Psychology Behind Advertising

One word, out of 495, that drew a bunch of replies

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Last week I sent out an email, “Write 10 books instead of 1,” that got a good number of replies. The curious thing was the replies split neatly into two camps.

One camp was people who liked the core message in the email and felt inspired to start or finish their own book or books.

But the other camp, in fact the majority of people who replied to that email, had nothing to say about the core message.

Instead, this second group replied because of a single word of that email. A single word that was hidden, between two commas, in position 408 in an email of 495 words.

Would you like to know what that word was?

​​Good, then I’ll tell ya.

That word was inshallah.

Inshallah, as you might know, is a saying used in Muslim societies. It means “God willing.” It expresses both hope for a future event and resignation that the future is not in our control.

But why??? Why would I use this word in the tail end of my email?

Is it because I myself am Muslim?

Is it some kind of incredibly clever personalization based on the reader’s IP address?

Was it a joke or irony?

Readers wanted to know. And from my religious profiling based on these readers’ names, almost all the people who wrote me to ask about inshallah were either Muslim or came from Muslim societies.

I’ll leave the mystery of why I used inshallah hanging in the air. Instead, let me tell you a story that this reminded me of, from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy.

Dan used to travel the country on the Peter Lowe Success Tour, a modern-day speaking circus that featured former U.S. presidents and Superbowl quarterbacks as speakers.

Dan would go up on stage at the end of the night and deliver a rapid-fire comedy routine/sales pitch to sell his Magnetic Marketing program.

I highly recommend tracking down Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech and listening to it. ​​I’ve listened to it multiple times myself.

But one thing I never noticed, in spite of the multiple times listening, is that Dan somewhere mentions that he used to stutter as a kid.

Again, this speech is rapid-fire. It lasts maybe 50 minutes. It contains thousands of words. And among those words, there are a few — maybe a dozen, maybe a half dozen — that refer to the fact that Dan Kennedy stuttered as a kid.

It’s very easy to miss. Like I said, I’ve listened to this speech multiple times and I’ve never caught it.

But there’s a group of people who don’t miss it.

And that’s people who themselves stutter or who have kids who stutter.

Dan said somewhere, in one of his seminars, how he’d regularly finish his speech and try to get out of the room, only to be faced with an audience member, holding a brand new $197 copy of Magnetic Marketing in their hands, and ready to talk about stuttering and how Dan overcame his stutter and how he now performs on stages in front of tens of thousands of people.

That’s something to keep in mind, if you’re missing a word to put into the 408th position in your sales message… or if, like me, you suffered from epileptic seizures as a kid.

All right, moving on.

I got nothing to sell you today. But I do have something to recommend.

Well, I recommended something already, and that’s Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech. Dan has said that this speech is the best sales letter he’s ever written.

It’s worth listening to if you want to learn how to write an interesting, indirect, and yet effective sales message.

On the other hand, if you want to learn how to do marketing that gets you really rich — who to target, how to reach them, what offers to create — then I can recommend a book I’m reading right now. It’s also by Dan Kennedy. It’s more relevant now than ever before. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/reallyrich

The third-hottest release of 2023 closes after just one night

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Last night, with crowds of paparazzi pushing outside the velvet rope, and a few stars making their way from their limos down the red carpet to the doors of the classy old theater, my Influential Emails show had its grand opening.

The show ran for exactly one night.

And then this morning, I locked and chained the theater doors, removed the “INFLUENTIAL EMAILS” letters from the marquee, and took out an ad in the local paper to announce this show is now over.

As I announced in the lead up and during the grand opening of Influential Emails, this promotion would go until Sunday at the latest, and I might close it down sooner.

Well, that sooner is today, about 12 hours after the initial grand opening. I would have closed it earlier but I was asleep.

The reason why I did this is that made up my mind, before I launched this promo, what a nice sum of money would be to make from it.

I’ve now made that money and more. And so the cart is now closed.

If you managed to squeeze in to the Influential Emails show, I hope you will get value out of it in a way pays for itself, and soon.

If you wanted to get in but didn’t manage to, then all I can say is — if you’re not too angered by this experience, then maybe you will have better luck next time.

And if you were not interested in buying Influential Emails, then I can share the following valuable truth with you:

You can choose who you sell to, and how much of something you sell. There’s no law against it. And it’s ultimately good for business, in many different ways.

Now here’s a little sneak peek behind the scenes:

This promo didn’t really run for 12 hours.

It ran for about 36 hours.

I opened it up a day earlier for a private showing, just for people who were on the waiting list and who had already bought something from me in the past.

I also gave them an inducement to buy within the first 24 hours.

Many did.

That’s how I managed to make more money with this one-and-a-half-day promo than I used to make in a whole month, the first few years of my copywriting career.

Some of the folks who were invited for this private showing had bought pretty much all of my offers in the past.

Some had bought just one of my courses.

And some only bought my little $5 Kindle book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

It didn’t matter.

They are all valued and ongoing customers, and I wanted to say thanks with this special opportunity.

All that’s to say, if you have not yet bought my 10 Commandments book, then consider doing so.

It might teach you a thing or two about copywriting. And it might just prove to be a ticket to an exclusive future show, and a walk down the red carpet. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Take your likes to the bank

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A couple days ago, I sent an email about an email trick to get more engagement. To which, I got a response — an engagement!

The response came from Jakub Červenka, who runs an info publishing business in the men’s sexual health niche.

First, Jakub just replied to tell me he liked that email about engagement. Then we got into a bit of an email conversation. Then he told me about the trouble he was having with his Facebook ad agency.

And then he wrote:

===

So I learnt I am decent marketer and cannot let go of this part in my company.

Also, started writing daily emails again recently and looking at the mails I am writing now and I did year ago… it is as if 2 different people wrote them and that makes me happy.

And this is the main reason I am writing this to you, John, I think me improving so much is lot thanks to you. Yours is the only newsletter that I read almost daily and is amongst the 3 that survived my brutal opt-out-from everything. I don’t mean this to sound bad, I bought your Copy Riddles, Most Valuable email, your 2 pump-postcard newsletter and your latest Sales emails training.

I like all your courses, a lot, probably best spend money in copywriting courses, but still I think I learn most from your daily emails – probably due to the fact that it does not seem like I am working, I enjoy reading your stuff and it is small bites daily.

Keep up the good work,

Your grateful student and zealous reader,

Jakub

===

I once had a reader write in to tell me he always skips the quoted parts of my emails, the parts in italics that start with ===.

In case you also skipped what Jakub wrote, I can tell you it was a testimonial, with good things to say about my courses and in particularly about these emails.

And here’s something I’ve noticed about getting nice testimonials like this:

It rarely happens that somebody writes in just because they want to tell me how great they think one of my courses is, or how great I am.

Yes, it does happen from time to time. But it’s kind of like finding a Black Lotus in hundreds and hundreds of packs of Magic The Gathering cards — valuable yes, but also rare.

A little more common is when I explicitly ask for feedback on a course or training, and offer an incentive to reply.

People then reply in a pack. But even then, it’s not an overwhelming number of responses, and not everything I get is a great testimonial I can feature.

Really, the bulk of the good testimonials I’ve gotten, and that I’ve featured in emails and on sales pages, came like Jakub’s message above.

They came as an “oh by the way” that people tacked on when replying to one of my emails that had to do with an entirely unrelated matter. It’s been a steady drip-drip over the years that’s eventually filled up several buckets.

It’s popular to say in the direct response world that only sales mean anything, and that you can’t take your likes to the bank.

Except you kind of can.

True, a great testimonial like Jakub’s above is not cash. I can’t go and buy cans of beans and bags of rice with it today.

But a good testimonial is like a check, and eventually it will clear. Somebody somewhere will eventually be converted into a new and loyal customer because of testimonials like Jakub’s above. We all look to others when making our own decisions.

So my point is, if you work to increase engagement with your emails, you will get more testimonials, and you will be able to take those to the bank, in time.

Of course, for that to happen you do have to feature your testimonials so people can see them.

Sales pages are one place.

But really, emails are the main place, because emails are kind of the headlines for your sales pages.

Which brings me to the my latest Sales emails training, as Jakub put it, aka my Simple Money Emails course.

I’m probably giving away too much in these emails and I’m probably killing some sales for my courses like Simple Money Emails.

Maybe I will fix that in time.

For now, if you want to see how I’ve used emails to make (up to) tens of thousands of dollars in sales per day, and still kept readers coming back tomorrow, then Simple Money Emails will show you, and will show you how you can do it too. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

The most famous copywriter, real or fictional

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On Dan Heath’s new podcast, “What It’s Like To Be,” I heard Dan asking a TV meteorologist, a criminal defense lawyer, a forensic accountant, all the same question:

“Who’s the most famous meteorologist/criminal defense lawyer/forensic accountant, real or fictional?”

This got me wondering who the most famous copywriter might be, real or fictional.

I had a gut feeling. I double-checked via simple Google search, by looking at the total number of results.

As far as real copywriters go, there’s really only one possible option for a copywriter that a rando off the street might know.

​​That’s David Ogilvy.

There’s something about the pipe, the smart suits, the English disdain, the French castle.

Sure enough, Ogilvy was the only real copywriter who has more than 1M indexed Google results about him.

As for fictional copywriters, it depends on who you consider a copywriter.

Don Draper, the creative art director from the TV show Mad Men, clocks in at over 2M Google results.

But was he really a copywriter or more of an idea man? I’ll let you decide.

Meanwhile, the most famous, fictional, 100% copywriter that I’ve been able to find is Peggy Olson, also a character on Mad Men, who only gets around 220k Google results.

Should we stop there? Oh no.

It turns out several celebs out there have a copywriting background… but are not today known as copywriters.

One of these is novelist James Patterson. Before Patterson set out to write 200 books (and counting), he was a copywriter and later the CEO of J. Walter Thompson, one of the biggest and oldest ad agencies in the world.

Patterson has 6M+ Google results to attest to his fame.

And if we’re already going with celebrities who have copywriting in their history, and maybe their blood, then we get to the most famous copywriter of all time, real or fictional, live or dead, even though nobody nowhere would identify him as a copywriter.

I’m talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald worked for a time as a copywriter before becoming the author of the quintessential great American novel, The Great Gatsby, and later a topic of almost 13M Google results.

So there. Now you know. And now you might ask yourself, “What did I just read? Did I really need this in my life? How did I wind up at the bottom of this email?”

If any of those questions is flitting through your head, let me point out that interest in famous people seems to be hardwired into our brains.

Tabloid writers and sales copywriters know this fact well, and they use it over and over and over. Because it works to draw attention and get people reading, day after day.

That’s a free lesson in copywriting.

For more such lessons, including ones that you might not be able to shrug off by saying, “I guess I knew that,” you will have to buy my Copy Riddles course.

The whole big idea behind Copy Riddles is the appeal of famous people — at least famous in the small niche of direct response copywriting.

I mean, on the sales page, in place of a subheadline, what I have is a picture featuring Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Stefan Georgi, and Ben Settle, all of them celebrities in the micro world of direct response, all of them paid off on that page as being integral to the course.

If you’d like to buy Copy Riddles, or if you simply want to read some gossip about famous copywriters, then head here and get ready to be amazed and shocked:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

About the only times I’ve ever felt okay

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Last night, I was reading a book about money and I came upon a quirky passage about John D. Rockefeller.

At one point, Rockefeller’s unimaginable wealth was worth 1.5% of the entire U.S. GDP, equivalent to about $349 billion today.

From the book I was reading:

===

John D. Rockefeller was one of the most successful businessmen of all time. He was also a recluse, spending most of his time by himself. He rarely spoke, deliberately making himself inaccessible and staying quiet when you caught his attention.

A refinery worker who occasionally had Rockefeller’s ear once remarked: “He lets everybody else talk, while he sits back and says nothing.”

When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem:

A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?

===

Speaking of wise old birds:

Legendary copywriter Robert Collier wrote that the most powerful appeal in copy is vanity, “that unconscious vanity which makes a man want to feel important in his own eyes and makes him strut mentally.”

Legendary negotiation coach Jim Camp said that from the moment we are all born, we struggle to feel comfortable and safe, or as Camp put it, “okay.” Not behind others in the race of life. Not inferior.

I don’t know about you. I know it’s true in my case. I like to feel smart. Or at least not inferior. I’ll struggle and strive to prove it. Except it never really works.

The point of today’s email is to be like that wise old owl.

Like Jim Camp and Robert Collier and John D. say, there’s real power in shutting up and letting your adversary feel okay, smart, in letting him mentally strut.

It’s the kind of thing you want to do if you’re selling or negotiating.

I’ll only add a little bit, which has nothing to do with selling or negotiation.

​​And that’s that the only times I’ve really felt okay is when I stopped trying to do anything to feel okay.

Something for you to consider, or to entirely ignore.

As for the business end of this email:

You won’t hear vanity discussed often in copywriting courses. But you will find it analyzed in several different ways in Round 19 of my Copy Riddles program, which deals with a sexy technique for writing bullets that leave other copywriters green with envy.

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Take a look at this

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Maybe you’ve heard that last month, marketer Todd Brown assembled a gathering called Copy Legends:

A bunch of top copywriters, in a mansion in Palm Beach. Sitting around a big table. Talking openly for a day, while cameras and microphones record it all.

What did these legendary copywriters have to say?
​​
Well, for example, during a discussion of headlines, Copy Legend Kyle Milligan, who used to be a copy chief at financial publisher Agora and who made a name for himself by analyzing sales letters on YouTube, said the following:

===

I believe everyone way overcomplicates what needs to be done at the start of a promotion. They’re looking for this whiz-bang tactic to grab attention.

Yet, there are these tried-and-true openers which continue to work like crazy. Like, a visual pattern interrupt that just says ‘look at this’ and gets the prospect to sort of adjust and focus for a second is like one of the most timeless, time-tested methods there is.

If you don’t know what else to do for an opener, go with ‘Take a look at this.’ It’s like old faithful.

===

Kyle’s comment got a lot of people nodding their legendary heads around the Copy Legends table.

I found this amusing.

Because it’s a kind of anti-proof element for the whole concept of Copy Legends. As Todd says himself in the headline for the Copy Legends sales page, that concept is:

​“NEW Copy Techniques Working Like Crazy Today”

As in, they didn’t exist yesterday, and they will probably change by tomorrow.

It makes good sense to position an offer like this.

Like Kyle said around the Copy Legends table, people want that promise. They want whiz-bang tactics. And they will pay good money for such whiz-bangery, even though the really effective methods, as Kyle said at the actual Copy Legends event, are things that keep working year after year, decade after decade.

Todd Brown will soon release upon the world his Copy Legends recordings.

I won’t be buying it. But I certainly won’t tell you not to buy if you are after “new copy techniques.”

On the other hand, perhaps you are looking for timeless, time-tested copywriting techniques.

​​Technique that worked 50 years ago, 5 years ago, 5 months ago… and that will continue to work into the future, because they are based on fundamental human psychology and the competitive research of history’s greatest copywriters.

If that’s what you’re looking for, then… take a look at this:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

It’s not funny if they’re laughing

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I got a testimonial. I’m very excited. I want to share it with you.

I know, I know. You can’t wait.

But there’s a point to the testimonial, beyond just the self-promotion. Trust me.

New reader Kameron Bryant, who just got my Simple Money Emails course yesterday, asked me for the link to Monday’s storytelling presentation, which is a disappearing bonus if you get Simple Money Emails right now.

After I sent the link over, Kameron wrote:

===

Thanks for sending over and I’m loving the course.

In my eyes it’s more than a course. I see it as a money making email road map.

I’ll be re-reading for the foreseeable future.

Thanks

P.S

I’m a newbie in the email copy space and the testimonial from the guy who said he finally felt comfortable getting client work is what pushed me over… and he was right.

===

Now, there is no doubt I am telling you this in a kind of blindingly obvious way to promote Simple Money Emails. But if you want or need a marketing lesson as well, consider the following bit of science:

There was a study in Australia once upon a time. They made university students listen to a recording of a comedian, along with the laugh track provided by an audience.

In one scenario, the students believed the audience on the recording is students from the same university.

In another scenario, the students believed the audience are members of the far-right One Nation party.

In a third scenario, the students just got the recording of the comedian, without the audience laughter.

Result?

The laugh track made the comedian 400% funnier in the “just like us” case… 0% funnier in the “despicable them” case.

As the authors of the study put it, “It’s not funny if they’re laughing.”

Same goes with sales:

People who are just like your prospect is the strongest form of social proof, stronger even than getting a thumbs-up from a Tony Robbins or a Bill Clinton or whoever is the star in your industry.

That’s the lesson you can draw from the last line of Kameron’s testimonial above, beyond the fact that you should buy Simple Money Emails.

But back to self-promotion:

Tomorrow at 4pm CET/10am EST/7am PST, Kieran Drew and I will host a free presentation on storytelling.

The presentation is free as in, you gotta have Simple Money Emails to get in for free. If you have SME before the presentation starts, you get the presentation link and the subsequent recording. Otherwise no.

This is the last email I will send before tomorrow’s presentation. So if you’d like to get in, the time to move is now.

The sales page is at the link below, where you can find testimonials from a book editor… a career coach… a freelance copywriter… an in-house copywriter.

I haven’t yet added the testimonial by an online entrepreneur, Kieran Drew himself, who wrote recently that Simple Money Emails is the the best email writing course he’s ever taken.

If you’d like to join us tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Reader succeeds in provoking me with a backhanded compliment

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Yesterday, a reader succeeded in provoking me with a message that started with a backhanded compliment — how my Most Valuable Email course is ‘good’ but not ‘WOOOW.’

The hackles stood up on the back of my neck as I read this.

If you’d like to be provoked also, read through my reader’s message below, and then I’ll tell you something simple but powerful about influence:

===

I’m stopping by with a purpose: to finally give you my impression of MVE.

Look… The first time I read all the content, I found it “good”.

I’m not going to deny that, although I found the idea original, I hadn’t found the hook that made me say “WOOOW”.

Two weeks went by, and I found myself going around in circles to write some emails and improve my list engagement, and I decided to re-read all the MVE content.

…

I admit I have no idea what was going on in my head the first time I saw the course.

This is one of the best courses I have EVER bought.

I probably read it without much thought – the way one reads newspapers in the morning – and didn’t see how much value it had.

And I am writing this email to you after:

1. having carefully studied MVE, and
2. Having put it into practice and seen the results.

I paid $100 for this course. However, if it had cost me $500, I would have paid for it anyway (I really still can’t get over how effective and unique it is).

Even though MVE’s sales page states well everything the training comes with…

I believe the course contains MUCH more at a deeper level, and its results are better than what you state on your sales page.

Thank you for this. I understand that it is something I paid for and that is the “price”, but beyond that, I feel that selling this product is a service you are doing that is worth 10 times what I paid.

I have had good results in my newsletter, and just now it has grown more than expected and I have built an audience that I feel comfortable with – and I owe that in large part to MVE.

===

Maybe you yourself feel provoked or at least disappointed now.

Maybe you feel I’ve bait-and-switched you by promising you some genuine drama, and instead I’ve sneaked in a testimonial for one of my courses.

If so, let me work to make it up to you:

The reader who sent me the above message, Jesús Silva, “got” me with his opening.

I started off reading his email thinking, “What a jackass. Why would anybody take the trouble to write me and say something I’ve worked hard to create is ‘good’ but not WOOOW.”

By the end of Jesús’s message though, I thought this is the nicest testimonial I’ve ever gotten for MVE.

I asked myself why.

After all, I’ve had many people write me with very positive and even grateful reviews of MVE.

Why did this one impact me more?

Perhaps it’s obvious.

It’s that bit of emotional roller coastering… the swing from “‘good’ but not WOOOW”… to “one of the best courses EVER” and to thanking me for selling this course.

In other words, the second half of Jesús’s message is very flattering. But on its own, it wouldn’t have the impact that it had on me when prefaced by the hackle-raising opening.

So the point I have for you today:

There’s great power in emotional contrast.

From negative to positive… from humiliated to triumphant… from arrogant to nice… from alarmist to optimistic.

Emotional contrast is simple. But it can move people who cannot be moved otherwise… and it can can create a much stronger reaction than a one-sided appeal ever could.

But back to that “good but not WOOOW” MVE course:

I’ve raised the price of MVE dramatically since Jesús bought. Rather than the $100 I charged Jesús, I now sell MVE for $297. That’s three times as expensive. It’s a shameless price hike on the level of Martin Shkreli.

But if what Jesús says is true, MVE is still a good deal and is still underpriced, even at this new higher price.

And I can tell you I wouldn’t sell MVE at this new price if I didn’t think the education inside is worth much more, if only you only read the content thoroughly and then put it to use, growing your influence, list, and even marketing skills, faster and further than you might ever think possible.

The MVE trick takes all of one hour to learn, though you might want to go through the content twice to get it on a deeper level.

If you’d like to get started with that now, so you can start profiting today rather than weeks or months later, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

My alternative to shameless teasing

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A couple days ago, I gave a copy critique to a successful course creator. Let’s call him Liam.

Liam is writing a welcome sequence for his newsletter. He has decided to not promote anything in his first seven emails, but rather just to offer solid advice and inspiration — the dreaded “value” autoresponder.

While I certainly don’t condone the nasty practice of not selling anything across seven welcome emails, I figured Liam’s mind was made up on this point, so I didn’t argue it. But I told him that, even if he is not selling his main course in these emails, he can certainly seed it.

Liam already does this already to an extent, by teasing his course in a PS and saying something like, “… if you liked this, you’ll find more good stuff like it in my course XYZ, which I’ll tell you more about soon.”

Teasing like this is fine. It works, and it can work great, the more shameless you’re willing to get with it.

But there’s an alternative to shameless teasing.

​​It makes for more natural content. It’s more sly. And yet it can be even more effective than teasing itself.

Would you like to know what I have in mind? ​​What I told this successful course creator? What I practice myself to good effect from time to time?

I’ll tell ya:

It’s simply to use yourself and your products as your case studies when illustrating a point that the reader should take away.

How exactly do you do that?

Well, look at what I’ve done in this email. I could have made the same point — use yourself as a case study — by talking about some legendary and dead marketer like Gary Halbert… or by referring to a scene from a movie like Brokeback Mountain Part 2.

Instead, I did it by about talking about ME ME ME, or more specifically, the way ME interacted with a client and the advice me gave him.

Which brings me to my offer today:

I do not offer one-off coaching critiques. Well, I did with Liam, but that was a special case, and not something I offer otherwise. Forget about that.

What I do offer is medium- to long-term, one-on-one coaching. It involves both email copywriting — you got a free tip on that today — and more broadly, easy marketing and money-making levers that I spot in your business, the pulling of which is often more lucrative and long-lasting than making any copy tweaks.

My coaching is expensive, and I only take on people rarely, when I feel they have a good chance of profiting and quickly.

If you are interested in getting my critical eye, help, and guidance applied to your business, then hit reply. Tell me who you are and what you do, and we can start a conversation to see if it might be a fit.

The psychology of misdirection

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Today I meant to write an elaborate email about the sales page for my Simple Money Emails course.

But against my better judgment, I got roped into chauffeuring a friend of my father through stop-and-go traffic in the middle of the city.

While my blood pressure has largely returned to normal, the 45 minutes that that unnecessary drive ate up cannot be replaced. So the SME email will have to wait until tomorrow.

As for today, let me tell you something acute that one of my readers wrote in with a few days ago, after I wrote about my 10 jaw-dropping email deliverability tips. My reader wrote:

===

#5 – Links at the end of almost every email
I noticed that most of the time it is either an offer or an affiliate offer. Very rarely do you link elsewhere, unless you invite engagement like right now.

===

That’s very true. I almost always link to something I am selling at the end of my email. I never link to, say, the Red Cross website or to a cute ferret video.

On the one hand you might say that’s only natural — it’s what most daily sales emails look like, because their goal is to make sales.

But at the same time, I don’t have a huge list, and I don’t have surprising new offers every day. In other words, I am not necessarily sacrificing sales by not plugging the same well-trodden offer in each of my emails, day after day after day.

Plus, I remember a time when I first got onto Ben Settle’s list, circa 2012.

After a few weeks, I dismissed Ben because each of his emails at the time followed the same format: promise + tease + CTA to sign up to his print newsletter. I gradually got bored and I unsubscribed.

It took a conscious effort a few years later to get back on Ben’s list and start listening to him again, and I only did that because there still wasn’t anybody else talking about email regularly.

So when you put those two things together, you get the following heretical conclusion, heretical at least in the direct marketing world:

I can see good business sense in occasionally linking to stuff that won’t make you any money, but that can benefit, surprise, or delight your audience.

As Rich Schefren said once about the length of his own emails, you want to keep people guessing. You don’t ever want to give them a reason to dismiss you out of hand, before they’ve even had a chance to see your message.

I figure there must be some optimal rate of “public service emails” that keeps the interest of a large number of readers, while still allowing sales emails to predominate, and while maintaining or even increasing total sales. I don’t know what that rate might be, but I’m guessing somewhere around 10%-15%.

All that is really a long open to the following close:

When I decided to write this email today, I asked myself what was the most valuable resource that I don’t sell, but that I could share with readers on my list.

One thing popped up in my mind immediately.

It’s a book. I discovered it a few weeks ago. It talks about the psychology and neurology of misdirection.

Misdirection isn’t a great term, by the way — because what it really is is the control and focus of attention, along channels that serve the purpose of, say, a magician… or, say, a marketer or copywriter.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been devouring this book and taking pages of notes on it.

I was planning on hoarding all this knowledge for myself, and profiting from it all by myself.

But you gotta keep people guessing.

At the same time, to make myself feel better, I tell myself not one person in a hundred on my list will actually get this book, and even fewer will actually read it and apply it. But in case you’re curious, here’s the naked, non-affiliate link of a valuable resources that I do not sell:

https://bejakovic.com/misdirection