Psychology Behind Advertising

Spend all your time trying to sell out games

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Yesterday I watched a movie, Local Hero, which finished around 9:17pm my time, some 32 minutes after my daily email went out.

In those 32 minutes, I had 21 sales of the offer I introduced yesterday — “give me $10, and I’ll make you a ‘beta-tester’ for my new book.”

Since I only wanted 20 such beta-testers, I closed the shopping cart, and I updated the checkout link to point to a page that said “Thanks but this offer is now sold out.”

You might think it’s not much of an accomplishment to sell out 20 spots (actually 21) at $10 each.

And true, it’s not a lot of money.

But it’s very important anyhow. Not just for my own morale, but for public perception.

And on that note, I would like to share with you a quote from sports marketer Jon Spoelstra.

Spoelstra worked with some of the losingest and least popular sports franchises out there.

In spite of the lousy sports records of these teams, Spoelstra repeatedly managed to turn the teams into cash-cows. Here’s how:

“At the Nets, we spent all of our energies in trying to sell out games. This started with the games that people most likely would want to go to — the games with the marquee players on the opposing teams. You might think it was easy. It wasn’t. If we hadn’t committed all of our resources and manpower to selling out our best games, we wouldn’t have. A funny thing happened on our way to sellouts. Our attendance picked up in the other games where we weren’t even trying.”

I was planning to promote my beta-tester offer today to make sure this offer sold out, just like Spoelstra advises.

But since the offer sold out with just one email last night, that plan’s out.

So let me remind you of my most popular program, Most Valuable Email.

I can tell you that today’s email does not use the Most Valuable Email trick, which is what this program teaches you to perform in less than an hour.

And yet, the Most Valuable Email trick in a way underlies this entire newsletter, whether I use it in a particular email or not.

I can imagine that doesn’t make much sense without knowing what the Most Valuable Trick is. In case you’d like to find out, and better yet, to profit by using this trick yourself:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​

A favor?

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Would you do me a favor?

As you might know, for the past few days I’ve been promoting a new “work alongside me offer.”

In short, I’ve launched a new list and I’m starting to grow it by paying for ads. I’m inviting people who want to follow the same process I’m following to work alongside me and to grow their own list, while getting copywriting feedback and marketing input from me.

A part of how I will deliver this feedback and input will be via a Skool community.

Which brings me to the favor:

I will be promoting this “work alongside me” offer for another week.

But I want to open up the Skool community early, and start interacting with people and giving them feedback. The reason for this is both to take the load off that’s sure to come with a bunch of people signing up at the final deadline… and also to get a sense of where people are at, and inform the marketing I will do during this last week.

So if you’ve been interested in this offer but you have been holding off, would you let me know now?

I can then share the full details of how this “work alongside me” offer will work. And if you decide to join early, by tomorrow, Sunday, at 12 midnight PST, instead of waiting for final deadline in one week’s time, then I will do two things:

1. I will put you into the Skool community as soon as I open it up on Monday

2. I’ll give you a special mystery bonus to say thanks. This special mystery bonus is about a strategy that’s not covered in the list-building blueprint I will be following… but a strategy that I’ve used in the past to offset the cost of running ads, and in one case even eliminate it

So if you’re interested in this offer, would you let me know? I’ll be checking my inbox throughout the weekend, but maybe it’s best to do it now, while it’s fresh on your mind. Thanks in advance.

The reputation benefit of a bigger list

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My own email list — this one, about marketing and copywriting and influence — is tiny. But some of the people on my list have much bigger lists than I do.

One such person is Russell Nohelty. Russell is a bestselling author of fantasy books and comics. He also writes about the business of writing, and he runs Writer MBA, a membership program to help writers make more money.

Russell’s audience on Substack is over 70,000 people.

Last week, when I started writing about my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic, Russell reached out. He offered to share his experiences spending $30k since February to grow his audience.

Russell and I got on a call this past Monday. It was interesting and valuable throughout, but one thing in particular stuck with me, something Russell said about the reputation benefits of various list sizes. In Russell’s words:

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There were a couple of break points where everything felt different.

10,000 emails felt different than 8,000.

30,000 emails felt way different than 20,000 emails.

From my experience, talking to other people, 50,000, 80,000 — there’s different break points where people go, “Oh you’ve got 45,000 people on your list! Yes, I want to get in front of them!”

Promotions become easier. When you’re a Dream 100 guy like I am, you can reach out to almost anyone and be like, “Hey, do you wanna be in front of my 35,000, 45,000, whatever the number is, people.”

===

I can imagine that somebody somewhere has just crossed his arms and frowned. “Well, I’d much rather have a small but mighty list than a stupid big list that doesn’t read or buy from me.”

Sure. It’s my policy as well with my own list. That said, you can have both a large and a mighty list — Russell does.

But here’s the sneaky thing:

All of us constantly use mental shortcuts to evaluate the people around us and the choices we have.

On the one hand, a large list is an immensely valuable asset for its own sake.

On the other hand, a large list is also an immensely valuable asset because of its reputation benefit. Because people treat you differently if you get one. Because opportunities open up which would be closed otherwise.

All that’s to say, if you got a business, and a list, but it’s not quite going how you’d like… then the solution might just be to get a bigger list. Maybe if you can make it to the next break point, like Russell says above, then your problems now might just go poof.

Which brings me back to my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while we work alongside each other.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497 to get started, plus $10-$15 a day for ads. If that doesn’t deter you, hit reply and tell me so, and I can give you more information.

Jim Camp, A-list copywriter

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Right now I’m reading a book titled You Can’t Teach a Kid To Ride a Bike at a Seminar.

The book was written by David Sandler, a 20th-century sales trainer.

I wrote an email about Sandler last year because of his connection to famed negotiation coach Jim Camp. That email ran with the subject line, “Jim Camp, plagiarist.”

Camp must have studied under Sandler, because the ideas inside “You Can’t Teach a Kid” and Camp’s book “Start With No” are as close to identical as two brown, “L”-sized, farm-fresh eggs. (For reference, Sandler died in 1995, Camp published Start With No in 2002.)

If you ask me, Camp did three things right.

First, he took Sandler’s system out of the world of sales — water filters, life insurance, and whirring hard drives — and he applied it, word-for-word, to the world of billion-dollar negotiation in corporate boardrooms.

In other words, Camp took Sandler’s valuable but provincial knowledge and brought it to a bigger, more prestigious arena, not encumbered by the slumdog baggage that’s attached to the word “sales.”

Second, Camp co-opted what Sandler taught and made it his own. He turned the Sandler Sales System into the Camp Negotiation System, without ever mentioning or crediting Sandler except once, in the middle of a list of 20 other mentors, in an appendix to his “Start With No” book.

You might think this is despicable, and in a way it is, but it’s also a necessary part of the positioning of the guru at the top of the mountain.

And then there’s a third thing that Camp did right.

It’s completely in the presentation, the messaging of his book and of his Camp Negotiation System.

You can see this messaging change in the title Start With No. It’s also present on almost every page of the book.

This messaging change is what built up the mystery of Jim Camp, and it’s why Camp’s book has sold so well and spread so far, and why so many sales folks and marketers and copywriters know Camp today, and why so few know Sandler.

Now ask yourself:

If you knew what change Camp made, and if you could apply it to turn your message from unknown to bestselling, from slumdog salesman to mysterious and yet celebrated negotiation guru…

… what could that be worth to you?

I don’t know. But you do know, and maybe the truth is it would be worth a lot — thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more.

I’m asking you this question because you can find this messaging change, the technique that Camp used to make himself and his system fascinating, in my Copy Riddles program.

It’s there in round 15.

If you own Copy Riddles and it’s not 100% clear to you how Camp applied the technique in that round to his messaging, write me and I will clarify it.

And if you don’t own Copy Riddles, you can find out more about it at the link below.

I can tell you upfront, at $997, Copy Riddles is an expensive program.

But maybe in your case will be worth much more than I’m asking for it. Here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

You won’t make money by reading this email, but you might become a bit smarter

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True story:

I once knew a girl who was in the last year of law school. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, who owned some kind of online business.

The guy wasn’t willing to accept the breakup. So he called the girl and texted her, asking that they meet again so he could plead his case.

The girl said no.

The guy kept texting and asking for them to meet.

The girl politely but firmly still said no.

Finally, the guy, clever and successful businessman that he was, wrote her a message saying how he understood she is a poor law student, and that since we are all self-interested creatures, he would be willing to pay her a nice and fair hourly rate, fit for a full-fledged lawyer, if she would only meet with him for a coffee and a chat.

At this point, the girl stopped responding to the guy.

But she did tell me this story. And she laughed as she told it, as if to say “What was I doing with him?” She rolled her eyes at how warped his brain had become, and how he thought he could buy her.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Travis Sago lately. And Travis likes to say that money is tertiary.

As in, yes, money is important to most of us. But in the grand scheme of what we all want, two categories of needs are even more important.

And in fact, there are situations where money is even at odds with those two other categories. In those situations, offering money completely spoils the appeal.

Perhaps you heard how last week, after the CrowdStrike IT snafu interrupted life-saving surgeries… disrupted millions of people’s trips… and caused panic and days of extra work for businesses around the world, CrowdStrike went into damage-control mode.

They sent an email to key partners to apologize. And in addition, to show how truly bad they feel about the whole thing, they also included a $10 Uber Eats voucher.

“Your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!” CrowdStrike wrote.

Unsurprisingly, backlash and mockery followed all over Internet.

There’s no doubt in my mind that no backlash or mockery would have happened had CrowdStrike simply sent an apologetic email and left it at that.

So keep that in mind.

Money is tertiary.

As for what’s secondary and primary, if you think a bit about your own motivations in life, with respect to work in particular, I’m sure you will be able to figure that out.

But if you want to see how top copywriters make appeals to those primary and secondary needs, you can find that round 19 of my Copy Riddles program, which is titled:

“A sexy technique for writing bullets that leave other copywriters green with envy”

For more information on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

A grateful reader succeeds in making me blush

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Last night, I got an email from marketer and copywriter Shakoor Chowdhury, who wrote:

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Hello John,

I wanted to take a moment of my day to say “thank you”!

Besides Dan Kennedy, you have played the most impactful role in growing my revenues every single day

most of my NEW cashflow can be directly attributed to you and your courses “MVE” & “influential emails”…

I write emails daily now and they always bring more money or book appointments with high ticket clients…

This year I decided to focus on building relationships with my customers and not just ‘direct selling’ one time…

And I have to say, nobody is able to teach the concepts of email marketing better than you have…

It is simple, straightforward and teaches the FUNDAMENTALS of what it takes to be an email copywriter

I am a lifelong fan and customer.

Hope many more people and great things find their way to you, you are a bit of a ‘best kept secret’ in the copy world

which is perhaps why you are the best… the mystic ‘guru at the top of the mountain’

I found you because OTHER copywriters spoke so highly of you

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Like I said in the subject line, Shakoor succeeded in making me blush, and I’m blushing now having to write about it. So let me change the topic immediately.

I recently heard business coach Rich Schefren say that he often gives presents to his mentor Mark Ford, because Mark doesn’t like to be in anybody’s debt, and so he always gives presents in return.

Let me do the same with Shakoor:

Based on what little I know of him, he sounds like a guy who gets things done and would probably have been successful one way or the other.

Last October when Shakoor and I first exchanged a couple emails, he was already working with a number of clients as a kind of full-service marketer for ecom businesses.

With just one of those clients working on a performance deal, Shakoor was taking in $10k+ per month. Overall, at that time, he was driving $300k+ in sales for his clients each month.

Somewhere along the line, Shakoor also had time to run his own dropshipping businesses, one of which got up to 100k+ buyers.

All that’s to say, after Shakoor decided to build up his personal brand and to start writing daily emails, I’m guessing he would have been successful with Dan Kennedy or without Dan Kennedy, with me or without me.

That said, I do appreciate Shakoor’s kind words.

​​I also do appreciate that I have been able to help occasional people learn something about direct marketing and copywriting… and even make transformations in their lives, whether that meant making more money, or getting going with daily emailing so they can build a personal brand and stop relying on cold outreach.

And on that topic:

I’m not currently selling the Influential Emails program that Shakoor was referring to. But I still am selling my Most Valuable Email program.

Most Valuable Email pulls back the curtain and shows you, in less than an hour, how to perform a specific email copywriting trick, one I use regularly in my own emails.

Emails using this trick are different from emails you might be familiar with, like story emails, or “hot takes,” or how-to emails, or personal reveals.

Unlike those other kinds of emails, Most Valuable Emails happen to work well whether you have authority or not, whether you’re just getting started with your personal brand or you have had a following for years.

And yet, none of that is the reason why these kinds of emails are most valuable.

The real reason is that Most Valuable Emails make daily emailing fun and educational for me personally, and easy to stick with for the long term.

And it seems for others like Shakoor also.

Maybe for you too?

I don’t know. But if you’d like to find out more about MVE, and see if it makes sense for you:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Announcing: Best Daily Email Awards

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Over the past few months, I’ve gotten addicted to listening to a Japanese woman’s YouTube channel, on which she puts out collections like, “1963 Billboard Top 100 Countdown.”

These collections feature hit songs I know, and are also a good way to discover something new, or at least new to me.

But the real reason I’m listening to this woman’s YouTube channel, as opposed to a million other YouTube song collections and playlists, is that her collections feel somehow authoritative, vetted.

After all, the included songs were all hits at the time they came out. People loved each of these songs then, even if some of the songs fell into obscurity later. The Billboard rankings prove it.

My own addiction reminded me of something I read in the Robert Collier Letter Book.

At one point, Collier was selling a subscription to the Review of Reviews, a monthly magazine that I guess was similar to Reader’s Digest.

The problem was few people really like committing to a subscription.

The solution of course was a series of attractive bonuses, which could appear and disappear on command.

But how to make a bonus instantly attractive?

One solution was to again defer to authority and vetting by others. The winning bonus was a little book that collected 64 stories that won the O. Henry prize for the best short story of the year.

Result? ​

​​​30,000-40,000 new subscribers with one sales letter, bundling a stupid magazine subscription with this sexy bonus.

You can do the same, by the way.

Maybe your niche already has some objective measure of authority to it — best-selling books, top-ranked ClickBank offers, investors who made the most money.

Or if there is no such objective measure, you can always invent a new prize or award.

You can use this authoritative or vetted status to create an attractive bonus or offer, and of course, to put yourself in the middle of the action.

And with that, I would like to announce the formation of the Best Daily Email Awards.

This is a new yearly award for merit in the daily email format.

Each year, the Best Daily Email Awards are selected by the prestigious and exclusive Daily Email Academy, which you are a member of by virtue of being a reader of this newsletter.

If you would like to nominate a particular daily email for a Best Daily Email Award, simply forward it to me before this Sunday, July 28, at 8:31pm CET.

Any daily email by any brand or person, in any market or niche, is eligible. You don’t need to explain your reasoning for nominating this particular email. The only restriction is you may only submit one entry, and that it’s actually a daily email.

And then, I, as the current acting Director of the Daily Email Academy, will collect the results, and announce the winners at the inaugural prize ceremony next week.

And yes, I’m 100% serious about this. So start forwarding now.

The one ring to rule them all, until it doesn’t

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A few weeks ago, Derek Johanson of CopyHour wrote an email with an inspiring idea:

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Most often all that an online business needs to go from zero to 6 figures is to focus on ONE simple business model and ONE marketing channel for growth.

One Business Model: If you sell courses, only sell courses. That’s your one business model. Don’t add coaching or do freelancing too.
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One Marketing Channel For Traffic: If you’ve picked LinkedIn to drive traffic, don’t think about YouTube or paid ads at all.

That’s it. Going deep into ONE business model and ONE marketing channel is how you double a small business.

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When I read this, I had a double reaction:

1. Whoa this makes sense
​
2. Hold on, this can’t be right — it’s just another manifestation of the human desire for “the one thing”

“The one thing,” as you might know, is a popular hook in direct response advertising.

It manifests itself in different guises — “the one thing,” “the ancient secret,” “the real reason” — but ultimately, it taps into to our brains’ desire to melt down the complexity and messiness of the world into just one magic ring of power to rule them all.

Rings like that exist in fantasies, but they don’t exist in real life.

Except, that’s not really what Derek was saying in his email. He was saying something more nuanced, and not-one-thingy.

I wasn’t quite sure how to stickily sum up what Derek was saying. Fortunately, somebody did it for me, in a paid private group (the only paid private group) that I’m a member of. The person in that group summed it up like this:

1. Test until it works
2. Scale until it stops working

Many things can work — for example, as sources of traffic.

The thing is, most things won’t work right out the gate. It will take some time and tweaking for them to produce results.

That’s step 1. Most people quit before they complete this step, and instead they jump to back to the beginning, to another supposed ring of power, hoping that it will work right away.

Derek’s email was about step 2. Going deep into one thing and scaling until it stops working. Which is a worthwhile idea, and like I said, quite not-one-thingy.

I thought about how to apply this to my own business. And I’m not really sure.

In terms of marketing channels to get people reading these emails, my number one source has been referrals and word-of-mouth, which I did absolutely nothing to encourage beyond writing daily and sharing novel ideas and illustrations. Maybe I should just keep writing.

As for the one business model, I still haven’t quite figured out one that I’m happy with. Which is why, over the past few months, I’ve sent out so many emails that ultimately link to $4.99 books on Amazon, or interesting articles you might find valuable, or—

Well, let me get to it now.

You remember I mentioned the paid private community I’m a member of? The only one?

I personally find it very valuable — and interesting.

Maybe you will too. But you will have to decide for yourself. I’m not promoting this community as an affiliate, and I’m not pushing you to join it. But if you’re curious to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

What a day to fly

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“Oh what the f—”

I arrived to the airport today around 8:45am to be faced with a giant, hideous snake, made up of people and luggage, starting at the check-in counters, folding in on itself a dozen times, and finally stretching its tail some hundred yards into the depths of the terminal.

I immediately made my way for the “last call” line. Even that took almost 45 minutes before I finally made it to the check-in counter.

​​I handed my id to the woman behind the counter. ​​She wasn’t interested.

“I need proof of your booking,” she said.

“What?”

“I need to see proof that you’ve bought a ticket.”

“The proof’s there in the computer,” I said. I helpfully pointed to her computer monitor for her.

She flipped it around so I could see. It showed a booting-up window. It was frozen.

“The computers aren’t working,” she said. “I need proof that you’ve bought a ticket.”

Maybe you’ve heard. There was some giant IT crash all around the world today. America. Australia. Europe. Hospitals. Banks. Airlines.

I produced proof of booking in the end.

​​And in return, I got a flimsy piece of paper, written out by hand, with my name on it and the code for the flight. That was my boarding pass today.

I won’t go into the details of all my adventures today.

Suffice to say, the situation was a huge mess, everywhere, all at once.

As I stood there at the airport, in a crowd of thousands of people, all of us burdened with luggage, all confused, all indecisive and yet unhappy to stay where we were, I thought that this was a little sampler of what Porter Stansberry has been predicting for 15 years or more.

“End of America.” Total social collapse. A world in which things stop working, and we’re suddenly exposed and helpless.

I don’t know if Stansberry’s predictions will ever come true.

But I do know that predictions like that always get attention.

Fear works. So does greed, if you can tie it into the fear, and make a claim like copywriter Gary Halbert once did:

“How You Can Profit From The Coming Stock Market Crash And Financial Blood-Bath That Is Going To Be Caused By Cash-Rich Drug Dealers And Other Criminal Scum!”

The thing is, fear and greed can be good at getting buyers. But they might not be very good at getting repeat buyers, the buyers who actually build a direct response business.

There has to be something more.

And to find out what that something more is, today I’ll invite you to read an essay that has been ringing in my head for years.

This essay explains why the “End of America” sales letter was such a huge success, when hundreds of similar sales messages, all making the same predictions and claims, didn’t even come close.

And this analysis comes from a man who should know, because he got the sales numbers of all these hundreds of sales letters, and he got the copy to compare. Plus, he’s a master copywriter himself, who has coached and guided dozens of other master copywriters.

If you’re interested in copywriting, at all, then this essay is worth a read:

https://www.markford.net/2019/12/09/

The light at the end of the tunnel

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“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“How do you expect me to respond to this?”

“How about, you love me too?”

“How about: I’m leaving.”

That’s the start of the last scene of the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. In case you haven’t seen it, the movie goes like this:

The first time Harry and Sally meet, they hate each other. The second time they meet, Harry doesn’t even remember who Sally is. The third time they meet, Harry and Sally become friends. Then they sleep together, and things go south and they stop being friends.

And then one New Year’s Eve, Harry finally realizes he loves Sally, and he runs to meet her, and he declares his love. And she says, “I’m leaving.”

The fact is, screenwriter Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner both felt that movie should end like this.

​​No way should it end with Harry and Sally winding up together. That’s not how the real world works. People in those kinds of relationships don’t end up together.

That’s how the first two drafts of the movie actually went. The bitter truth.

But in the third draft, Ephron wrote this final scene, and Reiner shot it. After Sally’s “I’m leaving,” Harry delivers a speech about all the little things he loves about her, and they kiss and they wind up together, forever, in love.

And that’s how the movie was released, and it was a big, big hit.

So what’s the point?

Well, maybe it’s obvious, but you can go negative and cynical and sarcastic for the whole movie, but you gotta end on an inspiring, positive note.

​​It’s gotta make sense to people and give them a feeling of hope, at least if you want to create something that has a chance to be a big big hit, something that can appeal to a wide swath of the market.

Or in the words of screenwriter and director David Mamet:

“Children jump around at the end of the day, to expend the last of that day’s energy. The adult equivalent, when the sun goes down, is to create or witness drama — which is to say, to order the universe into a comprehensible form.”

But now I have a problem:

I’ve just pulled back the curtain. And what’s behind the curtain is not so nice. So how can I end this email on an inspiring, positive note?

Well, I can admit to you that the world is a large and complex and often unjust place. But it does have its own structure. And just by reading these emails, you’re finding out bits and pieces of that structure, and that helps you make more sense of the world you live in, and it helps you shape and influence the world for the better.

I can also tell you that the above bit, about Harry and Sally and Nora and Rob, is part of a book I’m working on, the mythical “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Propagandists, and Stage Magicians.”

I’ve been working on this book for a long time. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

In the meantime, do you know about my other 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters?

It also collects bits and pieces of the structure of the world, and it can help you understand and shape that world for the better. In case you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments