Mental Shortcuts

“sold out”

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Yesterday, marketer Justin Goff sent out an email with the subject line “sold out”. The body copy immediately explained what was sold out:

Just a heads up, nearly half of the 250 swipe files that are available in the special sale going on today have already been taken…

So they will be sold out soon.

Here are a few things I, and probably many other people who are on Justin’s list, know after this email:

1. Justin has been promoting this affiliate offer for a few days.

2. So have several other marketers with large lists, including some with the largest lists in the copywriting/IM niche.

3. After several days of steady emailing by all those marketers, going out to tens of thousands of people in total, fewer than 125 sales of the affiliate offer have been made. That probably translates to a less than 0.1% conversion rate — and maybe as low as 0.025%.

I don’t know how many sales, and more importantly, how much money, Justin made with this “sold out” email. Maybe he did great. And maybe I will look like a fool for sticking my nose into things that I don’t know anything about.

With that in mind, let me say that Justin’s email is a violation of a fundamental rule of copywriting.

Perhaps the most fundamental rule of them all.

It’s a rule I was exposed to in the mythical webinar training that A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos put on back in 2018. Parris repeated this rule, over and over, while talking about how he evaluates his own copy, and while critiquing many pieces of student-submitted copy. The rule is this:

“Does it help your case, hurt your case, or is it neutral? Only keep it in if it helps your case.”

This rule might seem blindingly obvious. But as Justin’s email above shows, even smart and successful marketers will break this rule — because they get rushed, careless, or greedy.

When I read Justin’s email, my first impression was, “Fewer than 125 copies sold? This must not be a very attractive offer.” My second impression was, “Even if it’s a fine offer, I’ve got plenty of time to get it, since at this rate it won’t sell out soon — in spite of Justin’s alarmist subject line.”

Again, I might be sticking my hoof in my snout by talking about a promotion where I don’t know the actual sales numbers, and one which is still going on.

But the bigger point stands. Does it help your case, hurt your case, or is it neutral?

Anyways, on to my own promotion:

Nearly half of the infinity+ digital copies of my Most Valuable Email course have already been sold.

The remaining infinity+ copies are sure to sell out soon. So starting tomorrow, I will turn my great eye elsewhere, and start promoting my twice-born Copy Riddles program.

That means you might not hear from me about my Most Valuable Email program for a while, even though it will continue to be available for sale.

But hold on—

Is this any kind of way to do urgency? Should the fact that I won’t be pitching MVE for a while make you want to buy it today?

No. Not unless you’re the type to get activated by “sold out” subject lines and other transparent scarcity tactics.

On the other hand, if you like the basic promise of Most Valuable Email — “turn ordinary and rather boring emails into something clever and cool” — then today is as good a day as any to start down that path. ​​And maybe even better than any later day — because if you get going now, you will start seeing the benefits of this little trick in action sooner.

Whatever the case, if you are interested, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The post mortem of my “wanted” ad

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Gary Halbert advised all would-be marketing millionaires to take out a classified ad that reads:

“Housewives wanted to address envelopes at home. You must have a typewriter or good handwriting. Call 000-0000.”

That’s good advice still, whether you are a DM marketer, looking for that first-person experience of what getting sprayed by a firehose of response feels like… or a freelancer searching for insights on what the world is like on the other side of the looking glass, when you send in your own job application.

Last Friday, I sent out an email with the subject line,

“Wanted: Competent human to do some monkey work”

In that email, I made a job offer.

In spite of trying to make the job sound as unattractive as I could, I got two dozen applications, mostly from people who were clearly overqualified, but who applied nonetheless.

After looking over all the applications, I ended up hiring somebody yesterday. And I can tell you this:

The content of this guy’s application was largely irrelevant.

The price he quoted me was more relevant, but still secondary.

What really made me hire him is that I had interacted with him a hundred times before. He has bought a bunch of my offers — Most Valuable Email, Most Valuable Postcard, Copy Riddles, which he has gone through twice. He has participated in QA calls, contests, and masterminds I put on, and has given me testimonials before.

In other words, I already knew this guy well, as well as I know anybody from my list.

My point isn’t that you should buy any and all offers I put out, though you certainly should do that.

My point is simply that my brain, and from what I’ve seen, everybody else’s brain, is constantly looking for shortcuts.

The fact is, I don’t know that guy I hired will 100% do a perfect job, or a better job than the dozen or so people who offered to do the same job for less money.

It doesn’t matter.

I had to make a decision. And I was looking for easy ways to do that. You could say I was clutching at straws.

And that’s how most people make most decisions — largely irrationally, just trying to put the unpleasant task behind them. Which can work in your favor — if you put a bit of thought into how to give your prospects mental shortcuts, and how to make their decision process easier and less unpleasant.

Anyways, getting back to Gary Halbert. Gary advised people to take out that classified job ad because “Spectators Can Never Understand What It Is To Be A Player!” Gary explained in more detail:

“You know what the hardest thing it is for a caring teacher like me to do? I’ll tell you… it’s not to explain something to my audience. That’s relatively easy. No, my friend, the real challenge is to make my message real to that audience.”

Which fittingly enough is one of the core ideas behind my Most Valuable Email training. The MVE trick is all about making your email real to your audience — and to yourself.

In case you’d like to get the Most Valuable Email, and maybe interact with me in some way over it, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Dan Kennedy corrects a mistake I’ve made in my copywriting career

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Let me tell you a copywriting client experience that still stings:

About two years into my freelancing career, I got the opportunity to write some emails for RealDose Nutrition.

​​RealDose is an 8-figure supplement company, started by a couple of direct marketers and an MD. They sell actually legit supplement products — their USP is right there in the name.

Long story short – I did a good job with those emails. I even tripled results in one of their main email funnels.

Impressed with those results, the CEO of RealDose asked me to write a sales letter next, for their probiotics product.

The only problem was, at this stage of my career, I had never written a full-blown sales letter.

​​What to do?

​​I took Gary Bencivenga’s olive oil sales letter and analyzed the structure. I wrote something that looked nothing like Gary’s letter, but was the exact same thing under the hood.

I gave it to the guys at RealDose. They shrugged their shoulders. They copy seemed okay… but I guess they weren’t sold. Because as far as I know, the sales letter was never tested.

Some time later, I got that sales letter critiqued by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. Parris said the body copy was fine. But the hook? The headline and the lead?

Parris used my headline and lead to publicly illustrate what an uninteresting promise looks like. “Are you the first person on the plant to ever sell a probiotic?” Parris asked me. He laughed and shook his head.

I never got another chance to write anything else for RealDose. I always wonder how my career might have gone had I done a better job with that big shot that I got.

I bring this up because today, I made a list of 10 mistakes I’ve made in copywriting career.

That RealDose sales letter, with the uninteresting promise in the headline, was no. 1.

No 4. was that this newsletter, the one you are reading now, is actually the third iteration of my daily email newsletter.

​​I deleted the previous two versions.

Version one was very much like this, and ran for a few months in 2016.

​​​​Some time later, I deleted it because I started writing about crypto marketing.

​​Then in 2018, I deleted that crypto daily email newsletter… and started writing this current iteration, starting over where I had left off two years earlier, and wasting a bunch of time, effort, and opportunity in the process.

So those are mistakes no. 1 and no. 4.

And then there’s mistake no. 7.

Mistake no. 7 is that i didn’t treat my freelancing career as a business for way too long. And when I say that, I might not mean what you think I mean.

For example, I always paid a lot of attention to the prices I was charging clients. And I worked hard on getting those prices higher.

I was also always on the hunt for new leads and new ways of getting leads.

And yet, at the same time, I didn’t ask myself, until way too late, “How can I promote this? How can I make a spectacle out of this? How can I get this offer that I have — meaning myself and my copywriting services — in front of a much bigger audience?”

Maybe what I mean is best summarized by Dan Kennedy, the very smart and successful marketer I’ve mentioned a few times in the past few days. Dan once said:

“Your growth will have less to do with your talent, your skill, your expertise or your deliverables than it will your ability and willingness to create and exploit your own status.”

Dan claims this applies regardless of what business you are in, whether you are selling services or products. In fact, Dan gave the above advice to a guy with a software company.

Which brings me to my offer to you for today.

How would you like a free consulting day with Dan Kennedy?

A daylong consult with Dan normally costs $18k. But you can get it for free.

Well, fine, not the whole thing.

But you can get three highlights of the consulting day that Dan gave to marketer Mike Cappuzzi.

The fact is, I told you one of the highlights of that consult day above. But in case you think a little bit of Dan’s $18k/day wisdom could benefit your business, here’s where you can read Dan’s other two consulting day highlights:

https://mikecapuzzi.com/an-insiders-glimpse-into-a-consulting-day-with-dan-kennedy/

I will attempt to make you salivate with this email

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Some time ago, I sent an email with the nonsense subject line:

“The real secret to how I survive the biggest mistake you are making the fastest way”

That was in response to a message I got from a mysterious reader. He sent me an email with no body, with just a file attached. The file had seven “tested and proven” subject line templates, which I mashed together to produce that monster above.

A bit of fun to prove a point. I thought that would be the end of it.

Except, a few days ago, my mysterious “won’t even say hello” correspondent popped up again. Another empty-bodied email. Another file attached.

This file promised to teach me “How to Make Your Reader Salivate Over Your Offer.”

The file described a sales technique. I won’t repeat it here. While it’s solid sales advice, it really won’t make anyone anywhere salivate.

I mean, really.

​​Have you ever found yourself literally salivating at a bit of sales copy? Staring at the screen, your lips parted, your tongue lolling around your mouth, having to swallow hard every few seconds?

Of course not. That kind of physical reaction is impossible to produce with words alone. Right?

Right. Or maybe not right. ​Because here’s a passage that this “make your reader salivate” stuff brought to my mind:

​For instance, just think of the word lemon, or get a quick image of a lemon and notice your response.

​​Now see a richly yellow 3-D image of the same lemon, and imagine slicing it in half with a sharp knife. Listen to the sound the knife makes as it slices through, and watch some of the juice squirt out, and small the lemon scent released.

​​Now reach out to pick up one of the lemon halves and bring it slowly to your mouth to taste it. Listen to the sound that your teeth make as hey bite into the juicy pulp, and feel the sour juice run into your mouth. Again, notice your response. Are you salivating a bit more than you did when you just had a word or a brief image of a lemon?

This passage comes from a self-help book. It’s in a chapter on getting motivated. It describes a technique that’s supposed to make you want an outcome more. Because as Seth Godin wrote a while ago:

Humans are unique in their ability to willingly change. We can change our attitude, our appearance and our skillset.

But only when we want to.

The hard part, then, isn’t the changing it.

It’s the wanting it.

I don’t know if the lemon technique above works in making you want to change. At least for the long term. But it doesn’t matter much.

My point is not how to achieve real change in yourself… but how to achieve the feeling of possible change in other people.

Because if you are in the business of direct response marketing… then much of your work consists of spiking up people’s feelings just long enough that they step out of the warm bathtub of their usual inactivity.

And that’s why popular self-help books might have a lot to offer you.

Which brings me to an offer that will almost certainly not make you salivate. In fact, this offer will probably not interest you or tempt you in the least.

Because my offer to you is the book from which I took that lemon passage above.

​​I already promoted that book extensively in this newsletter. It’s called NLP, and it was written by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.

I promoted this book previously as a self-help book.

The value of this book as such is dubious, as is the value of all self-help books.

But the value of this book as a guide on how to stimulate the feeling of change and progress… of motivation and inspiration… in yourself and other people — that value is certain.

And for any marketer or copywriter who is willing and able to read the book as such, the book will be delicious. Maybe even mouthwatering. Figuratively speaking of course. In case you want it:

https://bejakovic.com/nlp

I’ve decided to let Adam Neumann act as my personal advisor on all personal branding and positioning matters

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A few weeks ago, a friend clued me into an amusingly shocking fact:

Adam Neumann is back.

You might remember Neumann as the former CEO of WeWork. ​​Handsome, charismatic, and prophet-like, Neumann built a $40-billion company, only to have it all crash down as the WeWork IPO failed. ​​In the wake of that, news reports exposed WeWork’s flimsy business model and the cult-like culture that fluffed it up for investors.

After Neumann was forced out as CEO, he was disgraced in the media as a grifter, hype artist, and woo-woo crackpot whose delusional self-belief infected others. “Serves you right for getting so big so fast,” cackled the little men at the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair, “you’ll never work in this town again!”

Well, like I said, Neumann is back. Is it really any surprise?

He now has a new company, something to do with climate and crypto. He has raised $70 million for it already.

Will this new MacGuffin turn into another multi-billion-dollar venture?

Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. One thing is for sure:

Adam Neumann does some very important things very right.

For example:

Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson once said that Neumann reminded him of Jobs. Some time later, Neumann claimed that Isaacson might write his biography. (Isaacson apparently never considered writing such a book.)

Another example:

Jamie Dimon, the billionaire CEO of JP Morgan Chase, lead a round of investment into WeWork. As a result, Neumann called Dimon his own “personal banker” and said Dimon might leave JPMorgan to run Neumann’s family investment office one day. (Dimon apparently never had any plans to leave JPMorgan.)

You might think these are examples of braggartly and grasping status-building. But I think it goes much deeper than that. I will have more to say about it, and probably soon.

For now, I’d like to announce that I’ve decided to allow Adam Neumann to act as my personal advisor on all matters personal branding and positioning. I respect Adam’s skills and instincts within this sphere. And I always look to surround myself with the best advisors, associates, and underlings. Adam is definitely fit to be among my inner circle.

It might take a bit of time for word to reach Adam that I have decided to let him become a trusted advisor to me.

In the meantime, I will continue to offer you the chance to transform your own business through my consulting service.

Once Adam joins my team, I might raise my consulting rate to $100k/hr and a 20% stake of your business. Or I might just drop the consulting and focus on my own more lucrative projects. We will see what input Adam has to give me on the matter.

For now though, you have the opportunity to have me help you elevate your offer, wow your clients and customers, and even position yourself as a prophet in your industry. In case you want a piece of the action:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting

I spent 120+ hours to uncover this marketing secret for you

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Do you remember the TV show Lost?

It was a big cultural phenomenon some 15-20 years ago. A planeful of people crash on a mysterious island. They have to fend for themselves while uncovering the island’s many bizarre secrets.

I watched Lost a few years after it came out. I did it because my girlfriend at the time insisted. She insisted because everybody else insisted.

So we got into bed one night and we watched the pilot episode.

Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

“Do we really need to keep watching this?” I asked my girlfriend.

“Yes! Everybody says it’s sooo good.”

So we watched another episode. More of the same.

And a third episode. ​

​​Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

But bit by bit, I was getting sucked in.

​​I was starting to like or dislike the various characters. I formed theories about the island’s bizarre secrets and the show’s unresolved cliffhangers. I looked forward to settling into bed each night for yet another episode.

And that’s how I ended up wasting about a hundred hours of my life, watching the remaining 120+ episodes of Lost. Even though my initial experience summed up what each of those episodes were all about:

Beautiful setting. Good-looking actors. Some ridiculous cliffhangers.

I recently talked about Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind. Here’s one curious thing from that book that got to me:

“It is generally the most disinterested spectator who is the hardest to fool. Those who watch less end up seeing more.”

Brown was talking about doing magic. Apparently, a drunk at the bar who is not paying attention to the magician on stage will spot the sleight much more easily than an attentive audience member who is focused on the magician and who is determined to catch the trick.

That’s because, as Brown says, magic is about “entering into a relationship with a person whereby you can lead him, economically and deftly, to experience an event as magical.”

As in magic, so in marketing.

Except you might already be a little sick of being told that marketing is all about the relationship.

And the fact is, what I’m telling you about is both more and less than a relationship. You can see some of the stuff I mean in my Lost history above. Social proof and pressure… a sufficiently tight curiosity gap… an attractive or inviting selling context.

Or, in a few simple but powerful words:

“One prime objective of all advertising is to heighten expectations.”

And with that, I’d like to promote a book to you. And it’s NOT Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind.

Instead, it’s one of the top five marketing books I would recommend to anyone…

It’s part of A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos’s mandatory reading for copywriters who want to make it into the top 10% in just a year…

And it’s where I got the quote above about that prime objective. I spotted that quote on, I believe, my third re-reading of this book.

Of course, there’s a lot more in this book besides this one quote.

Like horses. And beer. And ketchup. If you’d like to read more:

https://bejakovic.com/lost

It’s okay to open this email

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Here are some intimate facts about my personal life right now:

I have two friends visiting and staying with me. Two nights ago, the three of us went out to dinner. The food wasn’t great. But it sure was toxic.

At least that’s how I explain the sudden onset of nausea and high fever that hit me a few hours later, when I got home and went to bed.

Each time I turned between the sheets, I thought I might throw up. I also burned feverishly throughout the night, and got almost no sleep.

I spent most of the following day on the couch, taking cat naps, only eating paracetamols to bring my body temperature back into normalish range.

Maybe you say this doesn’t sound like a typical case of food poisoning.

Maybe you are right.

But what still makes me suspect the dinner was that within another 24 hours, I was completely fine.

No more fever. No more frightened stomach. Nothing except a little lingering tiredness.

In fact, I was so fully fine that by the end of that second day I considered going to the gym.

Sure, I wasn’t thrilled at the idea. I hardly ever am. But I felt guilty at already missing a day.

“I will do it,” I said to one of my friends, who was sitting on the couch next to me. “I will go to the gym.”

This friend, a dominant Turkish girl, looked at me crossly.

“What! Don’t go to the gym. Your body needs to recover. Besides, you didn’t really eat anything for the past 24 hours. You need fuel if you will go to the gym!”

I smiled and nodded at how right she is. I concluded that I should follow her wise advice and skip the gym. Which was convenient, because it’s what I wanted to do all along.

You might see how this story lends itself to persuasion and influence. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “There is power in issuing permission slips.”

Speaking of which:

I found that bit of “persuasion slip” wisdom on the bottom of page 47 of a huge 270-page document called,

“Dan Kennedy’s Million Dollar Resource & Sample Book”

I don’t know how much Dan originally sold this “Million-Dollar Sample Book” for. But I do know that it’s available for free as a bonus to Brian Kurtz’s very affordable book Overdeliver.

But in case you are quickly backing away from me right now, let me reassure you:

You might legitimately feel that buying Brian’s Overdeliver, and getting access to a few metric tons of high-quality marketing advice in the form of bonuses, has both its good and bad sides.

The good side is that it’s clearly an attractive offer. Brian’s book costs something like $12. And the bonuses that Brian gives away have sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

That’s the good side. The bad side is that:
​​
Almost certainly, you already have a mountain of good marketing advice sitting on your laptop right now, unconsumed, unloved, and unimplemented.

If that bothers you, I can telly you that I have the same. I have a ton of marketing content I have paid for but still haven’t done anything with.

Even so, I still encourage you to check out Brian’s Overdeliver collection.

In part, that’s because it is such a valuable hangarful of information. And because it is such an incredible deal.

And also, because I will make it easy for you to get value out of Brian’s offer. Here’s the deal:

1. Get Overdeliver

2. Get the bonuses using the form on Brian’s page below

3. Open up the Dan Kennedy Sample Book and go to page 47, where it says “There is power in issuing permission slips”

4. Send me an email, with the sentence immediately preceding that “permission slips” sentence

I will then tell you the most valuable and interesting thing I have personally learned out of that entire 270-page sample book, and possibly out of entire Overdeliver collection. Because I have gone through the entire massive collection, each part of it, and I have taken notes.

So here’s the link to get started. ​​Go ahead. ​​It’s okay:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

How to write for influence

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A while back, while pondering lazily how I could become more successful in life, I came across the article:

“How To Be Successful”

“Hmmm maybe I will read this article,” I said to myself, “and it will tell me the secret I have been missing.”

It looked like a good bet.

The article had 894 upvotes on a popular news aggregator. It had 300 comments. And it was linked to repeatedly ever since it was published, popping up every few months, each time with a big new response.

So what did this article say to justify this level of influence and interest?

Well, it had 13 insightful and surprising ideas such as:

* Work hard
* Focus
* Build a network

No?

​​You say these ideas aren’t tickling you with their novelty?

You don’t feel any insight from hearing these secrets of success?

Well, that’s kind of my point.

The article is solid. But it’s hardly novel or uniquely insightful.

It could have been written by some diligent high schooler in a 2,000 word Quora response.

But if the quality of the content is not it, what possibly explains the success of this “How to be successful” article?

Is it the presentation? The copy in the headline? The story in the lead? Is it just blind luck?

I’ll quit teasing you.

The article was written by Sam Altman. Altman is a 37-year-old tech investor worth some $250 million.

At age 26, Altman became president of the startup incubator Y Combinator (Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase).

Currently, he is the CEO of OpenAI, the Elon Musk- and Peter Thiel-backed research lab that is looking to replace every creative job on the planet with better, faster, cheaper software.

Maybe none of that means too much to you.

So the point I am trying to make is that within the venture capital and tech world, Altman probably could sign his name on a cocktail napkin… then take a photo of his napkin… post it on Twitter… and get thousands of people liking his autographed napkin photo and enthusing, “This! This is what makes the difference between the hugely successful and all the wannabes!”

And that is how you write for influence.

First, you become somebody famous, admired, and elite. And then you say whatever you like, even if it’s just “work hard.” People will still upvote, share, and spread your message on their own.

That’s not to say Altman’s “How to be successful” advice is not solid. It probably really is where it’s at.

Just nobody would hear the message it if it wasn’t coming from the mouth of Sam Altman.

But since it is coming from him, maybe you will hear it. Maybe you will even hear it right now.

So in case you are more ambitious than I am, and you want to read all of Altman’s 13 well-trodden points, and 1000x your chances of becoming a lightning success, here’s the full article:

https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful

Excluded by Amazon: The book that’s too powerful to promote

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Yesterday, as I finished up my email promoting Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind, I rubbed my hands together and started a reverie:

I imagined myself sitting in the shade, under a tiny palm tree, by a tiny beach, sipping a very tiny beer, and eating a very, very tiny steak.

After all, I was planning to put in an Amazon affiliate link at the end of yesterday’s email.

Depending on how many people actually took me up on my recommendation to get Brown’s quality, value-packed book, I might make $0.14 in affiliate commissions… or maybe $0.22… or who knows, if I was really persuasive… even $0.47!

That won’t buy a proper vacation even in a reverie, but a tiny vacation? Sure.

But then this tiny reverie was rudely popped. As I clicked to get the affiliate link, Amazon told me off:

“This product is one of the Amazon Associates Program Excluded Products. We do not support direct linking to this product. Please direct customers to another product or the category for this product instead.”

Excluded? Another Product? After I’d written the email???

I decided to invest a few minutes into threatening and cursing my laptop. That produced no result. So I looked around, made sure nobody had seen me, and pulled myself together.

I dug into why some products are excluded from the Amazon affiliate program. It turns out there are only three reasons why:

1. It’s alcohol

2. It’s an external promotional page linked to by an Amazon property

3. The third-party seller requested that the product be excluded

Brown’s book, by being a book, and by being on Amazon and not an external page, must fall into the third category.

In other words, like I wrote yesterday, maybe the information in this book really is too powerful.

Maybe Brown himself wants to keep it hush-hush. Maybe he only wants a select few, those who are cool enough, smart enough, mature enough, to read this book.

Maybe he wants to keep this book from appearing on a bunch of SEO-optimized top 10 lists and Medium filler articles and “most underrated” email newsletters.

So let’s see if that added information makes the book more attractive to you.

Whether you click the link below or don’t, I’m eating boiled chicken breast either way. I mean, I’m not getting paid anything by Amazon if you buy this book, and even if I were, it wouldn’t buy me steak tonight.

Before you go, if you want to hear more from me about excluded, possibly too powerful, insider information, then sign up for my email newsletter. And now, here’s the link to Brown’s book:

https://bejakovic.com/tricks

How to create blacker-than-black urgency without a deadline

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This morning, I closed down the Copy Riddles cart and ended the promotion for this run. It’s now time for all the people who signed up to see how I deliver on the promises I’ve made.

Like I wrote in my last promo email for Copy Riddles, 76.7% of those people — well, 76.7% of my total sales — all rolled in the last day. I had more coming in after I wrote that email, so the final number for last-day sales was even higher.

That’s because, like I wrote in that email, deadlines are black magic. In the words of Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap:

“It’s so black. Like how much more black could this be? And the answer is… none. None more black.”

Well, for Nigel’s benefit and maybe yours, I want to tell you that there is a form of persuasion wizardry that might be blacker than black. Let me quickly get my cloak and peak hat on, and tell you what I have in mind.

Over the past few days, while preparing to write my second Most Valuable Postcard, I started reading Rich Schefren’s 12 Month Marketing Blueprint.

I’m a big fan of Rich and just about everything I’ve seen him do. But I have to say the name of this particular offer is misleading. It’s hardly a blueprint. Really, it’s a fully built, furnished condo with pictures of Rich’s family inside.

In other words, what you get inside the “Blueprint” is 310 pages of actual emails, slides, sales letters, and free reports that Rich created back in 2006 and 2007 and sent out to his list and to his JV partners.

If you wanna reverse engineer a blueprint out of this, that’s gonna be on you. You have to do it yourself.

​​But it might be a worthwhile exercise. Because here’s the result of all these hundreds of pages of marketing, from the front page of the Blueprint:

Over 830,000 downloads
Over 1,895 one-way links
$960,000 in the first 2 hours and 15 minutes
From unkown – to known – to well known. From 20 clients to 2,070 clients. From 2 employees to 12.
How I Got Attention and Leveraged it to 7.4 Million a Year company.

I won’t spell out the many smart strategies that Rich uses in this 310-page collection of marketing. (A few of the most interesting ones are going to people who are subscribed to receive my Most Valuable Postcard later this month.)

What I will reveal to you is that blacker-than-black wizardry I mentioned above.

Here it is, right at the top of Rich’s sales page for his consulting offer — the offer that sold out in 2 hours and 15 minutes, and generated close to a million dollars:

“Warning: 32,543 want to know more about my coaching. 4,507 are on a waiting list to get early access (to this page) and 4,284 marketers registered for a teleseminar to get the details of this program. In addition, my joint venture partners will be sending out roughly 1,300,000 emails directing their subscribers to this offer. Consequently, there are only 1000 of 1000 seats available. Many of them are being taken as you read this. Scroll down to secure your spot!”

So there you go. that’s how you create blacker-than-black magic, without a deadline. Right there, in that salad of numbers.

What?

​​You want a blueprint?

A salad is not enough?
​​
Pff… fine.

​​Here’s the actual formula, phrased the way Rich likes to phrase it:

Social proof + Scarcity = Urgency

And now, on to unrelated promotional materials:

If you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard offer, I have an update for you.

I initially only opened this offer to 20 people, when I first made it available, back in May. All 20 of those 20 are still subscribed to get the postcard.

Later this month, I will reopen my Most Valuable Postcard for the first time, to 20 new subscribers. I’ll limit it again because I’m making some changes to the offer and I want to control how that will go.

My joint venture partners will be sending out roughly 0,000,000 emails directing their subscribers to this offer.

But this email is going out to over 1,300 people who read my daily emails.

And almost 140 of these readers have already expressed interest in signing up for the Most Valuable Postcard. They have joined the waiting list, so they can be the first to get notified and the first to have a chance to sign up when I reopen the Most Valuable Postcard.

In case you’re interested in blacker-than-black persuasion magic, and you’d like to have the best chance to sign up to my Most Valuable Postcard when it reopens, you’ll have to be on my email list first. Here’s where to sign up.