Mental Shortcuts

The status pirate game

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Imagine a large and hairy sailor, wearing a striped blue-and-white shirt and a bandana wrapped around his head, looking nervous.

​​The year is 1717, and he is the navigator of an English trading vessel that’s sailing through the Carribean.

A few times, the big navigator makes like he’s going to say something. But he stops himself.

His eyes keep darting forward — out toward the horizon – and then at the captain next to him, who is looking through the telescope.

It’s dusk and there is a ship up ahead. It’s very strange — there is nobody on board.

“It might have been the plague, sir,” the large navigator says. “Sudden plague could have taken them all.”

The captain shakes his head. He’s not at all worried. “Pirates,” he says. “Dusk is their favorite time. Have you readied the cannons?”

The navigator starts shifting his weight from one foot to another. “It would be a very simple matter for us to alter course, sir,” he says.

The captain squints his eyes and looks back through the telescope. “I — never — alter — course,” he says.

That’s the opening scene of a movie that never got made, called Sea Kings.

As you probably guessed, it’s about pirates.

And it’s also about how the human brain determines value.

In this case, start with a large sailor. From his physical size and job title, you would assume him to be a brave man. And he might be, in most situations. But out here, faced with pirates on the open sea, he’s nervous.

Then contrast that to the captain. He’s at another level of coolness and bravery. Unlike the navigator, he’s not afraid of pirates. He’s seen it all before and he won’t flinch.

And because the screenwriter — William Goldman in this case — set it up this way, it makes the next moment all the more dramatic and impressive.

Because in the next moment, a figure appears on the ghost pirate ship. It’s human shaped. But it’s entirely black and it’s enormous. It also appears to be on fire. And then the figure starts to speak. Its deep voice carries across the sea.

“Death or surrender… surrender or die… the Devil bids you choose…”

The big navigator starts screaming and running around. “What is that? WHAT — IS — IT?”

And the captain, who until a moment ago was so determined and tough, suddenly isn’t any more. He’s turned pale. He drops the telescope.

“Run up the white flag,” he whispers to the navigator. “It’s Blackbeard…”

That’s how you make an entrance for your main character.

Not by showing a closeup of him, scowling and looking scary and ugly.

Not by his credentials — the many cruel and daring things he’s done in his career.

Not by an action sequence in which your main character — a hulk of a man — fights a dozen frightened and incompetent soldiers.

No, if you want to make your main character frightening and awe-inspiring, you just put him at the top of a pyramid:

Blackbeard
Normally tough captain
Big and strong sailor who shouldn’t be afraid
The audience, representing the rest of soft and weak humanity

The fact is, the game of status is only ever relative.

You can think of it as a Ponzi scheme, or an MLM. The more people you recruit beneath you… and the more people they recruit beneath them… the better and more valuable your position.

And perhaps you’re wondering how you can specifically use this in marketing and sales copy.

The fact is, there are many ways. I could tell you what they are, but instead I’ll make you an deal:

Get a few people who are interested in direct marketing and form a little study group. With you as the leader. And then get them all to sign up for my newsletter. I’ll share my insights then.

Don’t read this if you can’t stand harsh glaring lights

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“It is important that you get clear for yourself that your only access to impacting life is action. The world does not care what you intend, how committed you are, how you feel, or what you think, and certainly, it has no interest in what you want and don’t want.”
— Werner Erhard, founder of est

Last week, after I sent out my Copy Koala Millions™ email, a reader named Lester wrote in with this interesting point:

“The one other thing I remember from Carlton is how in almost all business segments, the customers want easy/painless/low effort results. BUT the body building/fitness guys want the opposite. You have to sell how fucking painful and hard it will be with what you are selling.”

It’s true — 99% of sales copy promises quick/easy/foolproof results, preferably accomplished by an external mechanism, which you activate by pressing a large red button that reads “INSTANT RESULTS HERE.”

But like Lester says, not every market is like that. Bodybuilders for one… maybe also small business owners and entrepreneurs.

For example, yesterday I wrote about Dan Kennedy’s “#1 most powerful personal discipline in all the world.”

Dan promises that this one discipline can make you successful beyond your wildest dreams.

But honestly, I didn’t need that promise to buy what Dan was selling. I became hypnotized as soon as I read the words “powerful personal discipline.” At that point, I was 86% sold already.

That’s why I said yesterday that I don’t need to sell this idea to you either. Because if you feel the twitching of this same drive for overcoming inside you… you probably perked up just because I kept stuffing the terms “self discipline” and “personal discipline” a dozen times in what I wrote yesterday.

The fact is, there’s a very real need inside most people for occasional struggle, suffering, and proving their own worth.

Suffering and struggle might not sell in front-end copy going out to a cold list of people who are already suffering and struggling with a problem.

But it definitely does sell, including in sister markets to direct response. Such as the seminar business, for example.

Werner Erhard, the guy I quoted up top, ran est, the biggest personal development product of the 1970s. est consisted of two weekend-long seminars where people would literally piss themselves because they weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom — in a giant hall filled with hundreds of strangers.

On day two, attendees would go through the “danger process.” From the book Odd Gods:

“A row of the audience at a time would go on stage and be confronted by est staff. One person would ‘bullbait’ all of them, saying and doing things in order to get them to react. Other volunteers would be body catchers for those who fell, a common occurrence.”

Like I said, this went on for two weekends in a row. In other words, people would show up one weekend, get humiliated and brutalized, and come back the next weekend for more. When it was all said and done, people found it transformative, and enthusiastically recommended est to their friends and family.

My point is simply a reminder. We are no longer living in the world of one-off sales letters pitching a book of Chinese medicine secrets. Today, there’s plenty of money to be made by being strict, demanding, and harsh. Yes, even in your sales copy.

… well with one caveat. I’ll get to that in my email tomorrow. Read it or fail.

A quick and cheap boost in status and authority

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Today, I read about a guy who writes a Substack newsletter about parenting, and it’s made him a celebrity throughout his neighborhood.

Well, it wasn’t really the newsletter.

Rather, it was a specific fact about his own parenting success, which he revealed inside the newsletter. This one fact spread like wildfire among his neighbors, and soon everyone knew him, or at least wanted to. For example, when the guy got his hair cut last week, the following conversation went down:

“Hey, I know you, don’t I?”

“What? How’s that?”

“You’re the guy who has two sons at Harvard.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”​​

Status. All of us are aware of it. And the most pure of us all quest after it like Galahad after the Holy Grail.

I’m not saying anything new here. But here’s an unrelated idea, which might be new to you, and which can help you if you quest after status:

Don’t give too much proof. Argumentation and proof are sure ways to put a ceiling on how authoritative you seem and how much status you have.

“This guy sounds like a leader… but why does he have to buttress his claims with evidence and explain everything in so much detail? Something’s off.”

So cut down on the proof and avoid ruining or hampering your status.

And as with all things authority, things go in both directions. In other words, you can also get a quick and cheap boost in status simply by refusing to make an adequate argument for the claims you’re making.

You might think I’ll just leave that claim hanging as a way of demonstrating my point.

Not so.

For one thing, I’m actively avoiding pursuing status. I have other ideas of how I want to get into people’s heads.

For another thing, none of what I told you is really my idea. ​​I don’t mind telling you I heard it all from Rich Schefren.

​​So if you want proof for what I just told you, you should haunt Rich, and see if maybe he slips up into explaining why he believes all the stuff I just told you. If you don’t know Rich, you can get to know him here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKSG9Ug9FKrFCYxSlTRwGiA

The case against deadlines in your marketing

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Now, the ant may have a fault or two
But lending is not something she will do.
She asked what the cricket did in summer.
“By night and day, to any comer
I sang whenever I had the chance.”
“You sang, did you? That’s nice. Now dance.

Imagine a squat little ant and a tall, lanky cricket, waving to each other across an empty field.

That’s how the sales graph looked for the Influential Emails offer I ran last week.

On the first day, I had a squat but reasonable number of sales. That’s the ant on one side of the empty field. That ant — or rather, the proactive ants who took me up on my offer early — made up 15% of the total sales I got in terms of revenue.

For the next 6 days, I made some sales each day, But really, it was nothing to sing or dance about.

And then, on the very last day, just as I was ready to wrap it up and hunker down for a long and hungry winter, I got a bunch of orders. A tall and crickety spike in the sales graph. Totaling 47% percent of the whole.

So what’s the conclusion?

You might think this is a classic example of why nothing in the world ever gets done without a deadline. And that it’s foolish to allow people to buy your stuff whenever they want, because your garden variety of wanting is not enough to get crickets to act.

That’s one way to look at it.

Another way is that perhaps some of those come-lately crickets would have bought earlier had I not made this into a time-limited offer. Maybe they know they tend to put things off, and they would have acted to prevent this from happening.

Perhaps others would have bought over the coming weeks and months, had I kept reminding them and teasing them with regular, interesting emails.

And perhaps still others would have bought in time who will NOT buy now, because the offer is no longer available.

All those are reasonable arguments against putting a deadline on your offer, at least if you’ve got a good way to stay in touch with your prospects.

The fact is, we will never know.

I run time-limited offers with deadlines because I like it that way. Because it motivates me, and because it’s in line with my own cricket-like nature. And because I’m happy enough with the results, even if those results perhaps could have been higher through some other way of doing business.

Marketer Sean D’Souza was once asked if he has any data to show his contrarian business model works. He replied:

Do we have any data? No, we don’t.

The customers are using this every single day. I’m not actually here to prove anything to you.

What I’m asking you, when you go to a restaurant, does it work for you? When you go on a dating thing, does it work for you? When you go on the Apple site, does it work for you?

If you don’t think it works for you, don’t put it into place. I don’t have data. I started out as a cartoonist, I moved to marketing, and this has allowed us to take three vacations, buy houses, travel, do all the things we really wanted to do. We earn more money than we need.

The point is, if you think it works for you, put it in place. If you don’t think it works for you, that’s not a problem.

I heard this early in my marketing education. It’s stuck with me ever since. Both Sean’s attitude of, “Do we have any data? No, but it works for us.” But also the contrarian view of marketing that Sean was talking about.

Perhaps you don’t know what that contrarian view is. That’s a shame.

Because like Sean says, his way of marketing… well, it allowed him to achieve everything he wanted, on his own terms.

It might give you some good ideas as well. So if you’re curious, little cricket, check out my email tomorrow. That’s where I’ll tell you about the “it” that allowed Sean those vacations and those houses and that money. And you can then see if it might work for you, too.

My special time with Barack Obama

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On January 20, 2009, a friend and I drove down from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. At the time, I personally had nothing to do with the government.

But my friend had been involved with the Obama campaign from its unlikely beginnings. Thanks to him, we were now going to D.C. to watch Obama’s inauguration from a very special place.

D.C. was a madhouse that day. The streets were filled with hundreds of thousands of people.

My friend and I managed to park. We started making our way towards the National Mall. Barricades had been erected to corral and direct the masses so they could pile up in front of the Capitol building. Fortunately, this did not apply to my friend and me.

I’ll wrap up my experience from that day in a second. But first let me tell you why I bring this up.

I got an email today from a reader named Jon. Jon is a copywriter. One of his clients is an organization filled with high-status, high-authority persons.

But for reasons I cannot divulge (because I don’t know them), these powerful and authoritative persons must remain anonymous. Even their direct contacts must remain anonymous.

So Jon wrote in, and using his best Ali G voice, he asked me how to “big up an authority figure if that figure needs to stay anonymous?”

So here’s one thing I told Jon — maybe it will be relevant to you too:

If you want authority, but you got nothing else to work with, you can name tangential contacts.

Trump. Putin. Gary Bencivenga. Whoever the biggest person is that you can get.

It doesn’t have to be particularly meaningful connection — the name is more important than a really close tie. If you ever met once, even for a few seconds… if you ever attended the same event… or hell, even if you were ever in the same town at one point.

So I guess you see where I’m going with this.

Back on that 2009 Inauguration Day, my friend and I got carried around in the sea of people. We soon realized we wouldn’t see a damn thing if we pushed our way into the crowds in front of the Capitol. So we turned around, and by a circuitous route, we made it to the Washington Monument.

There were a bunch of people there also. They were looking at large-screen TVs showing the inauguration. I jumped up in place, and for a moment I could see the Capitol building above the crowd. I must have seen Obama, somewhere up there, for a split second. I guess.

And I guess you might have had enough of me and of this email by now. But hang on.

Because there are a few caveats about this authority by association stuff. Here’s how to actually make it useful:

1. Don’t make it absurd. The association doesn’t have to be super tight or flattering. But it has to be a little tighter and a little more flattering than my connection to Obama.

2. Don’t telegraph what you’re doing. For example, don’t make your loose association in an email where you explain that very technique.

3. Don’t bring up people your market doesn’t care about. Like Obama. He’s pretty irrelevant today to the space of direct response marketers and copywriters.

So is that the best I got? Obama, maybe, 12 years ago? Don’t I have even a tangential association to anybody more interesting in the direct response space?

Maybe I don’t. Or maybe I just choose to big up my authority in a different way. In the poorly chosen words of my friend, Barack Obama, while he was trying to make the case for government-run healthcare:

“UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”

If that makes little sense to you, perhaps you’d like to join my email list. I don’t promise it will answer this particular riddle… but there are many secrets and mysteries inside you might like. Click here if you want in.

Prancing Pony wizard characteristic

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In the opening six hours of the Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf finally realizes what those hobbits have in their house.

It’s the One Ring… the focus of all evil in the world. And right now, nine grim and bloody ghost riders are galloping to collect it.

So Gandalf rushes to Frodo the hobbit’s house. He tells Frodo to get himself and the ring out of there now.

Frodo is bewildered. “But where shall I go?”

“Go to the village of Bree,” Gandalf tells him. “I will meet you… at the Inn of the Prancing Pony.”

I recently wrote about Dan Kennedy’s main practical idea for wealth attraction. “Be the wizard, and beware other wizards.”

I’m a literal type so I started watching the LOTR to see what exactly it means to be a wizard in the popular mind. The above scene caught my eye.

Because Gandalf doesn’t say, “Where shall you go? Gee, I don’t know, Frodo… what do you think is best?”

Gandalf also doesn’t say, “Head to Bree. There must be some inns there. Book a room in one of them. I think they use the same money as here. I will try to find you sooner or later.”

Gandalf doesn’t even say, “Go to the Inn of the Prancing Pony in Bree. Because it’s not too far from here… and it’s on the way to where the ring needs to go anyhow… plus they make this really wonderful mutton sandwich, I think you will love it.”

Nope. Instead Gandalf gives clear, certain, and yet cryptic guidance.

Clear. Because if people are paying the wizard big bucks, they want to be told exactly what to do.

Certain. Because there’s nothing worse than doubt. Doubt is not a burden many people are willing to carry — and that’s why they seek out the wizard.

And cryptic. Why the Inn of the Prancing Pony… and not next door, at the Inn of the Gamboling Goat? We’ll never know. Gandalf gives us no fumbling explanation. Which allows us to think there must be a good reason… even if we are not privy to it. He’s the wizard, after all.

Of course, LOTR is a movie.

Plus I don’t think Dan Kennedy is as literal-minded as I am. I don’t think he was really talking about putting on a grey pointed hat… or trying to impress clients by growing out your beard and eyebrows.

Still, there is something in the unconscious mind that responds to wizard cues like in the scene above. And often, these cues pop up most clearly in pop culture like LOTR.

So if you work with clients, here’s where to go:

Give your clients clear guidance. Take away their doubts before they even have them. Resist your urge to explain yourself. And when you finish… I will meet you… at the Inn of the Wealthy Wombat.

Tending the penguins

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On September 27, 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set off on a daring, last-of-its-kind conquering of Antarctica.

But his ship got stuck in ice. The popular explorer and his intrepid men faced the prospect of a cold, slow, lonely death. They cabled a desperate plea back to England, asking for help.

Their message made it up to the First Lord of the Admiralty, a guy by the name of Winston Churchill. Churchill was in the middle of dealing with what would later be called World War I. And he wrote in response:

“When all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all their impoverished & broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, & every charitable subscription is closed, then & not till then wd. I concern myself with these penguins.”

Yesterday I promised to share with you one final great lesson I learned from Ben Settle. So let me get right to it:

Have standards for your business, and stick to ’em.

Like Churchill above, do the things you say matter to you. And leave the tending of the penguins for only after, if ever.

“That’s your great lesson?” you say.

Yeah. Hear me out.

I don’t know why having standards and sticking to them works so well. Maybe there’s some magic in it, and if you do it, the universe gives you more of what you focus on.

Or maybe it’s less magical. Maybe it’s just that we all secretly like strongmen. Maybe we are still kids in adult bodies. And whenever somebody assumes the right to start setting rules and boundaries… we start looking to them as an authority to be obeyed and respected.

Whatever the case, I believe that having your own standards and sticking to ’em – whether for yourself… your offers… your marketing… your business partners… your business practices… and yes, even for your customers — is the way to not only become successful… but to become successful on your own terms.

It’s how Ben was able to defy industry norms and not only survive but thrive. It’s how he could send multiple ugly-looking emails a day… offer no refunds… charge hundreds of dollars for a paperback book… while living his “10 minute workday” and making something close to $1 million a year, working by himself.

And a similar opportunity is there for you, too. You can also create a successful business that suits exactly you, if you take it upon yourself to turn the penguins away. Even if they are cold, hungry, desperate, intrepid, and popular. And even if the decision to do so might not win you any friends or make you any money in the short term.

But before you start rubbing your hands together, let me make clear that standards are not the only thing you need to succeed.

You can sit in your darkened room, having standards and sticking to them until you’re blue in the face.

Nobody will care.

You still need the fundamentals. Like attractive offers. And good copy. And a responsive list. Mix those fundamentals with some strict standards, and then you get the success you want, how you want it.

What’s that? You want some more? Well here’s one final point:

You probably know plenty of good resources to teach you the first two fundamentals above. And you might even know a good resource to teach you the last.

But I’d like to tell you about a resource which shows you how to create a responsive list beyond anything I’ve ever seen. I became aware of this resource only recently, and completely unexpectedly. And I’ll share it in an email to my newsletter next week. If you’d like to read that when it comes out, you can sign up here.

Don’t you get sick of being right all the time?

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“What do you think? I bet it’s just one guy.”

Butch Cassidy. The Sundance Kid. Their last day on Earth. ​​The two outlaws have just ridden into a Bolivian town to have a meal… and somebody starts shooting at them.

They run for cover inside a saloon.

Butch is the brains of the operation and forever the optimist. “What do you think?” he says to Sundance. “I bet it’s just one guy.”

Sundance takes off his hat and pokes it out the door. An army of guns goes off immediately. A dozen bullets whiz through the hat. Sundance stares at Butch.

“Don’t you get sick of being right all the time?”

Well? Don’t you?

Today I want to share an unpleasant but valuable truth with you. You may or may not be ready to hear it.

I first heard it from John Carlton. John says:

In order to persuade large groups of people to buy, act now, or even just begin to see your side of things… you have to see the world as it is.

Not as you wish it was. Not as you believe it should be. Not as you were told it was.

As it is. The stark, cold reality of how things actually work, and how people actually behave.

This is often scary, at first. It requires you to look behind your go-to belief systems (which you may have had since you were a kid)… to challenge authority’s version of what’s going on… and — most important — you must willingly exit the shared delusion among the majority of your fellow humans that what they say they’ll do is more important than what they actually do.

That’s not the only shared delusion among us fellow humans. There are plenty of others.

​​Such as “The One Thing”… the simple, black-and-white explanation… the leader to be obeyed or the charlatan to be mocked.

We all want to believe the world works like this. And there’s a lot of money to be made by telling people what they want to hear.

​​But like Carlton says, to make that money, it might be helpful to see the world as it is, rather than as you wish it were. Even if it means you’ll stop being right all the time.

But you know what? I’m not really talking to you. I’m talking to myself. Because check it:

A few weeks ago, I decided to unsubscribe from Ben Settle’s Email Players newsletter. I was subscribed for over 4 years. But I had my reasons to quit.

Ben is somebody I’ve learned the most from, both directly and indirectly, about this copywriting and marketing stuff. And yet, since unsubscribing from his newsletter, I notice my brain trying to make things black-and-white. To discount the things I’ve learned from him. To put them in a box of things I’ve outgrown.

My brain wants to be right. But I want to be rich.

So for your benefit as well as my own, over the next several days, I’ll tell you a few of the great things I’ve learned from Ben Settle. A few things… because there’s no “The One Thing.”

Put together, these great ideas were a central part of the success I’ve achieved so far. Perhaps they can help you too. As a sneak preview of the first of these great ideas, here’s a bit of dialogue between Butch and Sundance… right before they try to shoot their way out of the saloon, against an entire battalion of Bolivian soldiers and police:

Butch: Australia. I thought that secretly you wanted to know so I told you.

Sundance: That’s your great idea?

Butch: The latest in a long line. We get out of here alive, we go to Australia. Goodbye, Bolivia. Hello to Australia.

Real #1 proof for 2021 and beyond

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“We write you because, with all you have heard and read ABOUT O. Henry’s stories, you have never yet SEEN them. You have never yet had the privilege we now offer you of ACTUALLY handling volumes — reading in your home some of these wonderful tales — proving to your own satisfaction the marvelous insight of the man, the depth of his understanding and sympathy.”

— Robert Collier, from a 1919 direct mail campaign that sold $1 million worth of O. Henry books

Demonstration is supposed to be the strongest form of proof. And I believe it, because Gary Bencivenga and Claude Hopkins say so.

That’s why demonstration is what I resort to most often in these emails. I don’t just tell you ABOUT a cool persuasion technique. I allow you to ACTUALLY SEE it.

But what if?

What if demonstration is not really tops?

Remember when Beats headphones came out? Headphone snobs were quick to point out that Beats headphones were mediocre in terms of sound quality. Even non-snobs could probably tell Beats headphones were nothing special. And yet Beats soon became one of the biggest headphone brands in the world, and sold for $3.2 billion to Apple a few years later.

Or remember the story of Coke vs. Pepsi? How Pepsi was winning the blind taste tests? And how Coke decided to change their formula… which led to a popular backlash… and a return from the ashes of “the real thing” — Coke — and not Pepsi, which tasted better?

Who knows. Maybe things were different in the time of Robert Collier. Maybe people really trusted their own opinions and experiences. And maybe getting people to try was the best way to to get them to buy. Maybe.

Whatever the case was back then, it’s not how it is today. Today it’s too hard to choose, and we no longer trust our own opinions all that deeply.

You probably see what I’m getting at. And you probably see what I believe is the real #1 type of proof, in 2021 and beyond.

Which brings me to a book I’d like to recommend on that topic. Two people I respect — one a successful marketer and business owner, and the other a copywriter at Agora — recently recommended it to me.

That’s why, even though I haven’t read this book yet, and maybe never will, I’m sure I’d like it. And that’s why I’d like to recommend it to you as well, and why I’m sure you’ll like it too. So here’s the deal:

If you’d like to know the title of this book, sign up to my email newsletter. (A bunch of direct response legends and young stars already do subscribe to it.) And then send me an email to introduce yourself. I’ll write back to you, and tell you the title of this valuable and wonderful book.

Dan Kennedy, Rich Schefren, and a monkey named John B.

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Let me tell you a true story about a social primate I will call John B.:

Six months ago, John was reading the “Million Dollar Resource & Sample Book.” This is a 270-page document that Dan Kennedy prepared for his Titans of Direct Response talk.

Toward the end of this doc, John saw the mention of a seminar of Dan’s, called Opportunity Concepts. Opportunity Concepts is all about using ideas from bizopp marketers more broadly, in other kinds of businesses.

“Sounds valuable,” John muttered into his cereal, which he was eating at the time.

So John googled Opportunity Concepts and found the sales page.

“Interesting… interesting…” John said as he scrolled down the page. But suddenly, he bared his teeth and grimaced.

“Ouch!” he said, mouth full of cereal. “$2,000!…”

Now let me tell you with confidence, because I happen to know this social primate intimately, that John has been training himself to look at things in terms of their value… rather than in terms of their price.

Even so, after a few moments of grimacing and weighing access to Opportunity Concepts on the one hand… versus the pain of giving up $2,000 on the other… John found himself closing down the sales page and browsing away to happier, less stressful webpages.

Now fast-forward a few months.

John was watching a livestream put on by marketer Rich Schefren. Rich paused his scheduled programming to answer questions. And one of the questions that came in was this:

“Which products from Dan Kennedy do you think are the most valuable?”

Rich thought for a second and said, “I think Opportunity Concepts is number one.” And by the time Rich named his second favorite Dan Kennedy program, John was already gone. He was in a deep trance, credit card out, filling out the order form for Opportunity Concepts.

So that’s the true story for today. I hope you liked it. And now let me tell you why this story is meaningful to me, aside from my close relationship to the primate in question.

It’s not just that this story illustrates the power of social proof.

Or the value of an endorsement from a respected authority.

No, it’s about something broader.

Because one thing I’ve learned by working in direct marketing is how much our brain loves to avoid the hard tasks of thinking and making decisions.

That’s why we are constantly looking for shortcuts and excuses. Shortcuts to conclusions. And excuses to make a decision or to not make a decision.

If you’re new to direct marketing, you might think this only applies to those gullible people out there. The ones who buy magic pill weight loss supplements… at $47/month… based on obviously fake testimonials.

Well, I’d like to suggest it’s not just them.

Even people with greater advertising literacy make decisions in the same way. Even for much bigger purchases.

And if you’re selling something, including yourself and your services… it’s a good idea to give your prospects helpful shortcuts and excuses to make sure their decisions are the right ones.

And by the way, this same stuff applies to business owners looking to hire copywriters. You might think they will make a detailed, reasonable decision about who to hire. You might think they will evaluate all the data, and weigh all the pros and cons of each application.

Nope.

Business owners, like everybody else, are just looking for excuses to dismiss an applicant straight out the gate. And they are praying they will come across an applicant who will signal in some clear way that he is THE ONE… so they can hire him and get on to happier, less stressful tasks.

Even more by the way, are you yourself looking to get hired as a copywriter?

Then I have something that could be valuable. It’s a system for giving business owners those helpful shortcuts and excuses to make sure their decisions are the right ones — i.e. hiring you.

This system is inside my “Win Your First Copywriting Job” workshop, which kicks off this Friday.

For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/win-your-first-copywriting-job/