Persuasion

How to push-pull prospects on your list

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A few days ago, long-time reader and personal development coach Miro Skender sent me a message with a highlighted passage from my new 10 Commandments book which says:

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Expose human beings to anything constant — even incontestably good things like compliments, security, or money — and people soon stop responding. Like Macknick and Martinez-Conde say, we need contrast to see, hear, feel, think, and pay attention. Otherwise the world becomes literally invisible.

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Miro then said how he knows this fact of human psychology well. He knows how to apply it in his work with coaching clients. But he doesn’t know how to put it to use with prospects on his list. Do I have any ideas?

It’s a good question.

Prospects get bored and leave if you expose them to a constant stream of the same — even if it’s good, valuable, well-written same. But not only that. You make fewer sales with the prospects who stay, because your emails are simply less persuasive than they could be.

I thought of how best to answer Miro’s question in an email. Should I give an example from my own previous emails? Or from a sales letter written by an A-list copywriter? Or would a metaphor be needed to really get the point across?

There are benefits to doing each, I thought. So why choose among them and risk doing a sub-optimal job?

I soon realized that answering Miro’s question properly would involve a ton of work, way too much for a daily email.

Fortunately, I remembered I had done it all already, and more, inside my now-retired Most Valuable Postcard #2, code name “Ferrari Monster.”

The background on the Most Valuable Postcard is that it was a short-lived, paid, monthly newsletter I ran back in the summer of 2022.

It was short-lived because I found it was way too much work and stress to write up something as in-depth and researched as I wanted to make each of these monthly guides to be.

I pulled the plug on Most Valuable Postcard after the second issue, but not before I got glowing reviews from a group of initial subscribers that I let in.

For example, email marketer Daniel Throssell, who was one of those early subscribers, wrote me to say after the first issue:

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Seriously though, dude, I know it’s issue #1 but this program you’ve created is amazing. You’ve honestly made me pause and reconsider some ideas about how I want to do my own newsletter because this is just so excellently executed. I love pretty much everything about how you’ve done this, from the format to the content to the value you deliver in your insights. Really impressed.

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I don’t make back issues of Most Valuable Postcard available regularly. Most Valuable Postcard #2 wasn’t available yesterday. It won’t be available tomorrow. But it is available today.

If you’d like to find out more about what’s inside, and how you can use it to push-pull the prospects on your list:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp2/

A tabloidy factoid about Dan Ferrari and Ning Li

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A few weeks ago, copywriter Tom Baines wrote me to say:

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Anyway, I’m excited for your new book, and here’s an interesting tabloidy factoid you may already be aware of: Dan Ferarri and Ning Li have both talked openly about how they first connected in a pickup artist subreddit, where Dan initially mentored Ning as a pick-up artist before eventually bringing him over into copywriting and helping him build his career here… I think it’s a fun little overlap.

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I’m sharing this as a bit of gossip in case you have connections to the copywriting industry. Ning and Dan are both well-known figures there. I never knew the background of how they met, even though I was in Dan’s small and intimate coaching program 5+ years ago.

Beyond gossip, anything worthwhile here?

I heard direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy say on multiple occasions how the top copywriters he knows all have years of “nose to nose, toes to toes” sales experience. And if you look at the famousest copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert on down to Dan Kennedy himself, all started out in direct or door-to-door sales.

But I think today the “nose to nose, toes to toes” connection has weakened, in large part because door-to-door sales has become a much rarer endeavor.

On the other hand, I know more successful copywriters who have experience with pickup than I can count on my two hands and 10 sticky fingers.

In part, that’s because equivalent social shifts — things like the Internet — which caused d2d selling to drop have also made info about pickup and seduction available to a large pool of eager men.

But it’s more than that.

There are ideas, skills, and attitudes that translate from pickup to copywriting, and vice versa, same as from copy to d2d sales, and vice versa.

All to say:

1. You might have valuable skills and experiences you are not aware of right now.

2. If you want to find out some of the connections between copywriting and d2d sales and pickup, and also seemingly unrelated but deeply connected fields like hypnosis and stage magic and standup comedy, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Reader tells me to give up on the 10 Commandments

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A couple weeks ago, after I wrote an email in which I announced the imminent release of my new 10 Commandments book, a reader decided to reply with:

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Some advice… give up on the Book of 10 and take hold on the Promise of 1 – just as you so neatly summarised in this email. 1 is so much better than 10 in that, that single promise fulfils all the old hat laws you could ever throw at it.

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I never bothered to reply to this, and the reader has since unsubscribed from my list.

That’s just as well. What follows wouldn’t be useful to him, but maybe you can benefit from the advice I was silently thinking of for this reader, which I couldn’t share for reasons that will be obvious if you read on:

Don’t tell people they’re wrong.

Particularly, don’t tell people they’re wrong if they are a couple of years into a project, the way I was with my now-released 10 Commandments book.

Even if you’re right, people have to find out on their own. And in telling them, you will only antagonize them.

Ironically enough, the very first commandment of my new 10 Commandments book is directly related to this issue.

That first commandment (of 10) goes beyond keeping mum when you’re sure somebody is making a mistake, and tells you some proactive and positive things to do in order to take advantage of the underlying human psychology, which makes people so resist being told that they are wrong.

My ex-reader won’t profit from the advice in that commandment. But you can:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

1 week, 1 review

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One week ago, I published my new 10 Commandments book. Since then, I’ve sold around 200 copies. I’ve also gotten exactly one review, a five-star one from email copywriter Anthony La Tour.

I’m grateful to Anthony for his review. He did what he could for me.

But one review? It don’t look good to have a book with one review. What gives?

A part is that this new 10 Commandments book is longer than my previous 10 Commandments book. It’s taking people longer to read. Maybe more reviews will come when a few more people finish.

Another part is that Amazon is slow to approve and propagate reviews.

A couple people have written me that they’ve submitted reviews that Amazon has not yet published. And in the UK Amazon marketplace, two good souls, copywriter Andrew Harkin and craftsman writer James Carran, both gave me nice 5-star reviews, which are not yet shown in the US Amazon store.

And finally, still another part is that effective email marketing is to blame.

About a dozen of my readers who have audiences of their own have promoted my book to their lists, which is a kind of review that doesn’t show up on Amazon. Plus another dozen or so people have replied to my daily emails to tell me that they like, love, or adore the new book.

I’m grateful to everyone who has written me or promoted my book or reviewed it.

Now let me share with you my favorite review, which has come not from a copywriter, not a list owner, not a direct marketer, but from one of my best friends, Sam.

Sam and I have known each other for 20+ years from our time subsisting on popcorn and beer while studying computer science at the birthplace of NLP, the University of California at Santa Cruz.

During those 20+ years, Sam and I have mostly maintained a kind of dry, sarcastic, bantery interaction with each other, which tends to shy away from emotional confessions and naked sincerity. But here’s what Sam wrote me yesterday:

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I just finished your book. I love it. Yes, yes, just like your mom’s praise you think I’m saying this because you’re a good guy and a better friend but it is really fucking good. I am impressed that you finished it and impressed by how good it is. The stories are great, the pacing is great, and even people that didn’t know anything about it would find it intriguing. I’m imagining if we came across it in the UCSC library return cart or at an Airbnb we would be intrigued enough to crack it open and captivated enough to finish it. BJ all around! [“BJ” is Sam’s shorthand for “brilliant job.”]

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I’ve confessed before how to my non-entrepreneurial brain, praise from readers is more much meaningful than sales made. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it is a fact.

(I’d be much more successful if I only cared more about money, but like Rich Schefren says, you gotta put your business goals ahead of your personal development goals.)

Sam’s praise was particularly meaningful. And in case you’re wondering whether this might possibly have anything to do with you, except being a shameless plug for my new book, here’s the basic idea:

Ultimately, most people care about the praise and respect of others above almost all other things. Even the people who care much more about money than I do really just care about money as a means to get that praise and respect.

Maybe this is obvious to you, or maybe it seems trivial. What might not be as obvious or trivial is how this very fundamental human need for praise and respect translates into specific episodes of influence, across various disciplines ranging from boardroom negotiation, copywriting, screenwriting, and yes, confidence games.

In case you would like to dig into this topic a little more deeply, so you can apply it to your business or everyday interactions, you can find it drilled and fracked inside Commandment I of my new book. Commandment I, because it’s that fundamental. To find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

God I hate marketing

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I was at the gym yesterday, listening to a Spanish-language podcast — two likeable and chill Mexican guys, Hector and Beto, having a conversation in Spanish about ordinary things.

Halfway through the episode, Hector said the Spanish equivalent of, “And now we have to tell you about our new sponsor.”

I ran to my phone in desperation so I could skip ahead before hearing anything about the sponsor. I still heard the guys continuing the conversation for a bit, now about a new language-learning app.

After I skipped past the sponsored content, I thought, how odd. I mean, I listen to this podcast for the comprehensible input, and because I like these two guys. What does it matter if they’re talking about the traffic in Mexico City versus some new language-learning app?

I recently had a conversation with my friend Sam. Somehow that conversation veered to the 90s TV drama My So-Called Life, which was supposed to represent the lives of teenagers at the time.

I remember the cool, hot guy in that show, played by Jared Leto, casually mentioning in one episode that he was going to a Dinosaur Jr. concert. That made my teen self dismiss Dinosaur Jr. for the next 15 years. I figured if they were being plugged on TV, they must be shit. (Later, I somehow rediscovered Dinosaur Jr. and thought they were amazing.)

The point is, I hate marketing. I use the word “hate” because it’s adequate to represent the strength of my feeling here. I hate having somebody step into my life and tell me what to think or do, or worse yet, helpfully “suggest” it in a way that seems altruistic but that is of course self-interested.

And yet…

I have frequently bought stuff because I was marketed to. I have bought courses, subscriptions, clothes, food, shoes, and books because of marketing.

I’ve also bought experiences — hotel rooms, trips, rental cars, conferences, and one time, a hot-air-baloon ride — because somebody marketed it to me.

I’ve probably made even more fundamental choices in life — universities to apply to, cities to live in, careers to choose, attitudes to believe in — based on marketing.

In each of those cases, had I thought about the marketing at all, I would have been grateful for the guidance and help, at least at the moment of purchase, and if the actual product or service turned out to be good, later as well.

Aaron Sorkin once talked about good manipulation vs. bad manipulation. “There’s no difference,” said Sorkin. “It’s only when manipulation is obvious, then it’s bad manipulation.”

I used to think Sorkin was right. I don’t think so any more.

I don’t think it’s about obvious vs. non-obvious.

Good manipulation is simply the manipulation that ends up working. At least that’s what I can see in myself.

When somebody successfully manipulates me, I backwards rationalize and justify and tell myself that I am grateful and this person is cool for cluing me in and guiding and taking me to some place better or at least new.

Bad manipulation, on the other hand, is the kind that ends up not working.

No matter how helpful, funny, cute, informative the manipulation aims to be, I end up interpreting it at best as a distraction, at worst as an insult to my intelligence and self-sovereignty.

All that’s to say, if you want to influence others — and unless you’re a Carmelite nun, who lives according to a vow of total obedience, then you try to influence others most of the time — you might as well become effective at it.

It’s not only a matter of getting what you want in life more often, but also of being seen as a cool, helpful person more often, rather than as a distraction or a “manipulator.”

And with that, I’d like to remind you of my new 10 Commandments book. Much of the book deals with techniques to overcome people’s natural tendency to resist and react being moved — even though they will end up happy and grateful if you do succeed in moving them.

Specifically, Commandments I-V, Commandments VIII-IX, and the apocryphal 11th commandment that I give away as a bonus at the end of the book, are all one way or another about this tricky and inevitable conflict in human nature.

In case you haven’t gotten a copy of my new book yet:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Somebody has beat me to the 10 Commandments of Con Men

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As you might know, I have been working, toiling, grabulating for the past two years on my new book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

I had a minor heart attack earlier when I discovered that somebody has already beat me to the core concept. An Austrian con man named Victor Lustig, who lived and scammed in the early 20th century and who apparently sold the Eiffel Tower twice (!), apparently kept a list of 10 Commandments of Con Men. Here’s old Victor’s list:

1. Be a patient listener

2. Never look bored

3. Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them

4. Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones

5. Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other person shows a strong interest

6. Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown

7. Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually)

8. Never boast – just let your importance be quietly obvious

9. Never be untidy

10. Never get drunk

Are you impressed? Yes? No?

All I can tell you is that, after I read Lustig’s 10 Commandments, I personally took a big sigh of relief. I found his 10 Commandments rather dull and uninspiring, and fortunately, I found that there’s zero overlap (well, minus the hinting at sex talk) between his commandments and the 10 Commandments I have in my new book.

Most importantly, I was reminded once again that the value is almost never in the ideas (ie. commandments) themselves, but in how those ideas are presented, illustrated, and made to shine.

That’s why it took me so long to complete my book. And complete it I did.

I can tell you that, following two years of ups and downs, missed deadlines, and a few dozen readers writing me messages to the effect of “done is better than perfect,” I am proud and a little nervous to announce that my book will finally be published.

When?

Tomorrow.

Why not today?

Well, maybe Lustig was on to something. Don’t pry into my personal circumstances (I’ll tell you all eventually). Meanwhile, I have nothing to promote to you today — but I will tomorrow.

Platform is magic

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I went for a walk this morning and as I was dodging the puddles from last night’s rain, I listened to a podcast, a conversation between James Schramko and Dean Jackson.

In case those names are not familiar to you, both belong to Internet marketers who have been in the business a combined 50+ years.

Both James and Dean have made many millions of dollars for themselves and many more for their clients and customers.

Whatever. The point is simply that, in the little corner of the Internet where I live, these guys are influential and established and respected. I’ve known about each for many years, and I’ve been paying attention to both intensely over the past year.

This morning, while listening to the podcast, James Schramko talked about changes he had made to his business following the advice of his friend, a guy named Kory Basaraba.

That caught my attention and maybe made me step into a puddle.

The fact is, I’ve known Kory for years. A few years ago, back when I was still doing freelance copywriting stuff, I even worked with him.

Through this experience, I know Kory is smart, successful, and established. But on hearing his name being mentioned on a podcast, by two people I follow, I felt some sort of electric jolt.

I don’t know how wide of a reach this Schramko/Dean podcast episode might get. Maybe a few thousand people, maybe tens of thousands? In any case it’s not Joe Rogan.

It doesn’t matter. My opinion of Kory, while it was positive before, suddenly jumped. He got the warm bright glow of a star in my eyes.

Of course, I’m a hardened cynic and a bit of a wizard when it comes to knowing influence spells. So I quickly shook my head to clear my mind from this strange persuasion.

But I wanted to share this story with you, such as it is, for a bit of motivation.

I don’t understand what it is about having a platform. Maybe I’ll figure it out one day.

Right now, my best answer is that having a platform is simply magic.

A few hundred or a few thousand people around the world listen to you. It’s not a tremendous amount of reach or power. But it doesn’t matter.

The very fact of having a platform, of speaking to a group of people, gives you status and authority and charisma, and even the power to transfer that to others, simply by mentioning their name. That’s magic.

The motivating part is that, if you haven’t done so already, you can do this same thing for yourself.

Nobody’s stopping you from starting a podcast, or writing an email newsletter, today.

Like I said, you don’t need a tremendous overall audience to have a tremendous influence on the people who do listen or read to what you have to say. I can vouch for that from personal experience, having been both on top of the platform at certain times, and in the audience, looking up, at other times.

I know nothing about podcasting. But I know something about newsletters. Such as for example, that the more often you send emails, the greater your influence over the people in your audience.

And with that in mind, let me point you to a service that can help make it easier to send something every day, so you can work your magic quickly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Солярис

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Last night, I went to the movies. By myself. At 10pm, which is pretty much my bedtime.

First came one trailer — some Iraq war thriller with Matt Damon as a solider yelling at other soldiers and lots of explosions and jets swooping in and rapid-fire editing between more yelling and explosions and gunfire.

Then came another trailer — a horror movie about vampires in the deep south, with bloody mouths and fangs and a vampire banging his head on the door of a wood cabin, asking to be let in, while the non-vampires inside cower and transfer their fear to the audience.

And then, after about six total minutes of this adrenaline-pumping overstimulation, the screen got dark. A Bach piece on organ started playing and a barebones title card showed the name of the movie:

Солярис

… or Solaris, if you can’t read that. A three-hour-long science fiction movie from 1972. In Russian, which I don’t speak. With Spanish subtitles, which I can barely read before they disappear. The movie opens up with a five-minute sequence of a man walking next to a lake, without any dialogue.

I’ve seen Solaris twice before, years ago. A few days ago, I finished reading the science fiction novel on which it’s based. When I saw it was playing at the local old-timey movie theater, I decided I would violate my usual bedtime and go see it again, and on the big screen.

I’m not trying to sell you on Solaris. All I really want to highlight is the contrast that was so obvious between those new Hollywood trailers and the start of the 1972 Russian movie. It reminded me of something I read in William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade:

“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”

Goldman was writing in a different era. He was contrasting movie writing to TV writing.

At the beginning of a movie, Goldman said, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.

Things have changed since Goldman wrote the above. Today, all Hollywood movies have become like TV. That doesn’t eliminate the fact that different formats allow you to do different things, and that not every movie needs to start with a heart-pounding sequence of bloody vampires banging their heads on the door.

The bigger point is, just because you know a trick, this doesn’t require you to use it at every damn opportunity. Holding back can in fact can make the show better.

A year ago, I read a book titled Magic And Showmanship, about… magic and showmanship. The author of that book, a magician named Henning Nelms, kept coming back to a principle he called conservation.

Conservation is keeping from overselling what you’ve got, and from making yourself out to be more skilled or powerful than absolutely necessary for the effect in question.

It’s a lesson that can apply to a lot of showmanship, including showmanship in print.

Anyways, I suspect nobody will take me up on a recommendation to read Nelms’s Magic And Showmanship, but recommend it I will. In order to sell it to you, I can only say that last year, I was even thinking of taking the ideas from this book and turning them into a full-blown course or training about running email promos, because I found the ideas so transferable.

In case you’re a curious type, or in case you simply want new ideas for running email promos:

https://bejakovic.com/nelms

The dark side of social proof

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Here’s a story of a lovely refund:

Some time ago, I promoted an affiliate offer. As with all affiliate offers I promote, I made sure it’s a great offer I can fully get behind.

A guy from my list, somebody who regularly replied to my emails but never bought anything, bought this offer via my affiliate link. Then a few days later, he refunded it.

That’s part of the deal. Sometimes people buy, and if you offer a money back guarantee, sometimes they refund.

The following however is not part of the deal:

That refunding customer started writing me emails. First he explained that the course he bought didn’t have that “wow factor” and that’s why he refunded. He also asked what I would have done in the same situation?

In a future email, he complained that the course creator wasn’t replying to emails and inquiries quickly enough.

And finally, once the refunding reader got his refund, he claimed he couldn’t see the money landing in his bank account (even though the money was refunded as per ThriveCart). He kept writing me updates about the supposedly pending refund for a couple months.

Maybe the point of my story is not really clear, so let me spell it out:

The point is social proof.

People take an action or make a decision.

They then have to create the reality for themselves that this was the right thing to do.

And since we are social animals, that means getting others to agree with us and feed that back to us, otherwise it’s not really real.

That’s what I felt was going on here. This refunding customer seemed to have no rancor for me for promoting an offer that he decided to refund. Quite the opposite. He was writing me messages for months, trying to get me in some way to agree that either the course or the course creator were to blame, and that he was right in his decision.

Maybe you know the famous story of a UFO cult who was expecting a UFO to land in Chicago on Dec 21 1954, and whisk away the believers before a huge tidal wave wiped out the face of the Earth.

December 21 came and went. No UFO came. No tidal wave came either.

The UFO cult was headed by a woman named Dorothy Martin. She was in contact with the aliens via automatic writing (and sometimes over the phone).

In the hours after the supposed UFO arrival failed to materialize, Martin got the message that the aliens had decided to spare the Earth because of the good work of the UFO cult in spreading the word.

But here’s the really curious thing:

The UFO cult, which until then had been very secretive, very hostile to publicity, very closed to outsiders, suddenly went on a PR blitz, announcing to the world the good news. It was no longer enough for the cultists to be in direct contact with powerful aliens who had decided to spare the Earth from destruction — everybody else had to know about it too.

So that’s the dark side of social proof. We don’t just rely on others’ experiences to help guide our beliefs and decisions. We also seek to convince others that our beliefs and past experiences are right.

That’s all I got for you today. I realize it’s a somehow nasty thing to talk about, a bit destabilizing and inhuman. A positive way to spin it is that our reality is co-created with others, and that you have the opportunity to impact and guide that.

Anyways, if you want to see social proof in action, I’ve got about six pages’ worth of it below in the form of testimonials, creating a reality that my Daily Email Habit is a wonderful service, maybe the best service in the world, at least if you have an email list. I believe it, and I really want you to believe it too, so please click through and start reading:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Operation Mincemeat

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Today being April 30th it’s a particularly good day to tell you about Operation Mincemeat. Here’s a debrief I read about it a few weeks ago:

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Early on the morning of April 30, 1943, a floating body was discovered off the southern coast of Spain. Retrieved by a fisherman, it was brought to the city of Huelva and identified as Captain William Martin, of the British Royal Marines. A briefcase chained to the corpse contained documents indicating that the Allies planned to advance on Greece and Sardinia — intel that the Nazi-sympathizing Spanish authorities passed on to the Germans.

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The Germans decided to act on the intel, and shifted their troops to Greece and Sardinia. But the allies attacked neither Greece nor Sardinia.

Instead, the Allies attacked and easily took unguarded Sicily, which was their plan all along. The taking of Sicily in turn opened the door to mainland Italy… which led to the overthrow of Mussolini… which fractured the Axis… which shifted the balance of World War II.

As you might have guessed, Operation Mincemeat was a fakeout all along.

The corpse of “Captain William Morris” was really that of Glyndwr Michael, a London tramp who had died some days earlier by eating rat poison.

Michael’s corpse was transported by submarine to the waters off southern Spain, dressed up in a Royal Marines uniform, and left to float. The documents in the briefcase chained to the corpse were all forged by British military intelligence to make the Germans think they had stumbled onto something real.

I’m sharing this with you because 1) it’s curious and was new to me, so maybe it’s new to you too, and 2) because it’s applicable in your business as well, even if you don’t have a corpse at hand and even if you’re not engaged in a historic struggle with the Nazis.

In fact, this story ties in great to a lead magnet I have devised to go with my new 10 Commandments book, which is an extra, apocryphal 11th Commandment I’ll be giving new readers who sign up to my list. (If you’re an existing reader, you’ll be able to get it too.)

Some of the early reviewers of my book have gotten back to me. I’m eagerly integrating their feedback into the final draft of the book. I’m both excited and relieved to hear that, in spite of niggles here and there, the overall impression of the book has been very positive so far.

And so, it looks like, after a years-long and grueling struggle with this book, the balance has shifted. May 2025 will finally see the publication of this new book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

Speaking of, I have an offer to make you, or maybe a favor to ask.

Do you have an audience of your own? A newsletter, an online community, a local book club or bingo group?

What I want is for you to promote my book when it comes out. Of course, that means nothing to you and does nothing for you. I don’t know what I can offer you to make it worth your while to promote my book when it comes out, but I am open to all kinds of ideas, from straightforward to outlandish.

If you are open to it as well, at least in theory, hit reply. Let’s talk, and maybe we can figure something out that works for both of us.