Psychology Behind Advertising

Don’t read this before bed

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A gruesome and depressing email today. Read at your own risk:

Last night, of course right before bed, I saw a real-life clip online that I really didn’t need to see.

It showed a heartbroken mother wailing. She had just called 911 after she discovered some rotting human remains in her 19-year-old son’s closet.

The rest of the clip showed the police confronting the son.

He calmly and articulately admitted that, yes, that is a human head and a pair human hands in his closet, and yes, he did murder somebody with a knife. Asked why, he replied, “I always wanted to know what it would feel like.”

Of course, rather than closing my laptop at this point and going to drink some chamomile tea to maybe bleach this from my mind, I investigated this case further.

The murderer looks to be as close to pure evil as you can imagine. Cold, remorseless, shark-like.

He was arrested and then tried. His lawyers went with an insanity defense. It didn’t fly.

He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The jury felt he was not insane, in the sense that he could clearly distinguish between right and wrong.

But if you see the guy confessing to the murder or talking about the details of it, it’s clear that something is not right in his head. He might not be insane in the legal sense, but he’s certainly not sane in the everyday sense.

If you would dig into the neural pathways, chemicals, bits and blobs of his brain, I bet you’d find they were different to what a normal person has. Maybe this guy was born deficient in some way, or something went wrong early in life, or wasn’t there when it should have been.

I feel like I’m digging myself into a hole with this email. It’s too late to stop now, so let me dig a bit deeper:

I don’t know if we have free will, or like I wrote a few weeks ago, “free won’t.”

But even though the murder case above is as clear of a black-and-white, good-vs-evil, open-and-shut case as you would ever not want to see right before bed, I personally still feel there’s probably much more to it for anybody who would take the trouble to look closer.

Does that mean that the guy is not guilty of murder?

Smart people, such as Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, argue exactly this. Sapolsky says that assigning guilt doesn’t make sense when you actually look at what’s happening in the brain.

I personally don’t know.

One thing I do know is that my “shades of gray” way of looking at the world is a handicap, probably for my own happiness and certainly when it comes to influencing others. Because the more black-and-white you see things, the easier it makes it for others to identify with you, to fall in line with your views, to berserk on your behalf, as Ben Settle likes to say.

This black-and-white stuff also works if you write sales copy. (Yes, I have to somehow try to clamber out of that hole I’ve dug for myself.)

The more extreme, contrasted, polarized you make your claims, the more likely you are to draw attention to and to create desire for them.

This is something I go into much more detail in my Copy Riddles program. Copy Riddles gives you source material from info products of years past, and sales bullets from A-list copywriters who promoted those products, to drill this black-and-white stuff into your brain, such as it is.

In case you’d like to find out more, and maybe bleach this email from your mind:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Glamourous and profitable #1 ranking in an impossible category

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In 1987, Hatton Gardens Hotel in Upton Saint Leonards won the inaugural Loo Of The Year award.

The Loo Of The Year is awarded each year to the best public toilet in the UK, based on criteria such as adequate flushing frequency, urinal privacy, overall cleanliness, lighting, lack of vandalism, and, best of all, a “wow factor.”

The Loo Of The Year awards were set up in 1987 by the communications director of a washroom service company.

That first year, only 50 guests attended, and awards were given in only two categories, hotels and restaurants.

There are now 63 categories, and over 300 guests attended the prestigious event and dinner last year.

Yesterday, I talked about the transformative effect that winning the race at Le Mans had on Jaguar, the car brand. To my mind, there are three key elements in something like winning a top-tier car race:

1. A ranking with a clear number 1

2. An incontestable result, a matter of performance, not popularity or opinion

3. An element of glamour

But even if you cannot get all three, two out of three can still be great for business.

Awards and arbitrary “Top 100” listings only offer #1 and #3, ranking + glamour. The results are definitely a matter of popularity or opinion, but so what?

I wrote an email back in 2019 about the impact that the World’s 50 Best Restaurants listing had on the restaurant and tourism industry.

As one extreme example, a Copenhagen restaurant named Noma already had 2 Michelin stars. Even so, they were struggling to fill tables.

After Noma randomly and unexpectedly came in at the top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, 100,000 people tried to book a table there in one day. Suddenly, generating business was no longer an issue.

As for Hatton Gardens Hotel:

At the next year’s event ceremony, in 1988, the manager of the Hatton Gardens said visits to his hotel had doubled since winning Loo Of The Year.

Such is the power of a #1 ranking + glamour, above and beyond a certification… or a gold star… or a label. (And yes, even toilets can apparently have glamour — at least glamour enough to double business.)

So create an award for your industry, or create rankings.

Or better yet, pay somebody else to create them, and to announce you the winner.

Put on a tuxedo or an evening gown, get your photo taken in front of one of those step-and-repeat banners, and watch what happens to your business.

And if you detest awards show, and if paying some rando to create a Top 50 ranking and put you at #1 turns you off, don’t worry.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you how to have success with only elements 2+3 off the list above.

Can you guess what example I’ll use?

I’ll give you a hint. It’s a man who built a massive, enduring career, out of nothing, to become the most famous entertainer of his age. And he did it with a series of incontestable challenges, dares, and contests, all of which featured an element of glamour.

While you ponder that, let me remind you that my Daily Email Habit has been voted #1 among the World’s Best 100 Email Prompt Services by a distinguished panel of email marketers, all of whom happen to subscribe to Daily Email Habit.

Here’s what one of the distinguished panelists, Australian copywriter Allan Johnson, had to say in casting his vote:

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This is a very useful service. I have always struggled to commit to daily writing (emails or not) and protecting the streak is now a priority, so thanks.

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If you’d like to find out what makes Daily Email Habit #1:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why I don’t drink alcohol

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I’m zoominating on the high-speed train from Barcelona to Valencia as I write this.

In between looking out the window at the countryside (sun, olive orchards, power line towers, factories, occasional ruins of medieval forts), I also making sure to regularly check what’s happening on the Internet, so you know, so I don’t miss out on something important.

A few minutes ago, this led me to a surging Reddit thread:

“Why do you not drink alcohol?”

Millions want to know, and millions more want to answer.

This thread caught my eye because I myself don’t drink alcohol, and haven’t for the past two years. Why?

Some top Reddit comments apply to me, some not:

– “I drank my lifetime supply” (I definitely did drink, regularly, for years, but having had my fill isn’t what made me stop.)

– “Getting older” (A part of it. With age, drinking just made me feel in general less healthy, though it was probably always true.)

– “Blackouts” (This was actually significant. I noticed that even moderate drinking started to make me not remember what I did the night before, and this scared me.)

– “Tastes bad” (Just add some water to it.)

– “Alcoholism runs in my family” (No. My dad is a lifelong teetotaler and my mom tends to start crying if she has a glass of wine.)

– “I don’t like who I am when I drink” (I like myself much better when I drink.)

So much for crowdsourced wisdom. It’s okay… but there’s one reason I didn’t see anybody on Reddit mention.

The fact is, over the past two years, not drinking alcohol become a part of my identity.

For me, not drinking was at first a health-related experiment… then a kind of on-off habit.

But whatever reasons I initially had have become completely secondary to the fact that now “I just don’t drink.” It’s not something I have to think about, pressure myself to do, feel I need to justify myself over.

Maybe there’s a lesson there?

The way I see it, if you want to make an appeal to people, then identity is as powerful of an appeal as you can make, and much more powerful than any kind of benefit or promise or warning.

This works with yourself as well.

Make something a part of your identity, and it becomes a non-issue to do it regularly, cheerfully, even in the face of hardships and obstacles.

There are intermediate steps, like I said. First experiment, then habit.

But my train’s a-nearing Valencia. So let me just say:

I don’t know if you identify with the sentiment, “I write. It’s just something I do.”

Writing has benefits, as you may know. It also has costs — time, thought, or blood, like Hemingway apocryphally said.

But writing can become just something you do, regardless. And then good things happen.

If you’d like to start an experiment with writing regularly, and maybe make a habit of it, and even an identity one day, then I can help. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The first time I tried it, I didn’t last very long

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Dan Kennedy has a joke that goes something like, if we all stopped doing a thing in case the first time didn’t work out well, the human race would soon die out.

Get it? Get it? Wink wink, nudge nudge?

It’s about sex.

I bring this up for two reasons:

Reason one is that the first time I tried it — meaning writing emails, get your mind out of literotica section please — it didn’t work out well. Or actually I just didn’t last very long.

I believe this current newsletter, which has been running for 6+ years day in and day out, is something like my third or fourth attempt to stick to emailing consistently.

Reason two is because I want to share with you a case study I got from a reader named Jakub Červenka.

Jakub runs an online business called Muž 2.0. From what Google tells me, that translates from Czech into into Man 2.0. Because Jakub’s business is teaching men self-development stuff, specifically how to fix various bedroom problems.

Now, I happen to know from having exchanged lots of emails with Jakub over the years that his main thing is running ads on Facebook to a webinar that sells his core program.

But lately, Jakub gave another shot to daily emailing, even though it didn’t work out well the first time around. Jakub reports:

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I had been sending emails daily and then stopped for a good part of this year mainly due to feeling burnt out and feeling like I was riding on a dead horse, writing emails about the same topic.

With your service, this block is gone. I like to see the puzzle and then read in your email how you personally used it. It’s great over-the-shoulder learning experience.

I also noticed how not wanting to break the streak is motivating me – even more so than I don’t know, say making potentially money from making a sale to my list… that’s crazy. I am ashamed to admit it, as it is completely irrational, but it’s the truth. And probably not so surprising to anyone in the copywriting world, we know we are not rational beings, but still, this surprised me.

Also, I used a few of your prompts in my Black Friday promo. I made crazy good offer to my list, (20 of my flagship courses for 40% of the price) due to some messed up technical stuff ended up selling 23, which with some up/cross/down sells brought home close to $20k in 3 days… my best Black Friday yet.

So it was a good offer, but I was not promoting it in any other way than by e-mails and your inspiration was part of it, so you can say that your service contributed to this result. Which is true and it restored my resolve to write daily.

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The service Jakub is referring to is my Daily Email Habit. It makes it easier to come up with a daily email topic every day, plus it has an in-email streak counter to keep you accountable.

Like Jakub says, why the streak counter works is not particularly rational… but it can be very effective.

And the results?

Jakub already had a successful business, and he had all the pieces in place. Reintroducing daily emails helped him make another $20k last month that he might not have made otherwise.

Your particular situation? Only you can really answer that question.

One thing I’m sure of, if you’re planning to ever or restart daily emails, the sooner you do, the sooner you will see results. Yes, even if you tried it before and it felt like riding on a dead horse.

For more info on Daily Email Habit, and how it can help you start and stay consistent with daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

When scarcity wears out, what then?

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I only have a half-dozen print books in my apartment. The print books I do have are there because I feel the book is simply so important that I want it around me, available even if the grid goes down, sitting there on the shelf, catching my attention from time to time, inviting me to pull it down and open it up and look inside once again.

One of these half-dozen books is the Robert Collier Letter Book.

If I were ever stranded on a desert island… if for some unlikely reason I wanted to get off and rejoin civilization… and if my only hope of rescue was to write an effective sales letter that I would mail to millions of homes around the country… then I’d want Collier’s book next to me under that palm tree.

Collier’s book has got everything — rattlesnakes, beheadings, genies in the lamp, war heroes, romance, adventure, silk stockings, wagons of coal, dinosaurs.

But let me get to the point of this email:

Collier at some point was selling an O. Henry book set by mail. He sold literally millions of copies of this book set, in a single year.

How?

Well, prices of paper, binding, and labor were increasing (it was during World War I). Collier’s sales letters all emphasized that future editions of the book would have to cost more, and people saw that it must be true. In fact, Collier found that his most effective headline was:

“Before The Price Goes Up!”

But when the price eventually did go up, sales of the O. Henry dropped to such low levels that it wasn’t profitable to mail out any more sales letter.

Testing out different copy produced no improvement.

What then?

Side note:

One trick I practice (I think I got it from John Carlton) is to stop when I come across a puzzle like this. Rather than reading on to find out the answer — and there is an answer — I ask myself, what would I do here?

If I were selling something, using scarcity language to knock in a bunch of golf balls that are close to the hole… what then?

Time to move on? Or time for a new product? Or for more leads? Or what?

Think about that for a moment. Really, try it, now.

And once you’re done…

Then read on to find out the answer, in Collier’s words:

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So we decided to try another kind of hurry-up, and the one we hit upon was: “Last Chance To Get Jack London free!” Mind you, we had been giving Jack London (or Oppenheim or the mystery and detective stories, or some other premium) for six years, and people had come to expect it. They had grown tired of hearing of raises in price, probably no longer believed further raises possible, but the threat of losing the premium was something different.

Strange as it may seem, putting in that one line changed the results over night. Back went the sales to the previous year’s figures. Ads pulled again. And circulars — how they pulled! For the second time we sold $1,000,000 worth of O. Henry books in a single year!

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Point being, when one kind of scarcity wears out, move on to another kind. From price… to free bonus… to a special limited edition… to an event at a given time, happening only once…

There are lots of aspects of an offer that can become scarce, that you can focus on. As one more example, take my Daily Email Habit service. I’ve repeatedly gotten variations of the following question about it:

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Looks so good, if I subscribe do I get access to the previous daily prompts from when you started this service?

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The answer is no, and to emphasize it, I even number the daily email “puzzles” that go out, much like daily Wordle puzzles are numbered. (Today’s daily email puzzle, based on which I’m writing this email, is #18.)

It seems reasonable to me to only give access to those “issues” of Daily Email Habit that go out while somebody is subscribed, much like with a magazine subscription.

I think this is a way to respect people who signed up earlier… it’s a motivation to sign up now, rather than later, and avoid missing out on any new puzzles… and in my mind, it assigns greater value to each puzzle that goes out — it makes each puzzle feel more unique. You either get it, or you don’t.

If you’d like to get tomorrow’s daily email puzzle (#19) before it flutters away, or to find out what Daily Email Habit is all about:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Build your list by… writing

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Last Wednesday, I got a message from Chavy Helfgott, who is a copywriter and brand strategies, and who also happens to subscribe to my Daily Email Habit service. Chavy wrote:

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At least for the beginning, I’m posting my emails on LinkedIn as well (as I have a large following there) and – I got 8 new subscribers from today’s post! This is after neglecting my LinkedIn account and rarely posting for quite a while.

Thank you for this. It feels amazing to have had a concrete result so fast.

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Yesterday, I wrote that I’ll one day have an official launch for Daily Email Habit, but that day is not today, or any time soon.

I also invited people to reply if they are interested in Daily Email Habit, so I can send them the full details. A good number of people did reply.

I sent the folks the details… and then I asked myself, what exactly am I doing? What is my purpose in creating this extra obstacle for others and work for myself?

And so I’ve decided to open up Daily Email Habit to my entire list, both to stop myself from fielding these one-on-one messages, and to make Daily Email Habit available to people who might benefit from it.

If you’re interested in Daily Email Habit, and how it might possibly help you, the full info is at the link below.

I can tell you that the core promise of Daily Email Habit is a daily nudge to write your own daily email.

The effect of consistent nudging is consistent daily emails. And the effect of consistent daily emails is that they grow your expertise and authority… create or deepen your relationship with your audience… build up a stockpile of interesting content can reuse as you see fit… and make you better at writing, in all formats.

Plus, you can do like Chavy is doing, and simply post your daily email to LinkedIn or wherever and get people to opt in for your list. And yes, it does work — she sent me a screenshot of 8 shiny new subscribers from last Wednesday to prove it.

For full info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Wickedful

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I like to go see movies without knowing anything about them other than they’re playing at my local movie theater. I don’t want to know the genre, the actors in it, the plot summary, the reviews.

“Let them surprise me,” I say with a magnanimate sweep of my hand, as I hand over my 7 euro at the box office.

And so this Wednesday, I went to see Wicked. I only knew it had something to do with the Wizard of Oz. But I was surprised to find it’s three hours long, and a musical of the kind I don’t like, and a heavy-handed morality play to boot.

I emerged from the theater several years older, no wiser, and looking desesperately for something, anything, a little shred from this ordeal that I could reclaim for my daily email.

And there was something.

In between all the unendful singing, Wicked also has bits of dialogue. And the dialogue regularly makes use of a little word-trick. Each time it happened, it put a smile on my face and lightened the heavy burden of watching this movie.

I won’t spell out exactly what this word-trick is. But perhaps you can guess? I’ve tried to use it myself numerious times in this email.

My point for today is that it makes sense to make up and use your own words, terms, slang, even if it’s nonsense, or silly. It lightens the burden of reading (or watching) otherwise valuable but dry material.

You might shrug at that. Perhaps it’s because you’ve heard this advice before. Perhaps it’s because you think it doesn’t apply to you, and the serious business you are engagified in.

So there’s a bigger and to me much more interesting point I want to share with you. But I will save it for my email tomorrow. It’s not that humor is important, though it is. It’s not that it can be done in every field, even if your field is accounting for mortuary offices.

Rather, the point I want to share with you is a surprising idea I heard recently in the crypto space, which applies much more broadly, to business and perhaps to life.

Maybe you think that’s a grand claim. I can only promise to pay it off tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you would like to learn a different trick, one that can lighten the burden of reading AND writing daily emails, you might like the enfollowing:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Industry gossip you shouldn’t care about but probably do

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Yesterday, I exchanged a couple emails with the “The World’s Most Obsessed Ad Archivist,” Lawrence Bernstein.

Along with a few decades and deep connections in the direct response industry, Lawrence has the distinction of being one of only a handful of people to be called out as a “valued resource” by A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga, at the climax of Gary’s legendary Farewell Seminar.

I promoted a little offer of Lawrence’s a couple months back. Lawrence was good enough to tell me yesterday that the 150+ sales of that offer that I helped make were slightly more than he got from his own house file.

That’s gratifying to read. And considering I only have a modest-sized list, it’s proof of the effect of daily emailing done right. But wait. There’s more.

Lawrence then went on to say how this compares to big-marketer results he’s been privvy to recently:

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By contrast, and I realize this isn’t apples to apples…

There are/”were” some BIG marketers who thrived on the affiliate merry-go-round of ubiquitous as they are shallow $2K courses, usually backed up by webinar selling.

That model hasn’t had much of a pulse — at least as far as I can see — for a year or so. One of my subscribers and friends, who writes for one of the big financial outfits wrote me this last February, regarding those $2K offers:

“Been on a massive downslide ever since the FTC stepped in against Agora Financial – and in general the most recent “home-runs” have been more like inside-the-park home runs. They rarely work externally… and they’re mostly just milking house files with backend launches.

I’ve seen groups repeatedly run promo’s bringing in names at 10% of BE just because they had nothing else…

I’ve seen huge affiliate pushes for webinar launches that resulted in 750,000 names on a hotlist… and the sales were so low the affiliates payouts were ZERO…”

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Let me repeat that last number because it’s so crazy: 750,000 qualified leads… and effectively ZERO in profits.

I read something similar in an email from Shiv Shetti recently.

Shiv shared stuff he’s heard inside private masterminds, gossip about specific flashy gurus in direct marketing-related niches.

These are guys who are publicly making millions and living a Floyd Mayweather lifestyle… who are in private broke, nearing bankruptcy, or are facing revolt from the customers and clients they have managed to rope in.

Maybe you’re not in the direct response industry. Still, I’m telling you this in case you ever find yourself looking around, and seeing that everyone else is doing so much better than you are… maybe even including people who got going well after you did.

You can’t really know anybody else’s full reality. And if you’re like me, you don’t even want their reality, even if it’s not all rotten.

From what I can tell, the insecurity about how well others are doing is simply a way to focus the general human desire for ANYTHING BUT WHAT I HAVE NOW.

“People are like cats,” says Dan Kennedy, “they always want to be in the other room.”

The trouble is, this kind of “But look where everybody else is!” comparison is such a fundamental part of human nature, or at least my own, that there’s no easy, quick, and permanent fix for it.

But certain things do help. Awareness of it… inquiry about what’s really going on, and if the surrounding thoughts are true or not… focus on your own work, instead of gawking around.

And maybe the following exercise.

It’s quick, it’s easy, and it might just give you a permanent fix, at least a partial one in your business, and maybe even in how you feel about it.

If you have a couple minutes and an open mind:

https://bejakovic.com/things-worthy-of-compliment-in-12-of-my-competitors/

Smug, yet falsely modest

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I plopped onto my couch this morning and ripped open the latest New Yorker. I skipped the first few pages by instinct — after all, they’re just ads. “Except,” I said to myself, “that’s kind of my job?”

So I flipped back to page one.

What I saw was a two-page ad for AI company Anthropic, which makes Claude, a ChatGPT competitor.

The Claude logo took up the entire left page.

On the right page, the headline read, “Late bloomer” (including the quotes).

The body copy then went on to say that Claude might not be the first AI chatbot to market. But this was by design, the ad explained, so Claude could be so good, and so safe, and so useful as it happens to be. “We build AI you can trust,” concluded the copy

In a way, this kinda sounded like the famous Avis ad, “Avis is only No. 2,” which turned being second in a market into an advantage.

Or maybe it kinda sounded like the famous Volkswagen “Lemon” ad, which flipped quality concerns into a demonstration of higher standards.

The Anthropic ad kinda sounded like that… but it failed.

Because those headlines — “Avis is only No.2,” “Lemon” — really were objections that people were throwing at Avis and Volkswagen.

Whoever wrote this ad for Anthropic could have gone that same route by saying something like “Also-ran” in the headline.

Instead, they went the board-pleasing “Late bloomer” route, which is not any kind of insult or objection, but in fact a kind of smug self-compliment.

I can’t say whether this Anthropic ad will prove to be effective in any way, and neither can Anthropic. Because this ad is a typical “tombstone ad,” with no mechanism to track response.

All I can tell you is that this headline + body copy violate a kind of core rule of effective communication.

That rule is contrast.

If you say about a person that he is smug yet effective, then there is some tension and power in that description, because of the contrast. Plus, you get bonus points for transparency.

On the other hand, if you describe someone as “smug, yet falsely modest,” then at best you’ll confuse your audience based on what they were expecting. At worst, you’ll sound repetitive, mealy-mouthed, or self-serving, which is what I felt about this Anthropic ad.

So use contrast for power. Avoid contrast for blandness.

Also, if you haven’t done so yet, consider reading my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. It doesn’t have anything to do with this email, and so I won’t pretend otherwise. The only thing I will say in favor of this book is that it’s short yet cheap. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Thank you for putting back the plates

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I was at the gym a few weeks ago, headphones in, listening to the Español Con Juan podcast, when one of the girls who works at the gym started talking at me and gesticulating.

“Huh?” I said, taking my headphones out. “Sorry, what?”

“I just wanted to thank you for putting back the plates,” she said.

I must have stared at her with a look of total confusion, because she smiled and pointed to the two 10-kg plates I was holding in my hands.

“… putting back the plates where they belong,” she explained. “I think you are the only one who does it.”

It’s true. I was putting the plates backs on the rack.

But the truth is, I don’t always do that. Well, at least I didn’t always do that, not before the girl talked to me. I’ve been putting back the plates religiously ever since, like a proud little Boy Scout.

Point being?

Maybe it’s obvious. And if not, you can hear me spell it out on tomorrow’s 3rd Conversion training.

This training will be all about techniques that make your paid courses and ebooks and programs more consumable and more digestible… with the goal of getting more people to actually benefit from what you sell, so they get their money’s worth and more, and so they come back and buy from you again and again.

The deadline to sign up for the 3rd Conversion training is tonight, Wednesday, at 12 midnight PST.

The training itself will happen on Zoom tomorrow, Thursday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. There will be a recording which I will send out after the call, though if you can make it live, you and I both are sure to benefit more from it.

If you’d like to get in before the doors close:

https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion