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BIG secret about peak emailing

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Three days ago, direct response copywriter Stefan Georgi sent out an email, “Big Secret About Peak Productivity.”

I like big secrets and I cannot lie. Besides, according to Stefan’s website, the man has sold over $700 million via his sales copy. So maybe he really does have some big secret? I opened the email to find out. This was it:

And yesterday was one of my most productive days in a long-while (like I CRUSHED the day).

Alright, so why am I sharing all of this?

Because there’s a stupidly simple lesson here:

When you feel tired, burned out, or like you just don’t want to work…

Then you should take a break.

After I read this, I shrugged, smiled at my own gullibility, and closed down Stefan’s email.

​​I didn’t feel enlightened. I didn’t have an a-ha moment. I didn’t learn anything new or really even anything useful. And yet, the next time Stefan Georgi sends out an email, I will still open it and at least skim it.

And even if it’s another bland breakthrough like the one above, I will still stay on Stefan’s list, and still give him the benefit of the doubt with the email after that and then some.

So here’s my BIG secret about peak emailing:

Your status is more important than your content.

​​Sure, if your content is truly atrocious all the time, you will drive people away. I remember some years ago signing up to Dan Kennedy’s “email newsletter” which was clearly not written by Dan, and which was just an autoresponder on repeat to let you know about various GKIC subscriptions and offers and lead magnets. I opened a few of those emails, and then unsubscribed.

On the other hand, if you’ve built yourself up as somebody important and successful, like Stefan has done, then you can allow yourself a lot of slack.

​​One email in three, one email in four, five, has to deliver something — something. The rest can be “big secrets” about taking a break when you’re tired… or about the importance of hard work… or about doing the right thing. And people will still read.

Actually I have something more to say about this, the BIG secret about peak status. But I feel I’ve shared enough big secrets with you in today’s email, so I will save that big secret for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you have no status yet, or you have status but for your own stubborn reasons you refuse to exploit it, then you might find some big secrets to help you inside my Most Valuable Email training.

Like I say on the sales page for that monster:

Most Valuable Emails never required I have any status or authority. Instead, they’ve helped me build up immediate and unquestionable authority — even when I had no standing in this industry. These emails make it 100% clear I know what I’m talking about, even when I don’t harp on about the great results I’ve had for clients or the testimonials or endorsements I’ve gotten.

So what’s the big secret of Most Valuable Emails? You can find that out here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The devil sells me a coffee and gets me addicted to buying more

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I just got back home from a visit to a new and devilish coffee shop.

It opened maybe 3 weeks ago. It’s a typical “AirSpace” place, cool and yet warm, shiny in parts, subdued in others, stools for sitting, with colorful and well-designed boxes of teas, bags of coffee, and assorted overpriced cups, mugs, and water bottles for sale. ​​(One of the water bottles sells for 50 euro. I guess you put in water and it turns into gin.)

Point being, this new coffee shop has everything to predispose me to go there on occasion.

​​On occasion, but not every day — there are other good options for coffee around my house as well. But this new coffee shop, devilish place that it is, has just taken care of that as well.

The story:

Two weeks ago, I went there and ordered a pastry and two coffees. I went to pay. The girl rang me up and said, “It will be 6 euro for the coffees. The pastry is free, since it’s the first day we opened the bakery.”

“Oh that’s nice,” I beamed. I thought no more of it.

Since then, I’ve ordered a pastry on a few occasions. I had to pay for it each time.

Then there was this morning. Similar story — a couple coffees, a slice of lemon cake. But it happened again.

“The coffees are 6 euro,” the girl said. “The lemon cake is free.”

My heart almost melted. And through my tears of gratitude, I saw exactly what will happen in the future. I will be going back to this place regularly — screw the other coffee shops around, even if they served me well before.

You might think I’m telling you to give stuff away for free, to build some sort of reciprocity.

That’s a part of it, but it’s not enough. On its own, it can even be dangerous. You don’t want to train people to expect stuff for free. They will get used to it quickly, and they will start to feel entitled.

But surprise people on occasion with some stuff for free — or with any other kind of reward — and their hearts will melt.

​​Do it rarely, sporadically, unpredictably, and you literally create irrational addiction. There have been hundreds of science papers written to prove this fact, but perceptive people have known it for ages. From Cervantes’s Don Quixote:

===

… beguiled by a purse with a hundred ducats that I found one day in the heart of the Sierra Morena; and the devil is always putting a bag full of doubloons before my eyes, here, there, everywhere, until I fancy at every stop I am putting my hand on it, and hugging it, and carrying it home with me, and making investments, and getting interest, and living like a prince; and so long as I think of this I make light of all the hardships I endure.

===

And on that note, I would like to remind you I am giving away a purse with a hundred ducats for free tonight. Well, it’s a purse filled with info products, which are worth a hundred ducats, or maybe more.​​

I’m running an ad in Daniel Throssell’s newsletter. The ad will go out in Daniel’s email in a little more than an hour.

​​To get the purse full of info products, for free, you will have to be on Daniel’s list when the email with the ad goes out. Here’s the link to Daniel’s website if you want to get on there in time:

https://persuasivepage.com/

The core idea in this email is not new but that’s exactly the point

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As I sit down to write you this email, an old pop song, the Smiths’ How Soon is Now, is playing loudly in my head.

That’s because earlier this morning, I read about a new AI project, called Stable Attribution.

The point of Stable Attribution is to try to figure out which human-created images were used to train which AI-generated images.

The motivation, according to the Stable Attribution site, is that artists deserve to “be assigned credit when their works are used, and to be compensated for their work.”

That’s a waste of time, if you ask me, and a focus on totally the wrong thing.

A few days ago, a friend sent me an article about guitarist Johnny Marr.

Marr took a few different songs and sounds — most notably Bo Didley and a rap song called You’ve Gotta Believe – and co-opted them. The result was How Soon is Now, which became the most unique and enduring of Smiths’ songs.

Michael Jackson once ran into Darryl Hall in a recording studio. Jackson admitted that, years earlier, he had swiped the famous bass line for Billie Jean from Hall & Oates’s I Can’t Go For That.

Hall shrugged. He told Jackson that he himself had lifted that bass line from another song, and that it was “something we all do.”

Artists and songwriters co-opt and plagiarize all the time. It’s only in exceptional cases that we find out about it.

But this isn’t a newsletter about drawings or pop songs. It’s a newsletter about business, and marketing, and copywriting.

So let me tell you I once heard A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos on the David Garfinkel podcast.

Parris pointed out how a subhead from one of his million-dollar sales letters was the headline of an earlier control sales letter he didn’t write. That earlier headline worked, and Parris knew that. So he co-opted it, or if you like, plagiarized.

Marketer Dan Kennedy once talked about Bill Phillips, the body builder and fitness coach who built an info product empire.

Dan said Phillips is a pack rat who can pull out fitness ads and promos going back a hundred years. Knowing the history of his industry — and co-opting or plagiarizing it regularly — was a big part of the success Phillips had.

Even the core idea of my email today, of plagiarizing for long-term business success, isn’t new. I got it from James Altucher, who got it from Steven Pressfield. Who knows where Pressfield first heard it.

Fortunately, there is no Stable Attribution for human work. Nor should there be.

So my advice for you is to go back. Study what came before you, and what worked. Integrate it into your own work.

Give attribution if you like, or don’t.

Either way, it’s sure to make you more creative, and more successful at what you do.

And if your work happens to be copywriting, selling, or more broadly persuasive communication, then take a look at my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles will show you the work of some of the most successful copywriters in history, Parris Lampropoulos above among them. But not only that.

Copy Riddles will get you practicing the same, so you can co-opt the skills of these effective communicators and make them your own.

Maybe you’re curious about how that might work. If so, you can read more about Copy Riddles, and buy the program if you like, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Standing on stage, holding an award, to applause from colleagues and clients

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Last month, I got an email with a subject line in all caps:

“THANK YOU JOHN!”

Inside the email I found a picture of a young guy in a sharp suit, standing on stage, holding a microphone in his left hand and some kind of glass trophy in his right.

Behind him on the wall, projected in large letters, was his name, Carlo Gargiulo. That’s who was writing to me. Carlo had this to say:

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Hi John,

I am writing this email to say thank you.

Last night was one of the most important nights of my life.

I was awarded in the company as the most productive copywriter in the company where I work.

I was awarded for constant study, application of new writing techniques, and great results generated by my emails.

As for productivity, I really want to say thank you because I started writing much more quickly after taking the Most Valuable Email course.

Studying and re-studying the course and re-watching the video of your critique of my email several times was critical to my growth.

Despite the award and applause from colleagues and clients, I still feel like a copywriter eager to grow and improve!

I look forward to learning so much more from you and taking it to the next level!

Thank you for the valuable insights, information, and techniques you tell us about every day in your emails and in your amazing courses.

They are invaluable to me 🙂

Carlo

===

Obviously, this testimonial serves me very well. But can you possibly get anything out of Carlo’s message above?

Well no. At least not if you are looking for the secret shortcut to the Cave of Treasures, preferably a shortcut which doesn’t involve any walking.

On the other hand, if you are still reading, then let me repeat Carlo’s longcut to success:

“Constant study, application of new writing techniques, and great results generated by my emails.”

If the sound of constant study and the application of new techniques doesn’t make you cover up your ears in horror… and if you like the sound of great results generated by your emails, then consider my Most Valuable Email course.

It might be the first step on your path to the Cave of Treasures.

And who knows, maybe like Carlo, you will find MVE helps you write much more quickly, be more productive, and even win awards and applause from colleagues and clients.

For more info, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Remembering David Ogilvy

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Today is November 29th, which is neither the birthday nor the deathday of David Ogilvy. Still, I thought it might be a good idea to take a moment and remember the great man.

Because, as with another copywriting legend, Gary Halbert, the greatest promotion that David Ogilvy ever did was in promoting himself.

Today, more than 50 years after his heyday, Ogilvy remains the most famous ad man in history, and is really the only copywriter that a normie off the street might have heard of.

Why is that?

What lies behind Ogilvy’s enduring fame?

The way I figure, it comes down to three things.

​​Some part of it secret personal charisma.

Some part of it is luck.

And some part is the actual work Ogilvy produced.

Charisma and luck cannot be taught. Well, they can, but this is not that kind of newsletter. This is a newsletter which focuses on work — and how to make the work that you do more impactful, influential, long-lasting.

So what exactly did Ogilvy do? When I think of the man’s work, three snapshots come to mind:

1. The Rolls-Royce ad, “At 60 miles an hour…” That campaign shows you the value of being associated with a top-tier product, which largely writes its own advertising.

2. The man in the Hathaway shirt. The eyepatch. That shows you the power of creating a spectacle, of being instantly perceived as unique.

3. A 7-word soundbite Ogilvy wrote once, which I will not quote here, but which I bet you have heard before.

I bet you’ve heard it because I’ve quoted it before in this newsletter, and so have 99% of people who write about advertising, whether they knew it came from Ogilvy or not.

There’s some magic to this soundbite that makes it stick in people’s minds and that makes them want to repeat it — even though Ogilvy wrote it as just a throwaway in the middle of a 12,000-word ad.

Maybe you know the 7-word soundbite I have in mind.

Maybe you even know the magic that makes it stick in people’s minds beyond the millions of other words that Ogilvy wrote in his 50-year career.

And if you don’t know, but you think it might be in your interest to know, then you can find out all about it during the third call of my upcoming Age of Insight live training.

Registration for Age of Insight closes tomorrow, Wednesday, at 12 midnight PST. But I am only making this training available to people who are on my email newsletter. If you want to get in on the training, then hurry to get on my newsletter and pray that you are in time.

How to predict the future without being smart or highly educated

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I’m spending this weekend in the mountains, in a pretty ski village which is mostly dead because the ski season hasn’t started yet.

Along with me in the house are three smart, highly educated, grown-ass women who spent a fair part of the weekend discussing and also watching a Netflix show called Dynasty.

Now I’m old enough to remember that Dynasty was a 1980s soap opera.

The Netflix version is a remake from 5 years ago. It’s glossy, cheesy, and oversexed. Here’s a bit of dialogue from the season 1 trailer, when a brawny black chauffeur picks up a white bombshell socialite from her private jet:

BBC: How was Denver?
WBS: I miss the heat.
BBC: Trust me, it wasn’t as hot without you here. Straight to the manor?
WBS: [smirks] I’m open to a detour.

Like I said, the women I’m with this weekend find no shame in watching TV shows like this.

That’s a change.

As James Altucher pointed out on a recent episode of his podcast, there was a time, not long after that initial Dynasty came out, when watching TV was considered shameful among smart, highly-educated, grown-ass people. Some quotes from that not-so-distant past:

“My kids will never watch TV”

“TV rots your brain and destroys your community”

“We would all be better off if television got worse, not better.”

But that’s all gone now. Among the people I know, there are few who don’t spend a good part of the week watching some TV — and feeling no shame about it. I bet it’s similar with the people around you.

Which begs the question, which things that we are so scared and horrified of today will make a shame-free comeback in a few years’ time?

James Altucher thinks it might be social media. Maybe we will still be heavily using social media in 20 years’ time, in spite of all the current hand-wringing about the IQ loss and attention-fracking and shallowness that Instagram and TikTok cause.

Whatever. James Altucher is a smart and highly educated guy, and his predictions are based on a lot of thinking and research. Too complicated.

Here’s a simpler, more general way to predict the future:

Don’t count on moral outrage or good intentions to create change. Only new technology — considered broadly — will change people’s behavior.

And speaking of new technology:

Have you heard of email? I’ve only recently found out about it and I’m very excited by the possibilities. So much so that I’ve started writing a daily email newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and influence. A few thousand people have signed up to get daily emails from me and they seem to be enjoying it very much. In case you’d like to join them, click here and follow the very non-technical instructions.

My magic mushroom-like technique for producing new, different, and very very sexy mechanisms

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Long-time readers of this newsletter might remember that once upon a time, I ran a biweekly segment I called “3-minute direct response news.”

It was my first, but certainly not my last, attempt at launching something like The Morning Brew.

Anyways, in the Jan 2020 issue of “3-min DR news,” I wrote a little feature with the headline:

“The new CBD!”

In that segment, I predicted the explosion of businesses pushing psychedelics. I also suggested that DR marketers might want to get in on this.

I don’t know how far the DR world has picked up on psychedelics. But in the universe as a whole, there is now a lot of hype around psychedelics. So much so that…

Dr Rosalind Watts, a researcher who helped start this craze, recently wrote it’s time to put the brakes on psychedelics enthusiasm. As Watts wrote:

“I can’t help but feel as if I unknowingly contributed to a simplistic and potentially dangerous narrative around psychedelics; a narrative I’m trying to correct. […] If I could go back in time, I would not now be so foolish as to suggest that a synthesised capsule, by itself, can unlock depression.”

An article I read yesterday compared the hype around psychedelics to that around virtual reality or 4D printing.

But you could also compare psychedelics (like I already did) to CBD, or to mindfulness, or to stoicism.

​​All are some external thing — a pill or a process or a set of rules outside of yourself — that promises to finally solve that aching, long-running, intractable problem you have.

DR marketers have a name for this kind of external thing:

Mechanism.

A mechanism is what allows the same old promise — lose weight, get rich quick, be happy — to be made year after year, and to still be believable. Hope is eternal.

Of course, not all mechanisms are created equal. In order to do its job, a mechanism should be new, different, and ideally, very very sexy. Kind of like magic mushrooms.

Which brings me to my offer for today:

“A secret (and slightly sneaky) copywriting trick for producing magic mechanisms”

That’s a long-form, article-style, optin page I wrote up for my Copy Riddles program.

A warning in case you are getting excited:

You cannot join Copy Riddles now. Though you might be able to do it in the future.

For now, if you are curious about a technique for producing new, different, and very, very sexy mechanisms, then put your sunglasses on, mix up a jug of Kool Aid, and jump aboard the bus right here:

https://copyriddles.com/

How I increased my explosion rate +infinity% with the “Censorship Catalyst”

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Over the past two days, I got on my white lab coat, protective goggles, and elbow-high rubber gloves and ran a little experiment.

I wanted to see which mix of persuasive elements could create the most explosive reaction.

Except, I really have no scientific training. And so my experiment was poorly designed and very possibly dangerous. It went like this:

I sent out two emails with a link promoting the same book on Amazon.

But the link was not an affiliate link, so sales were not tracked.

To make things worse, the emails went out on two consecutive days, to my entire list, instead of at the same time, to different segments of my list.

​​Maybe the first day’s emails would eat up all the easy sales. Or maybe the second day’s emails would seem to sell all the people who were won over by the first email, but just didn’t buy immediately.

But let’s ignore all that for just a sec. And let me tell you my dramatic results.

Again, while I don’t have actual sales numbers for these emails, I do have personal replies people sent me. Among the replies to the first email, only one referenced the book I was promoting:

“I definitely didn’t buy it and I’m not excited to read it at all”

In case you missed it, the key words seem to be, “I definitely didn’t buy it.” For whatever reason, there seemed to be zero explosive reaction to my first email.

“What could be missing?” I asked myself as I paced up and down my lab late into the night.

Fortunately, just as I was about to give up and admit defeat, my lab mouse, Gulliver, who is allowed to run free around the lab after 9pm, knocked a book off the lab’s three-foot “Persuasive Classics” bookshelf.

The book fell off the shelf, hit me on the head, and landed right at my feet. I picked it up. It was opened to just the following passage:

“This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people — authors of daily email newsletters for example — the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize their censorship.”

I stared at the page for a few moments. “Too bad,” I said. “I had hoped I would at least get a good idea when this book hit me on the head. But I got nothing. Maybe next time.”

Suddenly I heard Gulliver squeaking up on the shelf. He was gesticulating wildly and trying to tell me something in his mouse-like way.

A light bulb went off in my head. I knew what was missing!

I ran to my work desk, and furiously wrote up a second email, featuring the missing catalyst – the fact that the book I was promoting was restricted from the Amazon affiliate program.

Result?

A +infinity% increase in explosive power! ​​That is to say, I got three (3) people writing in to tell me they bought the book.

​​Look, I know three is not a lot. But who knows how many bought the book and didn’t write in to tell me so? Probably millions. In any case 3/0 is still technically infinity, and infinity sounds way better than saying I made three sales.

But maybe you dismiss these findings, or the validity of my experiment.

If so, that’s your loss.

Because there are other hungry marketers on my list who will take this info and use it to create sales explosions.

Many of them probably have that same classic of persuasion sitting up on their bookshelves. And they can just open it up to chapter 7 to find out the specific conditions in which the above persuasive catalyst works best, and which extra catalysts make it even more powerful.

And others hungry marketers on my list, who don’t have this book yet, will be sure to click below and get a copy of their own.

As for you you? Well, if you don’t click on the link below, then write in and let me know what you decide to do.

https://bejakovic.com/censorship

Copy Stalker guidance to the A-list Room

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The camera starts at the face of a sleeping man. It then pans over his forehead, across his bald head, to the stream next to which the man is lying.

The camera keeps panning over the water. It pauses for a second on a clod of dirt that sticks out of the stream.

The camera moves on to more flowing water and in the water, it focuses on some trash:

A large metal syringe… a box with coins in it… a Russian Orthodox icon… gears from a clock, covered with moss… a long black spring… a page of a calendar… a gun… ceramic tiles, covered with floating layers of dirt and algae.

The camera completes its trip and ends up where it started, on the sleeping man’s hand, halfway in the flowing water. A black dog, which has been sitting and guarding the man, stands up. The man opens his eyes.

That’s part of a long, dialogue-free scene from the movie Stalker.

The stalker in the title of the movie is a guide.

For a bit of money, he will take you inside the Zone — a mysterious and magical place, with its own strange and even deadly rules.

But why go inside the Zone?

Well, somewhere inside the Zone there is The Room. And if you can survive the Zone and make it inside the Room, it is said you will be granted your innermost wish.

Stalker is one of my favorite movies. I’ve seen it a grand total of two times. But I’m not here to recommend you see it even once.

Statistically speaking, odds are great you would hate it.

Stalker is dark, depressing, and slow. It’s a scifi movie without costumes, without cool sets, without special effects — unless you count the black dog. There’s no action and little dialogue, and what dialogue there is is philosophical rather than sexy.

So what’s up? If I’m not recommending Stalker to you, then why talk about it? For two reasons:

Reason one is that the Zone in Stalker is why I’m calling my new offer Copy Zone.

Copy Zone will be my travel guide to the magical, mysterious, and sometimes dangerous world of freelance copywritering.

I’ve been walking in and out of the Copy Zone for a few years. I know it well and I’ve already led a few people inside.

​​If you like, then my guide will show you the rules and signposts to go inside Copy Zone safely — and even to reach the fabled A-List Room, if that’s really what your innermost heart desires.

The other reason I’m telling you about Stalker is that yesterday, I promised to talk about pop culture that your audience isn’t familiar with.

And if you’re still reading, you can take a look at what I did in this email, and how I turned a 1979 Soviet sci-fi film into marketing.

I’ll leave you with two quotes. One is from Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of Stalker. When he was told that Stalker is too slow for human consumption, Tarkovsky replied:

“The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.”

The other quote is maybe more practical. It comes from comedian Andrew Schulz. Schulz has this simple rule about talking about topics that his audience can’t relate to:

“Who cares if they relate to it? Make them relate to it.”

Last thing:

If you’d like to be notified when my Copy Zone guide becomes available, sign up here for my email newsletter.