best Restaurants listing had on the restaurant and tourism industry.

As one extreme example, a Copenhagen restaurant named Noma already had 2 Michelin stars. Even so, they were struggling to fill tables.

After Noma randomly and unexpectedly came in at the top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, 100,000 people tried to book a table there in one day. Suddenly, generating business was no longer an issue.

As for Hatton Gardens Hotel:

At the next year’s event ceremony, in 1988, the manager of the Hatton Gardens said visits to his hotel had doubled since winning Loo Of The Year.

Such is the power of a #1 ranking + glamour, above and beyond a certification… or a gold star… or a label. (And yes, even toilets can apparently have glamour — at least glamour enough to double business.)

So create an award for your industry, or create rankings.

Or better yet, pay somebody else to create them, and to announce you the winner.

Put on a tuxedo or an evening gown, get your photo taken in front of one of those step-and-repeat banners, and watch what happens to your business.

And if you detest awards show, and if paying some rando to create a Top 50 ranking and put you at #1 turns you off, don’t worry.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you how to have success with only elements 2+3 off the list above.

Can you guess what example I’ll use?

I’ll give you a hint. It’s a man who built a massive, enduring career, out of nothing, to become the most famous entertainer of his age. And he did it with a series of incontestable challenges, dares, and contests, all of which featured an element of glamour.

While you ponder that, let me remind you that my Daily Email Habit has been voted #1 among the World’s Best 100 Email Prompt Services by a distinguished panel of email marketers, all of whom happen to subscribe to Daily Email Habit.

Here’s what one of the distinguished panelists, Australian copywriter Allan Johnson, had to say in casting his vote:

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This is a very useful service. I have always struggled to commit to daily writing (emails or not) and protecting the streak is now a priority, so thanks.

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If you’d like to find out what makes Daily Email Habit #1:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

4,2,1,0… what comes next?

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Let’s see if you can solve this mathematical riddle:

My grandmother came from four brothers and sisters…

My grandmother then had two kids, my aunt and my mom…

My mom only had one kid, me…

And I, barring some late-life religious conversion or late-night sexual slip-up, will end up with zero kids.

So the riddle is…

4, 2, 1, 0… what’s the next number in this sequence?

I mean, is there even a number?

Or is the human race doomed? Because I don’t think my family is all that unique.

I look around at people of my generation and I see them either childless or with fewer kids than their parents had at the same age… and definitely fewer than their grandparents or great grandparents had.

Do you have your answer to the riddle?

Here’s mine, or rather, here’s my prediction about what comes after 0:

People will start having more kids again. 1, 2, and maybe 4. Yes, even in rich, modern, urban societies, the ones that offer all the pleasurable temptations and alternatives to a young man or woman to settling down and raising children.

The statistics don’t bear me out yet. But I’m seeing anecdotal evidence for it. People I know, younger than me, getting married earlier… having kids earlier… having more kids. Stuff that was unimaginable to me at their age.

The theory supports me also.

The human brain loves to think linearly. To find a pattern and to keep that pattern going to eternity, like watching a snowball roll down an endless hill.

We love to think in this way about other humans too.

Except humans are not like snowballs down a hill.

We also have the ability to consciously choose our action and shape our identity. To stop rolling, to even turn around, and start hiking up the hill again.

And in fact, that’s often what happens, more often than you might think. History is full of examples of groups of humans — Puritans, Bolsheviks, hippies — choosing their identity in direct opposition to what came before them, or to what’s around them now. Sometimes with great influence.

I’m not sure what my point is.

Maybe it’s that there’s a powerful persuasion lesson in the above, for anybody who would sit down and unpack it a bit.

Or maybe my point is simply to try to convince you to give my Daily Email Habit service a try.

Because if you have kids, or are planning on it, I figure it’s way nicer today than it was 40, 20, or even 10 years ago.

Back then, the only option for most people was to go to work in somebody else’s office, from 9-5, and sit in a car for an hour or two to get there. With the time left over, maybe they’d see their kids only for a few minutes before bed.

Today, there are real alternatives. It’s never been easier to work for yourself, at home, with yourself as a boss.

Now here’s my pitch:

If you’re gonna work for yourself, at home, and have more free time than you would if you had a regular job, then it makes sense to write daily emails.

Daily emails promote what you do and ensure a certain security and continuity. Daily emails nurture an audience of previous customers and ready prospects who know you and trust you and are willing to give you money in the future also.

And daily emails allow you to do that without you having to spend 16 hours a day hunting for new business all the time.

If that makes sense, I’d like to suggest you take a look at the following service. It will help you start and stick with sending daily emails. And it’s completely different to all previous methods I know of that promised the same:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why I don’t drink alcohol

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I’m zoominating on the high-speed train from Barcelona to Valencia as I write this.

In between looking out the window at the countryside (sun, olive orchards, power line towers, factories, occasional ruins of medieval forts), I also making sure to regularly check what’s happening on the Internet, so you know, so I don’t miss out on something important.

A few minutes ago, this led me to a surging Reddit thread:

“Why do you not drink alcohol?”

Millions want to know, and millions more want to answer.

This thread caught my eye because I myself don’t drink alcohol, and haven’t for the past two years. Why?

Some top Reddit comments apply to me, some not:

– “I drank my lifetime supply” (I definitely did drink, regularly, for years, but having had my fill isn’t what made me stop.)

– “Getting older” (A part of it. With age, drinking just made me feel in general less healthy, though it was probably always true.)

– “Blackouts” (This was actually significant. I noticed that even moderate drinking started to make me not remember what I did the night before, and this scared me.)

– “Tastes bad” (Just add some water to it.)

– “Alcoholism runs in my family” (No. My dad is a lifelong teetotaler and my mom tends to start crying if she has a glass of wine.)

– “I don’t like who I am when I drink” (I like myself much better when I drink.)

So much for crowdsourced wisdom. It’s okay… but there’s one reason I didn’t see anybody on Reddit mention.

The fact is, over the past two years, not drinking alcohol become a part of my identity.

For me, not drinking was at first a health-related experiment… then a kind of on-off habit.

But whatever reasons I initially had have become completely secondary to the fact that now “I just don’t drink.” It’s not something I have to think about, pressure myself to do, feel I need to justify myself over.

Maybe there’s a lesson there?

The way I see it, if you want to make an appeal to people, then identity is as powerful of an appeal as you can make, and much more powerful than any kind of benefit or promise or warning.

This works with yourself as well.

Make something a part of your identity, and it becomes a non-issue to do it regularly, cheerfully, even in the face of hardships and obstacles.

There are intermediate steps, like I said. First experiment, then habit.

But my train’s a-nearing Valencia. So let me just say:

I don’t know if you identify with the sentiment, “I write. It’s just something I do.”

Writing has benefits, as you may know. It also has costs — time, thought, or blood, like Hemingway apocryphally said.

But writing can become just something you do, regardless. And then good things happen.

If you’d like to start an experiment with writing regularly, and maybe make a habit of it, and even an identity one day, then I can help. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The first time I tried it, I didn’t last very long

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Dan Kennedy has a joke that goes something like, if we all stopped doing a thing in case the first time didn’t work out well, the human race would soon die out.

Get it? Get it? Wink wink, nudge nudge?

It’s about sex.

I bring this up for two reasons:

Reason one is that the first time I tried it — meaning writing emails, get your mind out of literotica section please — it didn’t work out well. Or actually I just didn’t last very long.

I believe this current newsletter, which has been running for 6+ years day in and day out, is something like my third or fourth attempt to stick to emailing consistently.

Reason two is because I want to share with you a case study I got from a reader named Jakub Červenka.

Jakub runs an online business called Muž 2.0. From what Google tells me, that translates from Czech into into Man 2.0. Because Jakub’s business is teaching men self-development stuff, specifically how to fix various bedroom problems.

Now, I happen to know from having exchanged lots of emails with Jakub over the years that his main thing is running ads on Facebook to a webinar that sells his core program.

But lately, Jakub gave another shot to daily emailing, even though it didn’t work out well the first time around. Jakub reports:

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I had been sending emails daily and then stopped for a good part of this year mainly due to feeling burnt out and feeling like I was riding on a dead horse, writing emails about the same topic.

With your service, this block is gone. I like to see the puzzle and then read in your email how you personally used it. It’s great over-the-shoulder learning experience.

I also noticed how not wanting to break the streak is motivating me – even more so than I don’t know, say making potentially money from making a sale to my list… that’s crazy. I am ashamed to admit it, as it is completely irrational, but it’s the truth. And probably not so surprising to anyone in the copywriting world, we know we are not rational beings, but still, this surprised me.

Also, I used a few of your prompts in my Black Friday promo. I made crazy good offer to my list, (20 of my flagship courses for 40% of the price) due to some messed up technical stuff ended up selling 23, which with some up/cross/down sells brought home close to $20k in 3 days… my best Black Friday yet.

So it was a good offer, but I was not promoting it in any other way than by e-mails and your inspiration was part of it, so you can say that your service contributed to this result. Which is true and it restored my resolve to write daily.

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The service Jakub is referring to is my Daily Email Habit. It makes it easier to come up with a daily email topic every day, plus it has an in-email streak counter to keep you accountable.

Like Jakub says, why the streak counter works is not particularly rational… but it can be very effective.

And the results?

Jakub already had a successful business, and he had all the pieces in place. Reintroducing daily emails helped him make another $20k last month that he might not have made otherwise.

Your particular situation? Only you can really answer that question.

One thing I’m sure of, if you’re planning to ever or restart daily emails, the sooner you do, the sooner you will see results. Yes, even if you tried it before and it felt like riding on a dead horse.

For more info on Daily Email Habit, and how it can help you start and stay consistent with daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Don’t think of an Iranian drone

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A couple nights ago, I rewatched the 1997 comedy Wag The Dog… as research for work.

Robert De Niro plays a political communications consultant. He’s brought in for clean-up after news breaks that the President of the United States has had sex with a 15-year-old girl in a closet behind the Oval Office.

The situation is bad. De Niro needs at least a day to think up a way out of this sticky situation. Fortunately, the President is on a visit to China.

“Keep him there,” De Niro tells the President’s handlers. “Say he’s sick. And say his visit has nothing to do with the B3 bomber.”

“Sir, as far as I know, there’s no such thing as a B3 bomber,” says a White House staffer.

“That’s exactly what I said,” says De Niro.

The rest of the movie is about how De Niro’s character, along with a Hollywood producer played by Dustin Hoffman, orchestrate a make-believe war against Albania (“They seem shifty”), which happens entirely on the evening news.

I thought about this while reading a news article yesterday, titled, “New Jersey drone cluster sightings prompt call for ‘state of emergency.'”

In case you haven’t heard, the state of New Jersey is under attack by swarms of unexplained drones. An FBI official explained:

“Are we concerned there are nefarious intentions that could cause either an actual security or public safety incident? There’s nothing that is known that would lead me to say that, but we just don’t know. And that’s the concerning part of it.”

Could it be Iran? China? Perhaps the Albanians?

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States,” said the Pentagon press secretary, “and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”

So you’re saying it could be the Albanians…

Look, I’m just fooling around. I’m certainly not claiming there are any parallels between the current drone situation and Wag The Dog. As far as I know, there’s no evidence that the drone situation is any kind of ploy to cover up some new atrocity being committed by people in power as we speak.

(See what I did there?)

All I really want to do is to introduce you to the powerful concept of a “frame.”

A frame is all the stuff that goes on in your head before, after, and around a specific message. A frame is how the phrase “SHUT UP!” can be interpreted in your head as an insult… a joke between friends… a cry of surprise or disbelief… a sign of mental breakdown… and probably 10 other things, all depending on the context.

There’s a guy named George Lakoff, who is a real-life version of Robert De Niro’s character in Wag The Dog.

Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, and he has long advised Democratic candidates on messaging and communication.

Lakoff believes that frames are such powerful and valuable communication tools that he wrote a guidebook, all about how to use them in politics, which he titled, “Don’t Think Of An Elephant.”

Because you can activate a frame even if you seemingly deny or negate that frame.

Frames are definitely an interesting topic, and it makes sense to actively play with them in high-stakes situations like political messaging.

But in everyday life, it can be exhausting and paralyzing to try to “control the frame,” as pick up artists like to say.

Fortunately, it’s not necessary to be constantly aware and constantly in control of the frame as you go about your life.

Because you can simply adopt a frame which will always serve you well.

That frame is that everything that happens works in your favor and is there for your benefit.

It works in politics, and in daily emails too, where it’s often expressed by the maxim, “Nothing bad ever happens if you write a daily email.” Everything becomes fodder for the content beast.

If you’d like to see how I and a group of other smart folks are taking our everyday frustrations, thoughts, and even stupid news items, and turning them into daily emails that both entertain and sell, you can find that inside my new service Daily Email Habit.

I’m not saying this service could transform your life, or be the equivalent of hitting the lottery. The people who subscribe to Daily Email Habit have reported good results, but nothing so far that would lead me to say this is the one thing you will ever need in your life for success, happiness, and contentment.

And that’s the concerning part of it.

For more info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

When scarcity wears out, what then?

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I only have a half-dozen print books in my apartment. The print books I do have are there because I feel the book is simply so important that I want it around me, available even if the grid goes down, sitting there on the shelf, catching my attention from time to time, inviting me to pull it down and open it up and look inside once again.

One of these half-dozen books is the Robert Collier Letter Book.

If I were ever stranded on a desert island… if for some unlikely reason I wanted to get off and rejoin civilization… and if my only hope of rescue was to write an effective sales letter that I would mail to millions of homes around the country… then I’d want Collier’s book next to me under that palm tree.

Collier’s book has got everything — rattlesnakes, beheadings, genies in the lamp, war heroes, romance, adventure, silk stockings, wagons of coal, dinosaurs.

But let me get to the point of this email:

Collier at some point was selling an O. Henry book set by mail. He sold literally millions of copies of this book set, in a single year.

How?

Well, prices of paper, binding, and labor were increasing (it was during World War I). Collier’s sales letters all emphasized that future editions of the book would have to cost more, and people saw that it must be true. In fact, Collier found that his most effective headline was:

“Before The Price Goes Up!”

But when the price eventually did go up, sales of the O. Henry dropped to such low levels that it wasn’t profitable to mail out any more sales letter.

Testing out different copy produced no improvement.

What then?

Side note:

One trick I practice (I think I got it from John Carlton) is to stop when I come across a puzzle like this. Rather than reading on to find out the answer — and there is an answer — I ask myself, what would I do here?

If I were selling something, using scarcity language to knock in a bunch of golf balls that are close to the hole… what then?

Time to move on? Or time for a new product? Or for more leads? Or what?

Think about that for a moment. Really, try it, now.

And once you’re done…

Then read on to find out the answer, in Collier’s words:

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So we decided to try another kind of hurry-up, and the one we hit upon was: “Last Chance To Get Jack London free!” Mind you, we had been giving Jack London (or Oppenheim or the mystery and detective stories, or some other premium) for six years, and people had come to expect it. They had grown tired of hearing of raises in price, probably no longer believed further raises possible, but the threat of losing the premium was something different.

Strange as it may seem, putting in that one line changed the results over night. Back went the sales to the previous year’s figures. Ads pulled again. And circulars — how they pulled! For the second time we sold $1,000,000 worth of O. Henry books in a single year!

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Point being, when one kind of scarcity wears out, move on to another kind. From price… to free bonus… to a special limited edition… to an event at a given time, happening only once…

There are lots of aspects of an offer that can become scarce, that you can focus on. As one more example, take my Daily Email Habit service. I’ve repeatedly gotten variations of the following question about it:

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Looks so good, if I subscribe do I get access to the previous daily prompts from when you started this service?

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The answer is no, and to emphasize it, I even number the daily email “puzzles” that go out, much like daily Wordle puzzles are numbered. (Today’s daily email puzzle, based on which I’m writing this email, is #18.)

It seems reasonable to me to only give access to those “issues” of Daily Email Habit that go out while somebody is subscribed, much like with a magazine subscription.

I think this is a way to respect people who signed up earlier… it’s a motivation to sign up now, rather than later, and avoid missing out on any new puzzles… and in my mind, it assigns greater value to each puzzle that goes out — it makes each puzzle feel more unique. You either get it, or you don’t.

If you’d like to get tomorrow’s daily email puzzle (#19) before it flutters away, or to find out what Daily Email Habit is all about:

https://bejakovic.com/deh