Psychology Behind Advertising

Just how bad are you at multitasking?

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Nobody called me out on it. But yesterday, I made a kind of preposterous claim.

​​I was talking about the following headline:

“If you’ve got 20 minutes a month, I guarantee to work a financial miracle in your life”

… and I said that his was an example of a concrete promise, something real and palpable.

As of this writing, nobody wrote me to challenge me on that. So let me do your job for you:

“Really Bejako? A ‘financial miracle in your life’? That’s your example of a concrete and real and palpable promise?”

Yes, really. And to prove it to you, let me tell you a story.

This story involves a man. A man named Tony. Tony Slydini.

Little Italian guy.
​​
Wrinkled, like a salted cod fish.

Spoke with a heavy Italian accent.

Performed magic tricks like you wouldn’t believe.

One of Slydini’s magic tricks involved making a bunch of paper balls disappear, only to appear in a hat that was empty at the start of the trick.

Before making each paper ball disappear, Slydini performed a few elaborate hand gestures. He’d wave the paper ball around in front of him, close it in his hand, sprinkle some invisible magic dust on it, open his hand, close it again, etc.

If you haven’t seen this trick, I have a link to it at the end.

​​But before you go watch, read on. Because I’m about to spoil the magic for you, and that’s important.

How does Slydini make each paper ball disappear?

​​And how does he teleport them inside the hat?

If you don’t want to know, then stop reading now. Otherwise, I’ll tell you.

Still here?

Fine. Here’s the trick behind the magic, from an article in Scientific American:

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Slydini deposits the vanished paper balls into the hat when he reaches inside the hat to fetch invisible magic dust. This mock action prevents the audience from assigning an additional, key intent to the move: to unload the paper balls inside the hat, to later reveal them at the trick’s finale.

Just as our visual system strains to see the vase and the two faces at once, we struggle to conceive of a motion that has a dual motivation: to put and to fetch. Even when it should be apparent to every member of the audience, and to every YouTube viewer, that Slydini’s action of fetching magical powder inside the hat must be a ruse.

In other words, even when the ostensible purpose is preposterous, we still can’t consider an alternative explanation.

That’s how bad our brains are at multitasking.

===

Our brains are sticky. This creates some strange phenomena.

Give me a warm cup of coffee to hold. Then show me a stranger’s face. I’ll evaluate the stranger as looking friendly.

Point my attention to the 20 minutes I know I have. Then make me a promise of a financial miracle in my life. I’ll evaluate your promise as concrete and real.

Don’t believe that it works?

You can see Slydini’s trick on YouTube. Link’s below.

​​You now know how the trick is done. But watch it yourself — it takes all of 4 minutes — and witness just how bad you are at multitasking:

 

If you’ve got 2 minutes right now, I guarantee more response to your offers

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A few weeks ago, I joined JK Molina’s email list. You might have heard of JK — he’s kind of the marketing coach to all the coaches who coach coaches.

Anyways, in between the steady flow of familiar promises – “make $100k per month with just Google docs and email” — I found an interesting persuasion idea in one of JK’s emails. Says JK:

“You get better leads by offering to take something they ALREADY HAVE into something they DON’T.”

Huh? The first time I read this, I had no idea what JK’s on about. But an example helped:

Bad ad: “How to make $30,000”

Good ad: “Turn the old car you’ve got parked in your garage into $30,000.”

A-ha. A dim, flickering light came on in my head.

And thanks to that flickering light, I could once again see Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullet #3. Gary asked which of these investing headlines won:

A:

The Millionaire Maker:
Can he make YOU rich, too?

B:

If you’ve got 20 minutes a month,
I guarantee to work a financial miracle in your life

As you can probably guess by now, the answer was B. Gary says it “worked like a charm and handily beat the previous champ.”

Gary’s explanation for why B won is that we’ve all gotten jaded by big promises, but the if-then structure somehow manages to disable normal critical faculties.

Maybe that’s really it.

Or maybe it’s what JK says above.

Maybe it’s that we don’t respond to promises unless we feel they are concrete and real. Unless those promises are anchored to something we can touch, taste, or in case of 20 minutes, simply know with 100% certainty that we have on us, right here, right now.

So try it yourself and see.

​​Use the if-then structure, or promise to turn the junk in your prospect’s garage into a stack of $100 bills.

I guarantee this will increase response to your offers. And if it doesn’t, come back tomorrow, and I’ll give you a new idea, for free, and keep giving you new ideas, until one of them does increase your response.

Also:

If you’ve got two thumbs and a smart phone, then I promise you a new way to fascinate your email subscribers every day. For more information on that:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Customers who pay you to pay you

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Right now, for the meager price of $30,000 to start, and then $10,000 per year to keep going, you can sign up to get a spot at Carbone.

Carbone is an exclusive restaurant in New York.

​​The $30k + $10k/year membership gets you a regular weekly table there.

​​Of course, you still have to pay for the food and drinks and service, which, as you can imagine, are expensive.

It turns out there are more and more such restaurants, going members-only.

They cater to people with money who want a few different things. One is better service, less waiting, and being treated with respect. Two is status and recognition. Three, and more than anything it seems, is a feeling of community.

In other words, people are paying good money to be among others like themselves, and to feel comfortable, welcome, and warm.

I’m telling you this to maybe warm up your own mind to the possibilities that are out there.

You can charge people decent money — maybe even indecent money — just for the privilege of being able to buy from you.

Of course, you do have to offer something in return — exclusivity, top-level service, a community.

Who knows? Maybe this is even a way you can charge for the marketing you give away now. Such as your daily emails, for example.

And with that, let me remind you of my Simple Money Emails program.

This program teaches you how to write emails that people want to read, and that they buy from.

I’ve only sent these kinds of emails to prospects for free.

But maybe you can not only use use these kinds of emails to make sales, but charge for them as well, by combining them with the idea above.

Whatever the case may be, if you’d like to find out more about Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Sizzling tracks at the gay nudist beach of death

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Yesterday, I was walking on the train tracks. It’s how you get to Dead Man’s Beach.

It turns out Dead Man’s Beach is a nudist beach. In fact, it turns out it’s a gay nudist beach.

I didn’t know any of this yesterday. I showed up, pretty straight, in my usual city slicker outfit of blue jeans and converse.

I looked down from the cliff that leads to the beach at all the nudity and gayness. There wasn’t very much of either — just two couples and a couple naked dogs.

But back to the train tracks.

In order to get to Dead Man’s Beach, you have to cross the train tracks, because the train runs right along the sea.

Also, in order to get from one part of Dead Man’s Beach to the other, you actually have to walk on the train tracks for a stretch.

Problem:

Every couple of minutes, a speeding train from Barcelona appears out of nowhere and zooms by on the tracks. This is not how Dead Man’s Beach got its name, but the trains really could be deadly.

Solution:

You can actually hear the train coming a good minute before it appears out of nowhere. Not because it’s ringing a bell or hooting a horn or loudly chugging along, but because the train tracks vibrate.

Even when the train is a mile away, the tracks start to give off a sizzling sound that warns you it’s time to move to the side.

Can you hear it now? You should be able to.

Because until tonight, Saturday, at 12 midnight PST, I have a special, free bonus if you buy my Simple Money Emails course.

The bonus is the “lite” version of Matt Giaro’s $397 course Subscribers From Scratch. It will show you how Matt grew his email list, with high-quality subscribers who paid for themselves, via little newsletter ads.

Right now, the deadline is speeding along, and it will come bursting out of its dark tunnel soon.

When that happens, you won’t be able to get Matt’s course any more — not for free in any case.

I won’t be sending any more emails before tonight. But you still have time.

The tracks are sizzling. It’s a warning. You can probably hear it. It’s giving you a chance to get the jump on the deadline. If you’d like to do it right now, before it’s too late:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Talk different

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Today is the last day to sign up for my Daily Email Fastlane workshop, which means it’s TIME:

TIME ​​to feature bits of self-serving feedback I’ve gotten from readers who have already signed up.​​

I have one such bit below.

​​If you read on, you will see it serves my purposes perhaps all too well.

Still, it might just be worth reading for your own self, because it does also illustrate a deep marketing truth.

Yesterday, I got a message from Ashley Gainer, who is a copywriter, former journalist, and current host of the Copy Chatter podcast.

Ashley had signed up for Daily Email Fastlane, so I wrote her to ask what her situation is in regard to daily emails, and how I can make the workshop as useful to her as possible.

​​Here’s a part of what she replied:

===

I’ve been sending a daily email to my list for 2+ years. Your “takes” on the how and why of copywriting and marketing in general are often so different from what I normally see with the chest-thumpers — I want to know more about your approach.

===

Ok, so now that I’ve slipped in this bit of self-serving feedback, maybe you can read it again and see that deep and obvious marketing truth:

If you want people to buy from you, even products that are kind of vague and mysterious like Daily Email Fastlane, then make sure you talk different from other people out there.

I don’t mean just talking all ungrammatical or doubling down on your own slang.

I mean fundamentally having unique things, different things, surprising things to say.

Easier said than done, right?

​​How in helminth do you come up with different, unique, surprising things to say, particularly every day?

Good news:

​​That’s one of the commonalities I’ve found among three successful daily emailers I will be using as case studies inside Daily Email Fastlane.

Honestly, I’m dissecting what these guys do as much for myself as I’m doing it for you.

Because if I could only have five fundamentals of human psychology as applies to marketing and copywriting, one for each of the fingers of my left hand, then contrast would be one of them. In fact it would be the thumb.

That’s why during Daily Email Fastlane, I’ll go into this “talk different” topic, and give you a practical technique I’ve seen used by all three of these daily emailers to say something unique as often as they like.

Daily Email Fastlane is happening tomorrow night, live on Zoom, at 8pm CET, with a replay if you cannot attend live.

But the deadline to sign up is today, Wednesday, less than 12 hours from now, at 8:31pm CET. If you’d like join me and find out how to talk different:

https://bejakovic.com/daily-email-fastlane

Not even Cialdini could coax, talk, or shame a solution to this problem

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Towards the end of chapter 4 of Bob Cialdini’s book Influence, Cialdini shares a personal story that I want to share with you today.

I want to share this story with you because it serves my purpose.

But you might want to read this story because it can help you achieve your purpose as well.

Here goes:

Robert Cialdini, a world-famous expert in influence, persuasion, and communication, wanted to get his 3yo son to learn to swim without wearing an inflatable inner tube.

Each year, a bunch of kids in Arizona, where Cialdini lived, drowned in unattended pools. Cialdini wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen to his boy.

So he tried a direct appeal — “Let’s teach you how to swim, son.”

NO!!! was the response. ​​Cialdini’s kid liked water, but he was terrified of getting in without the inflatable inner tube.

No matter how Cialdini tried to “coax, talk, or shame” his 3yo son, the boy wouldn’t let go.

Fine. Cialdini hired a graduate student of his, who was also a lifeguard and swimming instructor, to get his son to learn to swim.

Nope. Once again, the kid refused.

Not even the lifeguard’s professional techniques could overcome the boy’s fear of swimming without the inflatable inner tube.

Fast forward a couple days. Cialdini’s kid was attending a day camp.

One day, as usual, Cialdini went to pick his son up. And he saw a shocking, never-before-seen sight:

His kid was running down the diving board at the pool. He reached the end of the diving board and jumped into the deep end. No inflatable inner tube.

Cialdini rushed over, ready to dive in the pool and to rescue his certainly drowning son.

Except the kid wasn’t drowning. He was swimming.

Cialdini was stunned. He helped his kid get out the pool. And he asked the boy how come he could finally swim without his inflatable plastic ring.

Response:

“Well, I’m 3 years old, and Tommy is 3 years old. And Tommy can swim without a ring, so that means I can, too.”

You can probably imagine a bright-red handprint on Cialdini’s forehead as he slapped himself upon hearing that.

Point being:

We’re all looking for some kind of confirmation that what we’re trying to do is actually possible.

Examples from others can help there. But in order for it to actually help, those others must have the same limitations we have.

If you’re 3 years old, it doesn’t help much to see a 26-year-old lifeguard swimming without an inflatable plastic ring. But when you see 3-year-old Tommy do it, then that means something.

And now to my purpose:

If you are not yet writing daily emails for your personal brand, or if you are not yet successful with it, then next Thursday I’m putting on a workshop called Daily Email Fastlane.

A key part of this workshop will be the common elements I’ve seen among three daily emailers I have coached over the past 18 months.

​​These three coaching students have stood out to me in terms of the money they make, the stability of their income, and simply in how much they seem to enjoy their business and their life.

My claim is that seeing inside these guys’ businesses can help you overcome your own self-imposed or real limitations.

​​Because among these these three daily emailers, you can find at least one who has faced the kinds of problems that you might be facing now:

– a small list
– an unpromising niche
– leads without money
– imposter syndrome
– a genuine lack of credibility

And yet, these three guys turned out successful. Maybe seeing their examples can make you successful also, and quickly so.

If you’d like to join me for this workshop to try it for yourself, here’s where to dive in:

https://bejakovic.com/daily-email-fastlane

Very insightful AI-generated summary for my book’s reviews

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Yesterday, I checked my little 10 Commandments book on Amazon to see if I have any new reviews. I have no new reviews. But there is something new.

Above all the reviews I’ve gotten so far, there’s a new AI-generated summary that says:

“Customers find the book a great read with great bits of advice. They also appreciate the names of the great bits.”

Huh? Names of the great bits?

​​I’m guessing that’s the AI-generated summary of the following human-generated review, which contains the word “names” several times:

“Short and very pertinent. Loaded with the names of hugely successful giants of the copywriting world and the titles of their successful books. I read the book on Kindle and highlighted many great bits of advice and the names of the great writers sharing advice. If you write ad copy for a living or hope to do so, buy this book.”

Now, this is not one of those “Haha stupid AI, it will never be as smart as us great apes” emails.

I’ve gone on record three years ago, before ChatGPT really broke, saying I think AI will in fact be able to replace any and all human work, including supposedly creative work.

I still stand by that. If AI is not quite there yet today, like with the above review summary, then it will get there tomorrow, or the day after.

That said:

My awkward AI summary above actually makes an insightful point. Humans do appreciate the names of the great bits.

Specifically, we appreciate the names of great bits known as other humans.

I’ve noticed I get turned off when I realize something is AI-generated. Not because it’s inferior in quality. Often it’s not — often it’s actually better. But I still get turned off, simply because I realize it’s AI-generated.

Really, this isn’t anything new.

I haven’t been to many standup comedy shows. But I have heard they are typically set up in a 1-2-3 order:

Number 1 comic is unknown and often terrible. Number 2 comic is unknown but really good, on the way up. Number 3 comic is nationally famous and has been so for a few years.

Objectively speaking, the no. 2 comic will often deliver the best, tightest, funniest set.

But it’s the no. 3 comic who will draw the biggest laughs, simply because people have come to see him, because he’s the headliner, because he’s got the name they know. The quality of the content is actually secondary or tertiary.

While there are still humans, and while there is still work for us to do, there’s a lesson to be drawn from that.

​​And now, related to that lesson, here’s my offer to you:

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about creating some kind of a workshop or program to help people build up their status, their authority, their name. How to do this is a personal interest of mine. And maybe I can help you do it, quickly and thoroughly.

I haven’t yet decided whether to organize this workshop or program, or how it would look. But if you’re interested, just hit reply and tell me so.

I won’t have anything to pitch you — not yet at least. But I want to hear from you, and I want to talk to you, and see if I can help. So if you’re interested, hit reply and let’s talk.

Two underused forms of social proof

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One of the most personally useful emails I ever writ up went out with the subject line, “Send me your praise and admiration.”

That email was about something I’d noticed in the famous and immensely successful infomercial for the George Foreman Grill — aka the Mean Lean Fat-Reducing Grillin’ Machine.

What I noticed was that only half the testimonials in that infomercial talked about how great the grill is, and how well it cooks, and how the hamburgers come out delicious.

The other half of the testimonials were just about George Foreman, who really had nothing to do with the grill except that he allowed his name and his signature to be added to it.

So that was the first underused kind of social proof I spotted:

Testimonials that simply sell the person who’s selling.

The other kind of underused social proof I noticed last summer during an affiliate promotion I ran.

I noticed that whenever I featured a message from someone who had just bought via my affiliate link, more people would buy. Even if that comment said nothing spectacular about the offer they had just bought. In other words:

Simple proof that others were buying right now drove still more sales.

And on that note, this morning I woke up to several new notifications that I’d made affiliate sales of CopyHour. And I also saw emails from people who had bought, asking for their bonuses, including this message from a reader named Michael:

===

Hi John,

I hope all is well on your end!

I just wanted to reach out and let you know I signed up for Copy Hour. I have to say, I’ve seen it offered before but your Red-Hot Copywriting Bundle is what sealed the deal.

Thanks for the value you bring to the community.

===

About that Red-Hot Copywriting Bundle…

I am closing my promo of CopyHour tonight at 8:31pm CET — less than 8 hours away. If you join CopyHour before then, using my affiliate link below, I’ll also give you access to the following five free bonuses — code-named Red-Hot Copywriting Bundle:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

I sold each of those bonuses at the prices listed above. When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

Again, the deadline to get these bonuses is tonight, 8:31pm CET. If you want ’em, you’ll have to join CopyHour before then.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do join CopyHour, write me and say so. Also write me in case you already have bought via my affiliate link. The affiliate portal only lets me see the first name of who’s bought and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll send over your bonuses.

My ex doesn’t know what she wants, but she sure knows what she doesn’t want

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I have this friend. Actually an ex-girlfriend. We’ve been friends for 15 years after breaking up.

I talked to her yesterday on the phone. As usual, she’s having problems at work.

“I feel so stuck,” she said. “I think I should go get an MBA in entrepreneurship.”

Huh?

Bear with me for a brief moment while I run through my ex’s troubled work history. I promise to give you a valuable takeaway as a result of it.

My ex graduated some 15 years ago with a master’s degree in economics. Such a degree prepares you to do absolutely nothing in life. I know, because I too graduated with the same degree.

In spite of the worthless economics degree, my ex managed to get a job at General Electric, in what was effectively another graduate program.

After a few years of that and a few years off to raise a kid (not mine), my ex decided she wanted to change careers.

So she went back to school to study UX design. After graduating with her second master’s degree, she started working as a UX researcher.

She’s been doing that for the past several years, in a series of maybe a dozen jobs.

In each job, she very quickly discovers this is not what she had imagined. And within the first week or two, she starts planning and scheming to do something new, different. Now it’s an MBA in entrepreneurship. Anything, as long as it’s not what she’s doing now.

That’s the valuable takeaway I promised you. It’s a powerful sales principle.

It applies to most all of us. Definitely to my friend… definitely to me… probably to you and most probably to your customers.

That sales principle is that people can see with much more clarity and intensity what they have and do not want, rather than what they do not have but do want.

One consequence of this:

Rather than spending a huge amount of time coming up with clever positioning and sales arguments for your offer, it’s often much better to simply position what you have as NOT what your prospect is doing now.

Example:

My Copy Riddles program. It’s not a copywriting course in any traditional sense. It’s not good information. It’s something else.

For more info on this training program that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The new science of emotion and the old takeaway from it

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Two nights ago, I started read a new book, How Emotions Are Made. In the first chapter, the author writes:

===

It was in graduate school that I felt my first tug of doubt about the classical view of emotion. At the time, I was researching the roots of low self-esteem and how it leads to anxiety or depression. Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.

===

“Hello,” I said. “I never thought about it that way. This anxiety/depression distinction sounds valuable. Better note that down for the future. Maybe I can apply it in some sales copy.”

I got out my notebook and started to write this idea down. “Numerous experiments showed that…”

But something bothered me. It was that phrase, “first tug of doubt,” higher up in the passage. So I scanned on down the page in the book. And sure enough:

It turns out that in spite of strong belief and “numerous experiments,” this idea about the roots of anxiety and depression is not reproducible.

In fact, 8 subsequent studies designed to reproduce this well-trodden distinction all reproduced the opposite result.

In some people, a failure to live up to one’s own ideals produced neither depression nor anxiety. In others, it produced both depression and anxiety. Never just the one the theory predicted. Same with a failure to live up to standards set by others.

This isn’t just a one-time failure to reproduce a specific result. Rather, it seems to be a new understanding of what emotions are in general.

Apparently, there’s a new science of how emotions are made and what they really are.

It’s not five core emotions like you may have seen in that Inside Out Pixar cartoon. And it’s also not the fixed and familiar smiley/frowny/cry-ey emojis we all know and respond to.

Rather, emotions are something complex, unique, and unpredictable, at least in the way they manifest themselves in our behavior, faces, and bodies. It’s taken us 100+ years of scientific study of emotion to tease out this counterintuitive result.

Whatever. I’m getting too inside baseball. My takeaway for you today is simply this:

Nobody really wants to hear about the complexity, the uniqueness, the unpredictability. Even the scientists, except for a few bad apples.

Instead, we all want the immense, pretty much unfathomably complex nature of the universe reduced to a few rules of thumb, certainties, slogans. And whenever we come across a new one of those, we say,

“Hello. Never thought about it that way. Sounds valuable. Better note that down for the future. And maybe let’s see what else this guy is selling…”

That’s my free advice for you for today.

For more human psychology, gleaned from actual scientific experiments performed over millions of people, you might like my Copy Riddles course.

Copy Riddles shows you what appeals people respond to in in great detail. And more importantly, it trains you to apply this knowledge so you can make more sales. To find out more about Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/