Persuasion

Why my landing page says very little about me

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A new reader, who signed up to my list yesterday, asks why he should listen to me:

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Hey John, why does your landing page say very little about yourself. What makes you different from other copywriters atleast tell me how much money you have generated for your clients.

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Fair question. Here’s a fair answer:

First off, if I ever identified as a copywriter, I don’t any more. it’s been three years since I last had a client hire me to write for them. I don’t expect that to change soon.

As for money, I made some for clients back when I had them. Not enough money to buy Greenland… just enough to brag a bit.

But that was long enough ago that putting it front and center on my site would make me feel a little like Al Bundy, reminiscing about his glory days as a high school quarterback.

In short, I don’t list past client results on my optin page — or the endorsements I’ve gotten for this newsletter, or the money I personaly make via these emails, or my religious or sexual affiliation — because I don’t wanna, and also because it would be misleading.

None of those things is really what this newsletter is about.

The only consistency in this newsletter, the only thing you can expect, is ideas I discover and find interesting, which I then curate and polish to make sure they are relevant and interesting to you as well.

Well, there is one added step I take sometimes, beyond just writing about interesting and relevant ideas.

I call this extra step the Most Valuable Email trick.

The Most Valuable Email trick does set me apart from most other people who write daily emails, including in the copywriting and marketing worlds.

I have some authority and standing now in that space. But the Most Valuable Email trick worked for me even when I was brand new, and nobody knew me, and I had even less to brag about than I have now.

If you wanna find out more about the Most Valuable Email trick, or even have me pull back the curtain and teach you how I do it, you can do so at the sales page below.

I wrote this sales page back in 2022.

It features as much authority flexing as you’re likely to find anywhere on my site.

If you wanna get a few external reasons why you might want to read my emails, you can find them there.

Or if you want to understand the internal reason that makes many of my emails more interesting than what you might read elsewhere, and how you can do the same, in less than an hour from now, then:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Double-checking the windows of sales escape

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A true story, I mean, analogy:

A couple weeks ago, I was walking around town when a freak thunderstorm set in. I was only about a couple hundred yards from my apartment, but there was no braving this.

First, hurricane winds picked up, then a torrential downpour, finally large hailstones started beating down.

Along with a few dozen other people, I huddled in the metro station tunnel while the gods wore out their fury.

“Good thing I closed all the windows at home,” I chuckled to myself, as ominous music swelled in the background.

I got home and sure enough—

In the middle of the living room, a ficus ginseng plant, which banker and email-writing career coach Tom Grundy had sent me last year, was lying toppled over on the floor. Soil from the plant was all over the room.

“How did this happen?” I asked, possibly out loud. I walked around the apartment and came across a large puddle. One of the bedrooms was entirely flooded, including the mattress, which had soaked through.

It turns out that the window in that room was shut, but it wasn’t shut tightly enough. The furious wind blew it open, and then the rain and hail flew in, flooding the room, soaking through the mattress, and knocking over the plant in the living room and tossing the soil everywhere.

(The plant survived, by the way. It’s looking at me right now.)

I’m about to try to spin this story of emergency and disaster into a copywriting lesson, if you can handle one of those.

Last night, I hosted one of the Q&A calls for Copy Riddles, as part of the last-ever live cohort I will run of that program.

Several skilled copywriters and marketers submitted their bullets for the weekly CR bullet contest, including the following:

“How you could double your child’s IQ with this doctor-recommended breakfast switch. Page 17”

It’s a great bullet. It’s got a big promise I imagine most parents would respond to… a simple and intriguing mechanism… and proof in that phrase “doctor-recommended.”

There’s only one niggling thing, and it’s that, to my mind at least, the reader could read this and say, “Oh, great to know such a doctor-recommended breakfast switch exists! I’ll ask my pediatrician about it the next time I take the little monster in to see him.”

In other words, there’s a small, minor, minuscule chance, however unlikely, that the reader can be sold entirely on the promise of this bullet… and still won’t buy.

And that’s my analogy for you.

“You gotta close off all the windows and doors of escape for your sale” — maybe you’ve heard that advice before.

I know I did, but it didn’t really sink in for a long time.

In any case, knowing it is not enough, because really you have to know your audience as well, and keep learning about them, and keep shutting off all their paths to escape, including new ones that pop up.

Otherwise, even a seemingly shut window (bear with me here) can blow open unexpectedly, and then you have the sales equivalent of a mess in the living room and water all over the place and a mattress that’s been soaked through.

In other words, you have a lost sale, with good work put in and nothing to show for it. So it makes sense to double-check and triple-check the windows and doors of sales escape, using everything you know already and are learning about your skeptical, guarded, and inert prospects.

All right, analogy over. As for my offer:

While this is the last-ever live cohort for Copy Riddles, this program remains alive as an evergreen training.

Several of the people currently going through it have been through it three or more times already, on their own.

I also have it from a reputable source that Copy Riddles, even without the Q&A calls, is the best way to gain the money-making skill of writing sales bullets, short of being one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs. (I heard this from Vasilis Apostolou, formerly a copywriter at Agora, and now one of Parris’s copy cubs.)

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

All these years, I thought I just liked living up high with a view of water

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I’m reading a book called Yoga And The Search For The True Self — don’t ask — and last night I came across a passage that said:

“Anthropologists have shown that the favorite territory of human beings is high ground above water.”

“How did you know?” I said to the book. A couple facts:

#1 When reading another book (Psycho-Cybernetics), I tried imagining a kind of ideal refuge. I imagined a house on a hillside, overlooking a lake in the valley below.

#2 I currently live on the 9th floor, with a bit of a view of the sea (I wish I had more).

Upon reading that my unique personal fantasies and preferences are the same as those of the rest of mankind, I felt a little bit like Dave Chappelle when he walked into a Mississippi diner and found out what everyone there already knew, that “blacks and chickens are quite fond of one other.” Says Dave:

“All these years, I thought I liked chicken because it was delicious. Turns out, I’m genetically predisposed to liking chicken. I got no say in the matter.”

A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once said, “As a marketer you only have one power, and that’s to anticipate what people are going to think.”

We all have unique experiences and reactions, in the sense that we and only we experience them.

The strange thing, or maybe not so strange, is that other people have experiences and reactions that are very similar to ours. And if you take the time to learn and prepare and anticipate those, then, as Gary says, that becomes power.

This is the core idea of my new 10 Commandments book, published earlier this year in May.

I checked just this morning and it seems my book has gotten its first 3-star rating. Unfortunately, it’s just a 3-star rating and no written review I could lampoon.

All the written reviews I have gotten so far are 5-star and say things about this book like, “life changing,” “practical,” “packed with curious ideas,” “really fun,” “playful but legit,” “highly entertaining,” “the sharpest material I’ve come across on the subject,” “funny, weird, and most of all valuable.”

If you’d like to find out more about the unique reactions of others, and how you can anticipate those:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Am I just trying to provoke unsubscribes?

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In reply to my email yesterday, marketer and long-time customer Fred Beyer writes:

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Step 1: Tell your audience there are Mavericks who are worth serving and Gooses who are not (I refrained from using the plural geese ’cause we’re referencing a nickname here after all).

Step 2: Ask your audience which one they are, so you can ignore them appropriately according to your own suggestion in the email.

From Simple Money Emails: “What people do remember is the emotional stimulation”, and here you’re letting a large part of your subscribers know they are less desirable than the rest.

Are you just trying to provoke unsubscribes here? 😂

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My primary goal yesterday was what I wrote in the email, to find out who on my list has their own email list that’s growing at a healthy clip.

At the same time, Fred raises a good point. It’s one I thought about yesterday as I wrote the email.

I decided that yes, I’m ok if a bunch of people I don’t have any plans on working with unsubscribe from my list.

It’s not about them being “undesirable” in some global, eugenic sense. It’s simply who I want to focus on working with, and who I don’t want to focus on.

Ironically, it didn’t end up happening. I’ve had just 2 unsubscribes so far from yesterday’s email.

This I think is a lesson in itself, and probably an interesting data point around the topic of natural authority.

But that’s a topic for another place, another time.

For today, if you are wondering about the reference that Fred makes, to Simple Money Emails, it’s my course on how to write simple, daily emails, like this one, which both bring in sales today, and keep readers — the ones you want — reading tomorrow as well.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

“Play whatever you have”

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The fact is, I don’t wanna be writing this email. In fact I’d rather be doing one of about a dozen other things.

Maybe it’s because, somewhere along the line in the 2,500+ previous daily editions of this newsletter, I used up all the good topic ideas I had, and I don’t really have a hot new one for today.

Maybe it’s because, by my standards, it’s very late in the day for me to be writing.

Or maybe it’s because I spent too long walking in the sun earlier today without drinking any water, and right now my eyes feel heavy and my head is throbbing.

And you know what?

Well, let me tell you what, in the words of one Tristan de Montebello, who was at one point a world champion public speaker (yes, a championship for public speaking exists), and has since started an online business that has trained thousands of people in public speaking. Says Tristan:

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Play whatever you have.

If you show up and you don’t wanna be there, they should feel that you don’t wanna be there. Play the fact you don’t wanna be there, but play it with confidence.

What’s interesting about this idea is that it works in prepared speaking as well as in all of the other areas you’re going to be in.

What people tend to do is they will show up, in any environment, and they will start leaking.

They start leaking all of their insecurities. If they were hoping they would feel confident, and they show up and they don’t… a word comes out of their mouth wrong, they start fumbling, something happens that was not supposed to happen… everything internally is going to break down.

But what if instead you could keep those insecurities inside, plug the leaks, stay in character, and play whatever it is that you are experiencing, use that energy, in a confident way?

We call it staying in character. It kind of looks like conviction.

And what it does, it sends the message to your audience that they’re okay and you’re okay.

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When I heard this a couple days ago as I listened to an interview with Tristan while massaging the elliptical at the gym, my ears perked up, for two reasons.

One reason is that this strategy, which Tristan calls “playing whatever you have,” is a topic I had planned on including in my new 10 Commandments book. I’ve found it to be a common element between the work of standup comedians, pickup artists, and hypnotists.

The topic didn’t make the cut because, well, there was space for only 10 Commandments, and I had others that I felt were stronger fit for the book.

Reason two my ears perked up was Tristan’s final sentence, about making your audience feel okay. That’s something that did make it into my book, because it’s probably the most important persuasion lesson out there, and that’s why it goes into Commandment I.

Anyways, if you’re interested in figuring out how to “stay in character” and “play whatever you have”:

Tristan’s online business for teaching people public speaking is called Ultraspeaking. They offer 30-day cohorts for getting you better with public speaking.

I’m thinking of signing up for the next one, although the $997 does make me wince. If I do sign up, I’ll have more to say about it. Meanwhile, if you want to speak better to groups, and you have $997 to spend, you can look up Ultraspeaking and see if it’s for you.

On the other hand, if you want others to treat you better, and happily go where you’d like them to go, and do what you’d like them to do, the Kindle version of my book is just $4.99, and is waiting to make you feel okay at the following link:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Can I get your help/advice on how to apply the “Commandments” from my new book?

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Reader Brooks Allisen writes in with a question I don’t know how to answer:

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Hi John,

Sounds like a real adventure you’re on Stockholm – don’t forget to try some traditional home-grown Scandinavian delicacies – they aren’t spicy like you would find in Mexico, Asia, or India.

Here’s my question:

Having studied con men, pick-up artists, and professional negotiators, what’s one principle you apply in your own marketing (that you learned from them) which most marketers ignore?

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I have tried some of the traditional home-grown Scandinavian delicacies in my trip to Stockholm… and I’ve been mighty pleased. I wouldn’t imagine Sweden to be a culinary destination but the entire week I’ve been here, but I’ve been eating well.

As for Brooks’s question… I kinda wrote an entire book about that?

I don’t know how to answer this question without giving away valuable stuff that I have in my new 10 Commandments book. I don’t wanna do this, because I put a lot of work into making the book good, and I want you to read it.

The alternative is to give away supposed “secrets” that simply weren’t good enough to make it into the book. That would make for a weak email today, which is also something I don’t wanna subject you to.

So what to do? How do I handle Brooks’s question and similar questions I’ve gotten?

Like I said, I don’t know. I hope you can help me out. In fact, I’ll even make you a deal. We can do a tit for tat.

I’m looking for examples and ideas for how to apply the “commandments” from my new 10 Commandments book to marketing, copywriting, daily work, and personal and business life.

Here’s the deal:

1. If you’ve read my new 10 Commandments book, write in and let me know how you would apply one of the commandments I cover in that book, or how you’ve seen somebody else apply one of these commandments to their marketing, copy, personal life, etc. (Just please don’t feed me back the examples I give in the book.)

2. If you do this, I will reply to you personally and tell you how I applied Commandment I just a couple weeks ago, during an affiliate promo that didn’t feel like an affiliate promo.

(In spite of over 1k people who have bought and supposedly read my new 10 Commandments book, many of whom also read these daily emails, nobody spotted me using this commandment in public, or at least nobody called me out on it.)

And I can tell you this isn’t simply a curious thing to know for the sake of collecting cool marketing ideas. It’s a legit and valuable marketing strategy that can 1) make your work easier and 2) make your affiliate promotions more successful.

Do we have a deal?

I hope so. If you want to take me up on this deal, then think a bit and reply away with your best examples of my 10 Commandments in use in the wild, or ideas for how to apply these commandments.

And if you haven’t yet read my new 10 Commandments book, you can find it, including the first commandment that I applied recently, at the following candy-colored pasture:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

1-Person Advertorial Agency: Sold out after two emails

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I got an email this morning:

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Hey John,

I just want to confirm whether the link failed or if the workshop is full.

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That’s in reference to the 1-Person Advertorial Agency workshop, which I started promoting yesterday and stopped promoting yesterday, because it filled up faster than reservations at Les Grands Buffets, when they open up once a season.

In other words, the workshop registration is now closed. You cannot pay to get into this training any more, though considering the interest, it’s possible that Thom and Sam (the guys behind this workshop) will offer something like it again in the future. Here is some of that interest demonstrated in emails I got from people who signed up:

#1: “Of everything you’ve promoted for other people since I’ve known you, this is the first one that got my attention. Here’s why…”

#2: “This looks sick. Just purchased. Looking forward to it.”

#3: “I’ve known for years advertorials are a gold mine but until now I didn’t have AI to help me crank them out. You gave me the kickstart I needed.”

I’m telling you all this — well, why am I telling you all this?

This email isn’t the place to talk about it, but you can read all about it, if you haven’t yet, in Commandment IV of my new 10 Commandments book.

I wasn’t planning on promoting that book today, but I’m left without an offer to promote, due to the success of my own promotion yesterday.

If you have dreams of managing to sell your own offer to the brim, and quickly, almost as soon as you open up your shopping cart, then Commandment IV will tell you the underlying psychology of how to do so. Here’s where you can find that:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Madoff’s secret of member management

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I was listening to a podcast yesterday about con men, and I heard the following interesting titbit:

Bernie Madoff, the hedge fund manager/operator of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, would threaten to kick out investors from his funds if they expressed doubts or asked too many questions.

(Podcasts are in general a trash source of information, so I did a bit of due diligence myself. I found a WSJ article from 2008 that corroborates this exact statement.)

Perhaps the significance of this titbit is not really clear to you. So consider for contrast how most people would handle that same situation.

Imagine that you have, say, a club or a membership or some kind of in-or-out thing that people have to pay to be on the inside of.

If a member asked you questions or expressed doubts about the value of what they are getting, what would be your natural reaction?

Think about it for a moment.

I can’t speak for you might do, but I can tell you what I might do.

I imagine my natural reaction would be answer those questions or address those doubts to the best of my ability, and maybe even to ask the member how I could make my thing better and more valuable. In effect, my reaction would be to do the best job I could selling and reselling my offer to that doubting or questioning member.

That is clearly not what Madoff did.

In fact he did the exact opposite. His approach was to appear to want to break up the sale, and kick the doubting investor out of the fund.

The result of this, as the WSJ article put it, was that “Mr. Madoff shifted investors’ fears from the risk that they might lose money to the risk they might lose out on making money.”

That’s something to ponder on, even if you are not a con man, and even if everything you do is completely ethical and above board.

In fact, I found this bit of Bernie Madoff trivia interesting because it is yet another illustration of the apocryphal 11th Commandment of con men, pick up artists, magicians, door-to-door salesmen, etc.

I give that 11th Commandment away via a link at the end of my new 10 Commandments book. In that bonus 11th Commandment, I summarize much of the book, including the underlying principle of what Madoff was doing above, in just three words of powerful influence strategy.

And like Madoff’s strategy above, my new 10 Commandments book, including that apocryphal 11th Commandment, is not only relevant to you if you have criminal tendencies. Here’s a very nice review I got about that from a new reader by the name of Joe Vigliano:

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Life changing?

Yeah, it is. Despite its unfortunate title 🙂 I almost passed on it since I don’t consider myself a con man, pick up artist, magician, etc. Can’t tell you how glad I am that I clicked Buy Now. The information John shares is invaluable for both your personal life and your professional life…especially if that professional life involves influencing others. I’m a kinesthetic reader–i do a lot of highlighting. This book is almost an entire highlight, it’s that good. The information is solid gold and it’s written in an absolutely engaging, entertaining way. If you have the paperback, the pages will be dog-eared from use. Not sure what that looks like on my Kindle. Either way, this is a book to spend time with. Lots of time.

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But you know what?

I’ve been promoting this book for a long while. I’ve been giving you testimonials and curious stories from the book. I’ve been linking to it on Amazon, over and over in my emails, for months now.

If you still haven’t gotten my book, then there’s no sense in me trying to persuade you any more. I officially throw up my hands. This book, life changing or not, is not for you.

So don’t get it. It’s too late. And if I catch you getting it, say, if I catch you signing up for that bonus 11th Commandment, then you’re OUT, off my list, for good.

The foundation that personal positioning is built on

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Back when I was researching my new 10 Commandments book, about con men, pick up artists, and among others, door-to-door salesmen, I came across a 10-minute documentary titled, “The Bronzer.”

The Bronzer is about a door-to-door salesman named Stu Larkin, who has been selling bronzed baby shoes his whole life.

(The movie came out 10+ years ago, but Larkin is still at it as far as I know.)

There weren’t any useful door-to-door selling techniques in this documentary. But there was a kind of wake-up call.

Bronzed baby shoes are nice. I guess they sell for $50 a pair? or $100? or $200? In any case, Larkin had this to say:

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The thing about selling that I’m kind of disturbed about, because I know that I’m so good at what I do, is that I think I missed my calling in something else. That I could have made millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars selling something else. Like someone would be going, “We know that guy. He’s the most renowned salesman in the world.”

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There are good techniques for positioning yourself at the top end of your market, and I want to write my next book about those.

But those good techniques are like the blueprints for building a skyscraper. The foundation of that skyscraper, without which even the most sound blueprints will result in a janky leaning tower that nobody wants to live in, is choosing which market you will be in to begin with.

Fact one:

It takes as much skill to sell to people who aren’t interested in buying or who have no money… as to sell to people who both are eager to buy and who have the money to do so. Often, it takes more skill and more work, far more, to sell to the first group.

Fact two:

If you’re selling something right now, then there’s sure to be another market where your exact skills, and maybe even your exact offers, could sell for 5x or 10x or 100x of what you’re selling for now.

Of course, it’s not an easy or light decision to switch markets and to basically set sail in an unfamiliar and possibly shark-infested sea. But it’s worth thinking about, or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I’ve been thinking about it too.

I’ll leave you with that seed for today.

Meanwhile, as that seed germinates, if you wanna see what valuable techniques of door-to-door salesman I did find, and how those tie into related fields like copywriting, standup comedy, and con games:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to be a charming cad

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Many years ago, back when I had a proper office job, I used to work with a handsome and muscular guy named Roland.

One time at lunch, a woman on our team started reaching across the table and straining to get the salt shaker, which was in front of Roland.

Roland noticed this, and reached for the salt shaker himself, as though to push it closer to the woman and make her job easier. But instead of pushing the salt shaker towards the woman, he pulled it further towards himself, and firmly out of the woman’s reach.

The woman, now fully splayed out across the table, gave out a bit of an shocked gasp and then started laughing.

(I’ve repeated this little trick several times and it’s never failed to produce the same result.)

Example two:

Keith McNally is a New York restaurateur. Back in the 1980s, he opened up a restaurant called the Odeon that became a cultural icon — it was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney’s book “Bright Lights, Big City” and in movies like American Psycho.

When McNally used to walk around the Odeon, a new customer might ask where the bathroom is. To which, McNally would smile and say, “We don’t have one.” And then he would walk away, leaving the confused costumer to wonder for a second whether that could possibly be true.

It was small details like this that made McNally’s restaurant the “in” destination, and kept people coming back over and over.

So those are two examples of how to be a charming cad.

Though it might not look like it at first, they share a common structure. Perhaps you can see the structure, or perhaps you’ve heard me talk about it before. If not, you can find it laid out and explained in chapter, I mean, Commandment IV of my new 10 Commandments book.

But I won’t give you the link to buy that.

No, I wish. Here it is:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments