Mental Shortcuts

It’s okay to open this email

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Here are some intimate facts about my personal life right now:

I have two friends visiting and staying with me. Two nights ago, the three of us went out to dinner. The food wasn’t great. But it sure was toxic.

At least that’s how I explain the sudden onset of nausea and high fever that hit me a few hours later, when I got home and went to bed.

Each time I turned between the sheets, I thought I might throw up. I also burned feverishly throughout the night, and got almost no sleep.

I spent most of the following day on the couch, taking cat naps, only eating paracetamols to bring my body temperature back into normalish range.

Maybe you say this doesn’t sound like a typical case of food poisoning.

Maybe you are right.

But what still makes me suspect the dinner was that within another 24 hours, I was completely fine.

No more fever. No more frightened stomach. Nothing except a little lingering tiredness.

In fact, I was so fully fine that by the end of that second day I considered going to the gym.

Sure, I wasn’t thrilled at the idea. I hardly ever am. But I felt guilty at already missing a day.

“I will do it,” I said to one of my friends, who was sitting on the couch next to me. “I will go to the gym.”

This friend, a dominant Turkish girl, looked at me crossly.

“What! Don’t go to the gym. Your body needs to recover. Besides, you didn’t really eat anything for the past 24 hours. You need fuel if you will go to the gym!”

I smiled and nodded at how right she is. I concluded that I should follow her wise advice and skip the gym. Which was convenient, because it’s what I wanted to do all along.

You might see how this story lends itself to persuasion and influence. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “There is power in issuing permission slips.”

Speaking of which:

I found that bit of “persuasion slip” wisdom on the bottom of page 47 of a huge 270-page document called,

“Dan Kennedy’s Million Dollar Resource & Sample Book”

I don’t know how much Dan originally sold this “Million-Dollar Sample Book” for. But I do know that it’s available for free as a bonus to Brian Kurtz’s very affordable book Overdeliver.

But in case you are quickly backing away from me right now, let me reassure you:

You might legitimately feel that buying Brian’s Overdeliver, and getting access to a few metric tons of high-quality marketing advice in the form of bonuses, has both its good and bad sides.

The good side is that it’s clearly an attractive offer. Brian’s book costs something like $12. And the bonuses that Brian gives away have sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

That’s the good side. The bad side is that:
​​
Almost certainly, you already have a mountain of good marketing advice sitting on your laptop right now, unconsumed, unloved, and unimplemented.

If that bothers you, I can telly you that I have the same. I have a ton of marketing content I have paid for but still haven’t done anything with.

Even so, I still encourage you to check out Brian’s Overdeliver collection.

In part, that’s because it is such a valuable hangarful of information. And because it is such an incredible deal.

And also, because I will make it easy for you to get value out of Brian’s offer. Here’s the deal:

1. Get Overdeliver

2. Get the bonuses using the form on Brian’s page below

3. Open up the Dan Kennedy Sample Book and go to page 47, where it says “There is power in issuing permission slips”

4. Send me an email, with the sentence immediately preceding that “permission slips” sentence

I will then tell you the most valuable and interesting thing I have personally learned out of that entire 270-page sample book, and possibly out of entire Overdeliver collection. Because I have gone through the entire massive collection, each part of it, and I have taken notes.

So here’s the link to get started. ​​Go ahead. ​​It’s okay:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

How to write for influence

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A while back, while pondering lazily how I could become more successful in life, I came across the article:

“How To Be Successful”

“Hmmm maybe I will read this article,” I said to myself, “and it will tell me the secret I have been missing.”

It looked like a good bet.

The article had 894 upvotes on a popular news aggregator. It had 300 comments. And it was linked to repeatedly ever since it was published, popping up every few months, each time with a big new response.

So what did this article say to justify this level of influence and interest?

Well, it had 13 insightful and surprising ideas such as:

* Work hard
* Focus
* Build a network

No?

​​You say these ideas aren’t tickling you with their novelty?

You don’t feel any insight from hearing these secrets of success?

Well, that’s kind of my point.

The article is solid. But it’s hardly novel or uniquely insightful.

It could have been written by some diligent high schooler in a 2,000 word Quora response.

But if the quality of the content is not it, what possibly explains the success of this “How to be successful” article?

Is it the presentation? The copy in the headline? The story in the lead? Is it just blind luck?

I’ll quit teasing you.

The article was written by Sam Altman. Altman is a 37-year-old tech investor worth some $250 million.

At age 26, Altman became president of the startup incubator Y Combinator (Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase).

Currently, he is the CEO of OpenAI, the Elon Musk- and Peter Thiel-backed research lab that is looking to replace every creative job on the planet with better, faster, cheaper software.

Maybe none of that means too much to you.

So the point I am trying to make is that within the venture capital and tech world, Altman probably could sign his name on a cocktail napkin… then take a photo of his napkin… post it on Twitter… and get thousands of people liking his autographed napkin photo and enthusing, “This! This is what makes the difference between the hugely successful and all the wannabes!”

And that is how you write for influence.

First, you become somebody famous, admired, and elite. And then you say whatever you like, even if it’s just “work hard.” People will still upvote, share, and spread your message on their own.

That’s not to say Altman’s “How to be successful” advice is not solid. It probably really is where it’s at.

Just nobody would hear the message it if it wasn’t coming from the mouth of Sam Altman.

But since it is coming from him, maybe you will hear it. Maybe you will even hear it right now.

So in case you are more ambitious than I am, and you want to read all of Altman’s 13 well-trodden points, and 1000x your chances of becoming a lightning success, here’s the full article:

https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful

Excluded by Amazon: The book that’s too powerful to promote

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Yesterday, as I finished up my email promoting Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind, I rubbed my hands together and started a reverie:

I imagined myself sitting in the shade, under a tiny palm tree, by a tiny beach, sipping a very tiny beer, and eating a very, very tiny steak.

After all, I was planning to put in an Amazon affiliate link at the end of yesterday’s email.

Depending on how many people actually took me up on my recommendation to get Brown’s quality, value-packed book, I might make $0.14 in affiliate commissions… or maybe $0.22… or who knows, if I was really persuasive… even $0.47!

That won’t buy a proper vacation even in a reverie, but a tiny vacation? Sure.

But then this tiny reverie was rudely popped. As I clicked to get the affiliate link, Amazon told me off:

“This product is one of the Amazon Associates Program Excluded Products. We do not support direct linking to this product. Please direct customers to another product or the category for this product instead.”

Excluded? Another Product? After I’d written the email???

I decided to invest a few minutes into threatening and cursing my laptop. That produced no result. So I looked around, made sure nobody had seen me, and pulled myself together.

I dug into why some products are excluded from the Amazon affiliate program. It turns out there are only three reasons why:

1. It’s alcohol

2. It’s an external promotional page linked to by an Amazon property

3. The third-party seller requested that the product be excluded

Brown’s book, by being a book, and by being on Amazon and not an external page, must fall into the third category.

In other words, like I wrote yesterday, maybe the information in this book really is too powerful.

Maybe Brown himself wants to keep it hush-hush. Maybe he only wants a select few, those who are cool enough, smart enough, mature enough, to read this book.

Maybe he wants to keep this book from appearing on a bunch of SEO-optimized top 10 lists and Medium filler articles and “most underrated” email newsletters.

So let’s see if that added information makes the book more attractive to you.

Whether you click the link below or don’t, I’m eating boiled chicken breast either way. I mean, I’m not getting paid anything by Amazon if you buy this book, and even if I were, it wouldn’t buy me steak tonight.

Before you go, if you want to hear more from me about excluded, possibly too powerful, insider information, then sign up for my email newsletter. And now, here’s the link to Brown’s book:

https://bejakovic.com/tricks

How to create blacker-than-black urgency without a deadline

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This morning, I closed down the Copy Riddles cart and ended the promotion for this run. It’s now time for all the people who signed up to see how I deliver on the promises I’ve made.

Like I wrote in my last promo email for Copy Riddles, 76.7% of those people — well, 76.7% of my total sales — all rolled in the last day. I had more coming in after I wrote that email, so the final number for last-day sales was even higher.

That’s because, like I wrote in that email, deadlines are black magic. In the words of Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap:

“It’s so black. Like how much more black could this be? And the answer is… none. None more black.”

Well, for Nigel’s benefit and maybe yours, I want to tell you that there is a form of persuasion wizardry that might be blacker than black. Let me quickly get my cloak and peak hat on, and tell you what I have in mind.

Over the past few days, while preparing to write my second Most Valuable Postcard, I started reading Rich Schefren’s 12 Month Marketing Blueprint.

I’m a big fan of Rich and just about everything I’ve seen him do. But I have to say the name of this particular offer is misleading. It’s hardly a blueprint. Really, it’s a fully built, furnished condo with pictures of Rich’s family inside.

In other words, what you get inside the “Blueprint” is 310 pages of actual emails, slides, sales letters, and free reports that Rich created back in 2006 and 2007 and sent out to his list and to his JV partners.

If you wanna reverse engineer a blueprint out of this, that’s gonna be on you. You have to do it yourself.

​​But it might be a worthwhile exercise. Because here’s the result of all these hundreds of pages of marketing, from the front page of the Blueprint:

Over 830,000 downloads
Over 1,895 one-way links
$960,000 in the first 2 hours and 15 minutes
From unkown – to known – to well known. From 20 clients to 2,070 clients. From 2 employees to 12.
How I Got Attention and Leveraged it to 7.4 Million a Year company.

I won’t spell out the many smart strategies that Rich uses in this 310-page collection of marketing. (A few of the most interesting ones are going to people who are subscribed to receive my Most Valuable Postcard later this month.)

What I will reveal to you is that blacker-than-black wizardry I mentioned above.

Here it is, right at the top of Rich’s sales page for his consulting offer — the offer that sold out in 2 hours and 15 minutes, and generated close to a million dollars:

“Warning: 32,543 want to know more about my coaching. 4,507 are on a waiting list to get early access (to this page) and 4,284 marketers registered for a teleseminar to get the details of this program. In addition, my joint venture partners will be sending out roughly 1,300,000 emails directing their subscribers to this offer. Consequently, there are only 1000 of 1000 seats available. Many of them are being taken as you read this. Scroll down to secure your spot!”

So there you go. that’s how you create blacker-than-black magic, without a deadline. Right there, in that salad of numbers.

What?

​​You want a blueprint?

A salad is not enough?
​​
Pff… fine.

​​Here’s the actual formula, phrased the way Rich likes to phrase it:

Social proof + Scarcity = Urgency

And now, on to unrelated promotional materials:

If you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard offer, I have an update for you.

I initially only opened this offer to 20 people, when I first made it available, back in May. All 20 of those 20 are still subscribed to get the postcard.

Later this month, I will reopen my Most Valuable Postcard for the first time, to 20 new subscribers. I’ll limit it again because I’m making some changes to the offer and I want to control how that will go.

My joint venture partners will be sending out roughly 0,000,000 emails directing their subscribers to this offer.

But this email is going out to over 1,300 people who read my daily emails.

And almost 140 of these readers have already expressed interest in signing up for the Most Valuable Postcard. They have joined the waiting list, so they can be the first to get notified and the first to have a chance to sign up when I reopen the Most Valuable Postcard.

In case you’re interested in blacker-than-black persuasion magic, and you’d like to have the best chance to sign up to my Most Valuable Postcard when it reopens, you’ll have to be on my email list first. Here’s where to sign up.

You are a copywriting god… in the making

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Today is June 21, which means that in 10 days, the second issue of my Most Valuable Postcard is going out.

I am preparing to write it by watching a popular Ted talk about classical music… researching the motivations of men who like to go to strip clubs… and revisiting an old Jeff Walker presentation I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Today, I want to share with you a fascinating moment from that presentation. A bit of background:

Some time in the late 2000s, Jeff Walker was offering a business opportunity called Product Launch Manager. The basic idea was:

No list, no product, big money.

HOW???

By managing big companies’ launches using Jeff’s Product Launch Formula.

This was ideal for the most rabid of Jeff’s customers, the people who bought all his products, maybe even consumed those products, but never did anything beyond that.

Now comes the fascinating moment. ​​

At the end of this five-day event, speaking from the stage to a small segment of this group of hyper-responders, who had each agreed to pay $25k to attend, Jeff raised his hands up in the air, lowered his head to his chest, and said in a soft yet penetrating voice:

“You are marketing gods. If you can speak Internet marketing, you are in a separate class from the rest of the people walking the face of the earth.”

Jeff says this set the room on fire.

People jumped up from their chairs. Others started rolling around in the aisles. Still others were tweeting to let the whole world know. “Jeff says we are marketing gods!”

The implied message was that, by paying a lot of money, by attending an event and hearing a bunch of stuff, and finally by getting Jeff’s benediction, these folks had achieved true success.

And who knows, maybe some of them did go on to achieve true success.

After all, Jeff’s program was a step-by-step roadmap for what to do to manage big launches for big clients.

Put one foot in front of the other, while looking at the map, and you will get to your destination, sooner or later.

Still, the thing that struck me was simply the audacity of the claim — marketing gods! — and how much it resonated with people.

I feel it’s something to keep in mind when you are crafting your own promises… and the promises behind those promises.

Anyways, today, being June 21, is also the last day that I will email inviting you to register for my Most Valuable Email presentation, which happens tomorrow at 7pm CET.

At the end of that presentation, I would like to raise my hands, lower my head, and say in a soft and yet penetrating voice:

“You are now copywriting gods… go ye forth and use your new daily email knowledge to line your pockets with many shekels.”

And sure, I will give you a step-by-step roadmap. I will tell you how I write the one kind of email that has been most valuable to me in the history of this newsletter.

This one kind of email has allowed me:

1. To get in the heads of my readers, including some of the most successful and sophisticated direct marketers and copywriters out there…

2. To pump up my own authority, even when I don’t brag about all the successful and sophisticated marketers and copywriters who read my stuff every day…

3. And maybe most importantly, to drastically improve as a copywriter and marketer.

So there is that promise in the air, “… and you can do it too!”

Well, about that:

Attending tomorrow’s presentation, learning all the stuff I will share, and even having my benediction at the end will still only make you something like a copywriting god… in the making.

In other words, it won’t do you a damn bit of good unless you do the moderately hard work of putting one foot in front of the other, and not just once, but many times over.

So the close to this email is not as fire-generating as Jeff’s talk from the stage.

But it is a fact of life, and it might lead you to success sooner, rather than later or never.

Whatever the case may be:

If you would like to get the info inside my Most Valuable Email presentation, you will have to sign up to my newsletter before 7pm CET tomorrow. And once you get my confirmation email, you will have to hit reply, and let me know you’d like to attend, at the last minute, this fearsome email revival meeting.

How to hypnotize people even if you’ve never done it before

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Are you sitting down? Good.

Let me try something I haven’t tried before.

I’m going to count down from 3. And when I get to 1, I will snap my fingers and give you a suggestion.

Ready?

3…

2…

1…

[snaps fingers]

*SLEEP*

.

.

.

.

.

.​​​​

What?

You’re still reading? Not asleep? Hm. Let me check my manual and see where I went wrong.

[Flips through book. Aha!]

Confession:
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I’ve been reading Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind. Brown is a UK TV personality whose toolkit combines a lot of topics that interest me.

Comedy… magic… showmanship… classic influence techniques… NLP… and of course, the magical and mystical art of…

Hypnosis.

Brown says he started hypnosis in college. He would hypnotize his friends and then give them a post-hypnotic suggestion.

​​That way, when he saw them next and snapped his fingers and told them to sleep, they would pass out instantly, as though they’d been punched on the jaw by Mike Tyson.

And it worked. People would collapse on command.

But then a funny thing happened. Brown had a friend visit.

The two of them had talked about hypnosis before. But Brown remembered wrong, and he thought he had also hypnotized his friend before, even though he hadn’t.

So this second time, Brown snapped his fingers, and told his friend to sleep, expecting the post-hypnotic suggestion to kick in.

And sure enough, the friend collapsed and went to sleep.

In other words, hypnosis worked… even though there was no hypnosis. Or as Brown put it:

“I realized that day that hypnosis works not because of a carefully worded magical script from a self-help book, but because the subject believes the process is effective.”

Maybe that’s why my email induction above didn’t put you to sleep.

It wasn’t my fault. Rather, it was your fault. You didn’t believe it would work.

Of course, if it’s all the subject’s doing, then what is the good of a hypnotist?

Well, the hypnotist creates a setting, an environment, an experience, which allows the subject to believe. There are lots of ways and techniques to do this, and that’s what the skill and expertise and extensive training of the hypnotist are really all about.

But don’t despair at the words “extensive training.” There is one thing you can do right now to hypnotize people, even if you’ve never done it before. In Brown’s words:

“Bear in mind that you are not really inducing a special state, although you will talk as if you are. Instead, you are utilizing the subject’s expectations and beliefs. So if you appear unconvinced at the start that he will be a good subject, the chances are that he won’t respond well. You must be confident, unflustered, and act as if you’ve done it a hundred times before, even if you haven’t.”

Aha! So maybe it wasn’t your fault after all. Maybe it was that sentence I squeezed in at the start, “Let me try something I haven’t tried before.” It violates Brown’s rule about being confident, unflustered, and appearing experienced.

Yesterday, I told you a story about my friend Sam.

Sam confidently used the nonsense phrase “I’m from Los Angeles” to hypnotize a guy into renting us a sailboat.

That situation ended in shipwreck an hour later, because Sam and I had never sailed before.

But there are many situations in life, in which you are be perfectly skilled, able, or deserving.

But you still lack confidence.

And in spite of all your preparing and striving and wishing, confidence won’t come.

So that’s the point of my email today.

Whenever you don’t have internal confidence, then find something external, a mechanism, a process, a person, to believe in.

That’s why hypnosis works. That’s why I told you the story of Sam and me. That’s why I told you about Derren Brown.

Now that you have these stories in your head, you will be able to summon them up on command, along with a surge of confidence, just with the [snaps fingers] snap of your fingers.

I’m sure of it.

In fact, I’m sure that in the next 24 hours, you will have an opportunity to turn on your confidence to 100. When that opportunity comes, do it. And then write me and tell me all about it.

You just got a valuable treatment with the magical and mystical art of hypnosis.

Now, on to the magical and mystical art of making money.

Specifically, my email newsletter.

That’s where I share persuasion and marketing ideas that business owners can use to make more money… based on the hundreds of businesses I’ve already worked with… the thousands of sales emails I’ve personally written… and the millions of dollars of products and services those emails have sold in total.

If “more money for your business” makes your ears perk up, then you can sign up for my newsletter here.

The “I’m from Los Angeles” persuasion technique

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A few years ago, I met up with a friend named Sam in Tel Aviv.

​​At the time, Sam was working for an Israeli tech startup as their high-confidence, this-is-how-it’s-gonna-be sales guy for the US. He came to Tel Aviv for work for a few days. I flew out from Croatia, where I was living back then, to meet up with him.

One day, Sam and I went to the beach.

The Tel Aviv beach is a miles-long strip of sand, filled with good-looking people sunning themselves or hiding under parasols, and the sparkling blue Mediterranean sea rolling up with mid-sized waves.

At the corner of the beach, we saw could rent little two-person sailboats.

I’d never been in a sailboat before. Sam had been once or twice. Even so, we had the idea to go try it.

“Have you ever sailed before?” the sailboat rental guy asked.

“Oh, I live in Los Angeles,” Sam said with 100% conviction.

I frowned when I heard this.

The rental guy frowned as well. “So you have sailed before or not?”

“It’s no problem, Sam said. “I’m from Los Angeles” He put a lot of emphasis on the word “from”.

Sam and the rental guy stared at each other for a few moments. Then the rental guy shrugged his shoulders. And he rented us the sailboat.

There’s a lesson in that story.

Perhaps it’s obvious. And if not, I will tie it up for you tomorrow, and tell you how it connects to an unexpected area of persuasion and influence.

For today, I just want to finish up the cautionary tale above.

Sam and I went out on the sailboat. We sailed around for an hour.

It was a fairly unpleasant experience, slow and hot and slightly nauseating, since I knew nothing about what we were doing, and Sam knew very little.

Eventually, it was time to bring the boat back in.

We headed straight for the sandy beach without a specific plan of what exactly we would do.

But then, the wind caught the sails.

The waves grabbed the hull.

The beast picked up speed.

People on the beach first grew curious, then alarmed, then started running.

Mothers were screaming and pulling their children out of the water.

Old people stood at a distance, pointing and shaking their heads.

Boys cheered and waited for the inevitable crash.

And sure enough, as Sam and I sped up to the beach, out of the sea, and into the separating crowd, the keel of the boat, which we didn’t think to pull in, caught in the sand.

The entire boat toppled over with a crash.

The mast dug in among beach towels and picnic baskets. Sam and I wound up face first in shallow water, eating sand.

The boat rental guy came running over, holding his head in his hands, yelling. I’m not 100% sure, but I think he might have been yelling something like, “But you said you’re from Los Angeles!”

Or maybe not. Maybe he was just yelling how we should have pulled in the keel and lowered the sail, and how we could have killed somebody or at least ourselves.

So that’s my story. The message, again, if not clear, I will make clear tomorrow. In case you want to read that, sign up for my email newsletter. It’s okay. I’m from Los Angeles.

A $2,000 idea

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Yesterday, I met the owners of an apartment I am trying to rent in Barcelona. They are a married couple, very elegant and stylish, a few years older than me. We met at a cafe.

I sat down across from them and I leaned back in my chair. “So what do you have for me,” I said.

The husband smiled at me. “Would you like to drink a coffee first?”

I smirked, stared him in the eye, and said nothing.

“Oh okay,” he said, clearly browbeaten. “So you’ve had a chance to look at the apartment? You liked it?”

“The apartment is fine,” I said. “But let’s talk turkey. How much do you want for it?”

The man paused for a moment. He and his wife looked at each other in confusion.

“What do you mean?” the wife said. “The rent is right there on the listing.” And she repeated the number. It was a round figure, divisible by one hundred, ending in two zeros.

I laughed with contempt.

“A round figure?” I said, barely controlling myself. “You haven’t done one minute of work on this, have you? You just pulled that number out of your ear, without checking comparables and without putting in any effort to calculate a fair price. No! I don’t trust your round figure. And I don’t like being disrespected like this. I’m not interested in renting your apartment any more. Goodbye!”

I got up and left the cafe. The husband ran after me, begging me to reconsider, offering to make the price more specific and jagged. But it was too late.

In case this sounds like a slightly fantastical scenario… well, that’s because it is.

What actually happened yesterday was that I did meet the owners.

I smiled at them and I put on my best and most responsible face.

Using subtle sub-communication, I made it clear that if they let me rent their apartment, I would not adopt a pitbull… I would not host any drug-driven orgies… and I would not take up drumming as a new hobby.

After a few minutes of this renter mating dance, the owners were satisfied. They agreed to let me have their beautiful apartment, and I agreed to take it, at a perfectly round monthly rent, neatly ending in two zeros.

If you’re wondering why I’m telling you this, then, like my fantasy owners above, you clearly didn’t read my email yesterday.

That email was all about the power of specificity. Specifically, the power of specific numbers. Recently proven by some fancy scientific research, but suspected by smart marketers for decades and probably centuries.

Except…

There are times where your numbers don’t have to be specific.

My rent situation above was clearly one.

I accepted the nice and round price. Doing anything else would have been foolish, bordering on very foolish. The rental market in Barcelona is insane. There are only a few available apartments and thousands of hungry renters swooping down on each one.

But you might say, “Sure, you can get away with a round price sometimes. That doesn’t mean that a specific, jagged price wouldn’t work just as well or better.”

Maybe. Or maybe not.

There are situations where a round price is not only acceptable, but actually better. Where a round price sub-communicates high status, a lack of neediness, and a position of power.

Take for example the curious case of one Joe Sugarman. Joe was a multimillionaire marketer who created the BluBlocker sunglasses empire.

Joe sold each of his BluBlockers for $69.95.

But when Joe ran an ad to advertise his legendary copywriting and marketing seminar, he didn’t promise to reveal “7-figure funnel secrets,” or offer a *9.99 price.

​​Instead, Joe said, “Come study with me,” right in the headline. And then in the subhead, he told you how much it would cost, — $2,000, with three round zeroes at the end.

So take time and ponder on that. I’ll leave you today with a bit from Joe’s ad:

There are two types of successful people. Those that are successful and those that are super successful.

To be successful you must learn the rules, know them cold, and follow them. To be super successful, you must learn the rules, know them cold, and break them.

For more marketing ideas, some worth $9.99 and others worth $15,000, come and read my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Spanish A-list copywriter makes me an indecent proposal

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Last year in September, I kicked off the third run of Copy Riddles, my program for learning copywriting by practicing bullets.

As part of that September run, I had a little each week for the best bullet. Anybody who wanted to could send me their bullets. The winner got a prize, usually a book on marketing and copywriting.

(The contest has since been shuttered, since I spun off a complete coaching program to go with Copy Riddles.)

Anyways, the very first week and the very first contest, out of something like fifty submissions, the winner was Rafa Casas, a Spanish-speaking and Spanish-writing copywriter.

Rafa’s first bullet won because it was so simple and promised such a clear and desirable benefit.

But Rafa kept submitting bullets for later bullet contests (no dice, you can only win once). Still, he had such clever and persuasive ideas that I was sure he will be a big success soon.

And it seems to be happening.

Rafa is now writing copy for a number of clients in Spain.

He’s also offering his own email copywriting coaching to a few clients, based on his experiences writing two daily email newsletters.

And from what I understand, he recently won some kind of fancy award in Spain, recognizing his wizard-like copywriting skills.

Put all this together, and I think it qualifies Rafa as an A-lister in the Spanish copywriting world.

And if you wonder whether Rafa really has the hard results to back up being called an A-lister… then I’ll tell you that copywriting stardom is more about endorsements, legend, and mental shortcuts than it is about results.

That’s something to ponder if you yourself have aspirations to become an A-list copywriter.

But back to the indecent proposal I promised you in my subject line. A few days ago, Rafa sent me the following email:

It turns out that this afternoon while I was waiting for my daughter to do her yoga class, I read, as I always do every Thursday afternoon with a coffee, the book I always read while I´m waiting for her: The 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters, and I have come up with a business with which we will not become millionaires (not for now) but it will not cost us money either.

What do you think if I translate your book into Spanish and we try to sell it to the Spanish-speaking world as well?

Of course I wouldn’t charge you anything for doing it, well not in money at least. The idea is that while I translate it and we try to sell it, I can learn from you the strategy that we implement to sell it, for example.

Immediately upon reading Rafa’s message, I drifted off into a pleasant fantasy. I saw myself being interviewed on CNN, with all the different translations of my book on a shelf behind me.

“So Bejako,” the CNN anchorwoman asked me, “what can you tell us, as an internationally read copywriting expert whose books have been translated into multiple languages, about the recent news of monkey pox? Is this something to worry about? Is washing our hands with soap enough? And are there influence and persuasion principles we can learn from this?”

My dream balloon popped. I fell back to reality.

I realized was that Rafa’s proposal was indecent. But only in the original sense of that word, meaning not suitable or fitting.

Because while I would love to have a Spanish-language version of my book, it’s probably not worth Rafa’s time to translate it. Either for the money we could make together, or for the learning experience of how I might promote that book.

My feeling on these Kindle books is that they are valuable for credibility and as lead magnets.

They siphon people from Amazon into your world. They sit there, more or less passively, and do their work. In my experience, most of their value comes without any added promotion, outside of some very basic Amazon ads and occasional mentions in this newsletter.

Maybe you think that’s a cavalier attitude about promotion for somebody who calls himself a marketer.

Perhaps. But perhaps it’s about the best use of your time.

So in case I haven’t piled on the value in this email sufficiently, I will give you one last practical tidbit. It comes from James Altucher.

James is an interesting and quirky Internet personality. He has written and published 20 books, both fiction and non-fiction. And he’s doing something right, because he has amassed a huge audience… sold truckloads of books… and even had a WSJ bestseller with a book he self-published.

Here’s the book-marketing tidbit. James asks:

What’s the best way to promote your first book?

Simple.

Write your second book.

That’s what I’m planning to do to promote my 10 Commandments book. Along with, of course, occasional mentions in this email newsletter.

So if you don’t have a copy of the 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters… and you want to find out why a star in the Spanish copywriting sky like Rafa might want to read this book every Thursday afternoon… then take a look below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments​​

My big takeaway from yesterday’s Daniel Throssell presentation

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I’m at the airport as I write this, sitting in a dangerously comfortable armchair, staring out the big windows onto the tarmac, and waiting to fly from Sofia, Bulgaria to Barcelona, Spain.

This is the latest leg of a crisscrossing world journey I started almost two years ago. During that time, I have moved some two dozen times, staying mainly in Airbnbs though occasionally also with friends and family.

If you’re wondering why I’m gushing all this atypical and overly personal information at you, it’s because yesterday I held my “Analysis of Daniel Throssell” presentation.

In the aftermath of this presentation, I noticed I got as much positive feedback about the actual content I shared as about random personal things people spotted about me. The Firefox extensions I use… the labels in my Gmail account… my own charming face (apparently I look like actor Mike Connors).

The presentation seems to have been a success. Exactly 430 people registered for it, and by my very precise estimate, somewhere between 0 to 430 people attended live (I was too focused on what I had to say to actually check how many people were on the Zoom call).

The three techniques I was so focused on sharing during this presentation, the three techniques I identified in Daniel’s copy, are what you might consider “secrets.”

In other words, they are stuff you probably hadn’t heard or thought about before. They are meant to make you say, “Ohh, that’s clever” when you hear them.

These three techniques made certain of Daniel’s emails stand out to me. In that way, they are undoubtedly valuable.

But marketing “secrets” like this are rarely as valuable as the fundamental stuff you probably hear all the time, and have probably been hearing for years, but for one reason or another you refuse to accept, or refuse to do.

Such as the idea that personal reveals create trust, build a sense of liking, and set the foundations for a long-running relationship.

That’s probably plenty obvious to you if you are a regular reader of Daniel’s emails.

Perhaps you have incorporated revealing personal stuff in your own marketing, and you’ve reaped the benefits thereof.

Or perhaps like me, you dislike the idea of talking about yourself in any way.

In which case, all I can say is, it’s worth pushing yourself, and experimenting with how to make personal reveals in your marketing while still keeping your sense of integrity.

Because personal reveals definitely have benefits. Like I said above, they seem to be as impactful, and probably more so, as the info you actually share and the benefits you provide your audience.

That’s my big takeaway from yesterday’s presentation.

Does it resonate with you in any way?

No? You want more secrets?

In that case, you definitely won’t like the offer I will make in my email tomorrow.

To be honest with you, I actually hoped to put this offer it into today’s email. But I’m very sleep deprived, and it took me shamefully long to write the preceding 507 words. And in just a few minutes, boarding is starting.

So the only offer I have for you today is my workhorse, The 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. It might have slipped by you if you joined my list only recently.

It doesn’t really have any secrets, but it does have a lot of really fundamental advice, some of which might be trasnformative for you. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments