Ben Settle

How to be courteous to trolls

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There’s a scene in The Office where Dwight Schrute does battle with a sentient computer.

Dwight and the sentient computer (actually a couple of his coworkers in disguise) are competing to see who can sell more paper by the end of the day.

At one point, Dwight loses his cool. He tells the computer to “011 1111 011 011” (which apparently spells the letters “F” and “O” in ASCII).

The sentient computer doesn’t flinch, however.

Instead, it replies to Dwight:

“While you were typing that, I’ve searched every database in existence and learned every fact about everything. And mastered the violin. And sold more paper!”

I got a chance to apply a similar kind of response today for an ad I’m running on Facebook.

This ad is promoting a free ebook titled The Little Black Book of Essential Oil Scams. One of the sections in this ebook covers the two big MLM essential oil companies, doTerra and Young Living, which have a lot of ardent supporters.

One such supporter commented on my ad:

“You are showing your own ignorance! You promote oils and don’t know the difference between what’s pure and what’s not, and yet try to bash other companies. You couldn’t pay me to waste my time on your book!”

Until recently, I’ve ignored trolls like this.

But then I thought to myself, why be so lazy?

I should take the advice of expert troll-tamer Ben Settle, and try to profit from this.

So I decided to ignore what the troll said, misconstrue it as something positive, and then self-promote. I wrote in response:

“No need to pay for this book, it’s free. And I agree that essential oil quality is important. That’s why I write about several best-selling companies that have been shown to sell adulterated oils.”

Well, the troll didn’t like being misunderstood.

She wrote more angry comments. But I had no intention of engaging with her further. I think one serving of “misconstrue then self-promote” is all each troll is entitled to.

So what’s the point?

I believe it’s possible to deal with trolls with courtesy, as long as you misconstrue or ignore what they have to say.

And then, you can turn it to your advantage and self-promote.

It’s much like the scene from The Office above.

Don’t engage with trolls directly. And take the attitude that you’re winning no matter what.

If you do this, you will find opportunities for subtle self-promotion everywhere.

Speaking of self-promotion: If you read all the way to the end of this post, you might like my upcoming book on email marketing. You can sign up to get a free copy when it’s out by going to the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

I screwed up yesterday

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Yesterday, I was sending out an email to my aromatherapy list when the Internet died.

Normally, I write my daily email in a text editor.

I then paste it into ActiveCampaign, tweak the formatting, and then click “Send.”

Yesterday, however, between the pasting and the clicking, the Internet died.

I restarted the router, finished sending out the email (so I thought), and got on with my merry day.

It was only later I realized I’d screwed up. Because the Internet had died at the proper moment, the email body didn’t get saved in ActiveCampaign.

So I managed to send out an email with a tantalizing subject line, “This essential oil treatment only works for 25% of people”…

… But the body of the email talked about something entirely unrelated (it was the template copy, from an email I had written two years ago).

​Most importantly, the email wasn’t promoting what I wanted
it to promote (Essential Oil Quick Start Guide, my book on aromatherapy).

Shamezul.

What to do?

Well, I simply waited. And then today, I sent out another email saying, “I screwed up yesterday.”

I explained what had happened.

And I pasted in the correct email body from yesterday’s email below my explanation.

Many people opened this “penance” email.

Some read it.

And a few might even buy through it, as tends to happen when I include the right link.

Now, you might wonder why I’m mentioning all this. It’s to illustrate a principle I first heard from email marketing guru-in-chief Ben Settle. Says Ben (I’m paraphrasing):

“Nothing bad ever happens to you when you write emails”

In other words, everything can be turned and twisted into a good email.

So far, I’ve gotten new email content out of negative Amazon reviews, doubts about my credibility, and accusations thrown at me on Facebook.

​And as you’re currently reading, out of a story of how I botched my actual email sending.

All of which illustrates that it’s not hard to come up with fodder for daily emails, once you get in the groove.

Of course, you can’t send out an “I screwed up” email every day. You’ll need some other email ideas to keep things interesting for your audience.

If you want my ideas for the kind of email content you could be sending out to your list day after day, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing. For more info or to sign up for a free copy, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The yellow balloon sales principle

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I saw a tense dog-man standoff at a park near my house.

The dog, a German boxer, was on top of a little hill. The man, the dog’s owner, was at the bottom of the hill, calling to the dog to come down.

The dog stared and didn’t move. The man called again. The dog continued to stare.

Eventually, the man started to walk away. The dog still kept his spot on top of the hill, and didn’t budge.

And then, as the man was walking away, he slowly took out a bright yellow object from his pocket. The dog started charging full speed down the hill. The man put the yellow object to his lips and started to blow. (It turned out to be a balloon.)

The dog was there in a second, bouncing up and down as the man held the balloon just above the height that the dog could reach.

Now for the past few days, I’ve been writing about alternatives to asking yes-seeking questions. So far, I talked about vision-building questions and no-seeking questions — both of them based on what negotiation expert Jim Camp used to teach.

Well, today I have something out of the playbook of email marketing guru Ben Settle. In fact, it’s something I’ve talked about in this blog already. It’s what I called Ben’s “sink-or-swim” close. That’s when you tell your prospect something like:

“If you don’t believe this technology/service/information can help you be more competitive, then simply don’t buy it.”

And then you wait and allow them to make a decision.

Of course, you have to do a good job painting a vision before you do this. And as Ben likes to say, you have to do it on principle, rather than as a tactic. In other words, you have to be confident you’ve got a good offer, and you have to accept that even so, some people still won’t buy.

Not everyone is right for your offer and that’s ok. Because when you find a prospect who’s right for your offer, you’ll see something like I saw at the park.

They’ll think. They’ll stare. And they’ll start to move. Next thing you know, they’ll be charging down the hill towards that big yellow balloon you’ve put in front of their face, and you will soon have a sale.

At least, that’s how it worked with me in the case of the sales letter that Ben sent.

Anyways, if you don’t need sales emails like this written for your business, then, you know, that’s ok. Otherwise, you can get an idea of how to write them yourself, with a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. More info here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

4 lessons from the ongoing Parris bonanza

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Earlier today, I contributed $297 to help a guy named Taki beat cancer.

I’ve never met Taki. I have no special connection to him. I’m also not naturally the type to contribute to charitable causes. So what gives?

Well, as the GoFundMe page says,

“If you donate $297 or more, Parris Lampropoulos will send you a thank-you gift. Just email him your donation receipt.”

Let me explain what this is all about.

1. Name recognition

I’d first heard of Parris Lampropoulos through an interview on Clayton Makepeace’s site.

Clayton is (or was?) a super successful copywriter.

And he regularly interviewed other super successful copywriters, including Parris.

After reading the interview, I was curious to see whether Parris had a blog, or a newsletter, or a book, or a copywriting course…

And he didn’t. He seemed to be a secretive, off-line kind of guy. A shame, I thought, and I filed the name Parris Lampropoulus away for later.

That’s an important point — I knew the name. Because then…

2. Touch-point barrage

About a week ago, it started to trickle in.

First, I read an email from Ben Settle.

Parris Lampropoulus is finally making available his copywriting wisdom! And for ridiculously cheap! And all in an effort to help his cousin Taki beat cancer!

Ben was the first, but certainly not the last, to make this announcement.

Over the next few days, I saw David Garfinkel, Brian Kurtz, Abbey Woodcock, David Deutsch, and probably somebody else I’m forgetting also promoting Parris’s offer. Here’s why this barrage mattered:

3. Sell to buyers

After I first heard of the Parris offer, I got excited. I then told myself to cool off.

“You’ve got enough copywriting books and courses to last you the next five years,” I said to myself. “Why buy more?”

But the thing is, over the past year or two, I’ve started freely spending money on good information. And I’ve found I never regret it.

In other words, I always get more out of the info I bought than what I paid for it. Maybe through winning new client work, or through being able to charge more, or through some mysterious opportunities opening up.

So in many ways, I was an ideal prospect for this offer. And when I got a second reminder about Parris’s offer — and a third, and a fourth, all from independent quarters — my initial resistance wore down quickly.

And there was one last thing that helped.

4. The charitable opportunity

Some people probably took up Parris on his offer specifically because they wanted to help Taki. But like I said, I’m not the type to contribute to charitable causes (yet — maybe this first experience will be a crack in the floodgates).

Still, the charitable offer did help to convince me to pony up $297. I realized this when I considered the alternative.

If this had simply been a new course launch, I probably would have held off.

A part of why is urgency — Parris will take this offer down once the funding goal is reached, and that probably wouldn’t have been true with a regular course.

But another part of it is the fire sale element of all this.

People rush to a fire sale because they feel they must be getting a steal. Because they think they are taking advantage of somebody else’s time of need.

I’m not proud of it, but I realize that, somewhere not very deep down, there was an element of this in my motivation to seize this opportunity.

So there you have it.

My analysis of an easy, enjoyable $297 sale, or rather purchase.

I think Gary Halbert once wrote that, if you want to do direct mail, you should buy stuff through mail, and allow yourself to enjoy the process. That way, you can understand what the process is like for one of your customers — to have doubts, to make the decision, to be excited about the purchase.

That’s what I did today. Besides, of course, helping a guy named Taki and getting a valuable and rare item for my copywriting library.

Anyways, if you’re selling something online, I believe you should be able to use any of the four points above to sell a little more of whatever it is you’re selling.

And if you’re interested in taking Parris up on his offer, before the fundraising target is met, here’s the link to the page that describes everything you get:

http://o.copychief.com/parris-lampropoulos

A lesson from Widows: How to tell you’re winning a negotiation

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I just saw the surprisingly good Widows.

There are many scenes in this movie that would make for good email — or blog — fodder.

One that sticks out is the following:

Jamal Manning is a former crime boss who’s looking to get respectable, so he’s running for alderman in Chicago’s 16th district.

And in this scene, he visits the reverend of the largest congregation in his district, trying to get support.

The reverend speaks first:

“Election’s in less than a month. If I was a doctor, I’d be telling you to get your affairs in order. Three weeks from now, you won’t need a doctor. You’ll be asking someone like me to give you last rites.”

Manning is getting impatient. He thinks the reverend has already decided to endorse his opponent.

“I didn’t say that,” says the good reverend.

He then suggests he’s still keeping his options open.

Finally, Manning can’t take any more. He blurts out:

“I’m gonna cut to the chase here, reverend. I’m in the driver’s seat. I just don’t have a set of wheels. All I need is your endorsement and your contribution to help me get across the finish line.”

And there it is.

The phrase that tells you you’ve been negotiating right, and are near to crossing the finish line.

Did you catch it?

“I’m gonna cut to the chase.”

That’s not my wisdom.

Instead, it’s straight from the late negotiation expert Jim Camp, who said his students always love to hear that phrase. “Cut to the chase” means the other side is getting worn out and they are ready to agree to just about anything.

So how do you get to that point?

Well, you do what the good reverend did.

Which is something that doesn’t just apply to local politics or crime movies.

In fact, it’s another tenet of Camp’s negotiating method.

And it’s even something that’s been adapted to writing more effective sales emails by that devoted Camp disciple, Ben Settle.

You can try to glean what I’m talking about by closely reading the script above.

Or you can get a copy of my upcoming book when it comes out, where I will cover this topic in much more detail, and give several examples of emails where I’ve used this same strategy.

The choice is yours. If you want the second option, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The Trojan horse of lead generation

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“And armed hosts, an unexpected force,
Break from the bowels of the fatal horse.”
— The Aenid by Virgil

How do you overthrow a city defended by impenetrable walls?

You build a wooden horse and you get the Trojans to do your work for you.

How do you get paid for advertising your own product to other people’s customers?

You write a short book and you get the Amazons to do your work for you.

At least, that’s what one very successful Internet marketer had to say a few years back.

I’m thinking specifically of Hollis Carter, who ran (or still runs) a publishing company called Velocity House.

I remember watching a talk that Hollis gave at Mindvalley a long time ago — it was one of the first things that that got me excited about internet marketing.

The basic message was this:

Whatever you want to do — build a reputation, get leads, rank for a competitive keyword on Google — then writing a book and putting it on Amazon can do that for you.

Instead of paying for advertising, Hollis was saying, Amazon will actually pay you to deliver your ad (in the form of a book) to your target audience.

Well, I’m on this horse.

I’m putting together a Kindle book right now that will serve only for lead generation.

The best part is, it’s easy to do, since I’m just repurposing emails I’ve already sent to my email list.

But there’s a little twist to making sure this book unleashes the armed hosts and unexpected force of lead generation.

It’s a small principle that I learned from Ben Settle, who I suppose learned it from Matt Furey. Outside of these two guys, I don’t hear anybody else talking about it.

If you want to find out what this special principle is, I’ll tell you. All you have to do is sign up by the end of today (midnight PST, Tuesday, December 4) for my upcoming book on email marketing, and I will send you an email explaining the rest of this Amazon Trojan horse lead gen approach.

Here’s the link to sign up:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The secret online fountain of the truth

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“You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about in parties, you WANT me to be overweight, you NEED me to be overweight.”

Sometimes you gotta probe a little.

For example, I heard Ben Settle mention on his podcast, and maybe in a recent Email Players issue, how you get to the bottom of your market’s worst fears.

You first ask them (for example), “Why would you want to lose weight?”

“Because I don’t like the way I look and it’s unhealthy.”

“I see. Any other reasons?”

And then they think. And think. And if you’re lucky, the real story comes out:

“To tell you the truth, I was in a store yesterday and as soon as I came in, this snotty-looking sales girl intercepted me at the door and she said, ‘We don’t have anything in your size.’ I just got so humiliated and furious I decided something had to change.” (True story, by the way.)

You see, it’s that second, follow-up question which really gets the deep, dark, painful reasons why people do what they do.

It’s like the climax in A Few Good Men.

Tom Cruise’s character keeps probing and probing, asking just one more question…

Until he gets Colonel Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, to expose himself and yell out the famous line:

“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!”

Well, as a copywriter and a marketer, the issue is not that I can’t handle the truth.

Rather, the trouble is that I often can’t get at it.

After all, I rarely have my prospects before me.

I don’t have Colonel Jessup sitting in a courtroom either, waiting for my interrogation.

Instead, I have to go online and do some sleuthing to try to uncover THE TRUTH rather than those surface-level answers everybody is programmed to give.

The trouble is, all the typical places that you will hear recommended — Facebook, Instagram, personal blogs — are full of social posturing, and they don’t actually show people’s dark and scaly underbellies.

However, I do have a reliable way of getting that information.

In fact, just as an exercise, I tried to come up with THE TRUTH for a typical person interested in essential oils.

Within a few minutes, I had an avatar.

Yes, I found out what this person looks like, what her hobbies are, what her favorite TV show is…

But I also found out what rare disease she has, her personality type, and her insecurities around her friends .

This is NOT stuff that you will ever find on Facebook.

But it is out there, right on on the Internet savannah — if you know where to look. And though it might seem creepy, it’s a necessary part of the research you have to do if you are going to target an audience effectively.

Anyways, if you want to know what this deep fountain of personal information is, you’re in luck.

I’ll talk about it in more detail in my upcoming book.

Sign up below and I’ll send you a free copy when I’m finished with it:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

What’s the frequency, Brian?

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Did you know a group of ladybugs is called a “loveliness”?

Entomologists might not use this term, but it is what former CBS anchorman Dan Rather seems to call a ladybug congress. I found this out from a Tweet that Dan posted today.

He seems very chipper these days, does old Dan, enjoying being retired and spending time with his grandson. But it wasn’t always so.

As you probably know, poor Dan got beat up on the streets of New York back in ’86 by a guy who kept yelling, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

The “Kenneth” phrase became a kind of 80’s meme and inspired the big R.E.M. hit, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

The song’s lyrics are opaque and also include the line, “Richard said, ‘Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.'” This in turn comes from a scene in the movie Slacker, directed by Richard Linklater, in which one of the characters offers Oblique Strategy cards to a passerby, and the “Whithdrawal in disgust” card is what the guy picks.

Oblique Strategies, by the way, are cards designed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. They hold short, cryptic instructions to help with creative work.

This links back to the R.E.M. song, which slows down at the end. Apparently, the bass player had appendicitis as the song was being recorded, and they had to stop playing and rush him to the hospital. They never finished the recording properly. I don’t think this was one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, but it runs in the same vein.

You may think this is aimless rambling. And it is — but there is a point to it as well.

A while back, Ben Settle linked to a video that he said was very influential in how he wrote emails. The video is titled “Admiralty Law: Word Controlled Humans & The Law of Money” and it’s the recording of a presentation of one Jordan Maxwell, a world-famous conspiracy theorist.

The video is kind of mind-bending to watch, and the email marketing lesson I drew from it is the power of stringing two ideas together in surprising ways. Each idea has to be somewhat interesting on its own, at least to you. The way you string them together is also up to you — it doesn’t have to make too much sense.

Why do this?

Well, one reason is that surprising people is always a good thing. It wakes them up and makes them pay attention.

But there’s a second, and possibly more important reason. And that is:

Because these are your curious associations between different facts and ideas, they give your unique flavor to what you write. It’s this unique voice that helps you build a relationship with your readers. And ultimately, building a relationship is the highest level of email marketing.

So developing your own voice can be done consciously, like I did with the “Kenneth” stuff above.

The thing is, this association game is not the only way to develop a unique voice for your copywriting.

There are several other strategies. I’ll go over them in similar detail in my upcoming book on email marketing. If you want to get a free copy when it comes out, sign up here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Thanksgiving frustrates Bejako’s turkey

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I’m preparing to launch my new book on essential oils, and while I’m pretty much ready to pop this turkey in the oven, there’s a snag:

This Thursday is Thanksgiving.

The day after is “Black Friday.”

And the Monday after is “Cyber Monday.”

Which means every retailer, online and offline, will be bombarding their email lists with offers and special discounts.

Not a good time to try to vie for attention, especially since I plan to do so starting on a Thursday and ending on a Monday.

I’ll have to wait a week.

No problem though, because it will give me time to write all my promotional emails ahead of time.

And there will be a lot of them.

I’m largely following the product-launch strategy that Ben Settle outlined in his September 2017 issue of Email Players.

And it’s something I’ve applied once before, with a lot of success, for a big client, RealDose Nutrition.

This is an 8-figure company in the supplement space.

I rewrote their front-end autoresponder along the same lines I will be using for my own product launch.

The outcome was a 30% increase in sales — and that’s for a company built on direct response, and one that already relied heavily on email marketing.

If you want to get the full details of what I did for RealDose, you’re in luck.

Because this will be an ongoing case study in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.

The book is not out yet, but if you want a free copy when it does come out (it will sell for $17 after that), you can sign up here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The good, the bad, and the ugly of product names

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What’s in a name?

Quite a bit, my young Shakespeare.

I should know, having been blessed with an almost unpronounceable, unreadable name for all but a small part of this planet’s population (“John” is just my “professional” name).

As for people, so for products: names matter.

Yes, sometimes a great product can sell even in spite of an awful name (hello Psycho-Cybernetics).

But why not give yourself the best advantage by having both a good product and a good name?

Let’s look at some products I’ve bought in the last year to see what makes a good name:

“Quit in 6”

Buck Flogging’s course on making it with your own business. Buck says a good name will say what a product is, while a great name will say what a product will do for you. I guess he took his own advice.

“Email Client Machine”

Ben Settle’s product explaining how to get booked with clients using his email tactics. A good name in my opinion: it also says what it will do for you, and the word “machine” draws attention because it’s unusual in this context.

“Energy Blueprint”

Ari Whitten’s course on increasing your (physical) energy. There was a spate of these “blueprint” courses over the past decade. Today I think “blueprint” products have become cliche, putting this name into the good-but-not-great category.

“Dartboard Pricing”

Sean D’Souza’s product on how to set and raise your prices. It’s named after the methodology — how to set your prices — rather than the outcome. However, it definitely gets bonus points for the unusual, attention-grabbing term “dartboard.”

“Email Players”

This is Ben Settle’s monthly newsletter on email marketing. I think the “Players” bit is a reference to Gary Halbert and the way he used that word. If that’s true, then I don’t think this name is really about what the product will do for you… rather, it’s about the identity of the kind of people that Ben wants to assemble as his customers. Knowing Ben’s emphasis on building relationships, this would make sense.

So what makes a good name? I’d say you have two options:

Appeal to self-interest.

Or appeal to identity.

The decision will depend on what kind of clients you want to get, but that’s a topic for another day.

Either way, you get bonus points if you can make the name fresh (of course, without making it confusing).

Here’s why I bring all this up.

I’ve been playing around with the name of my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space (the ugly “Health Email Splash” has gone out the window).

Whatever the final name will be, the offer remains the same. If you sign up now, you can get a copy for free when it comes out. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails