Ben Settle

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

4 quotes about the unimportance of sales copy

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I was listening to the latest edition of the Copywriters Podcast, in which David Garfinkel interviews Brian Cassingena.

Brian used to be the head copywriter at Mindvalley, and now he seems to have gone rogue, helping individual businesses improve their sales funnels.

David asked Brian about the biggest mistake he sees with funnels. This was Brian’s response:

“[Businesses] are not split-testing enough. We assume — copywriters are the same — we assume we know what would work best.”

Isn’t that what you pay a copywriter for though?

A good copywriter — an A-lister like Brian — can be expected to get top-gun results much of the time, or at least drastically outperform some schmuck off the street.

Right?

Maybe not.

Here’s what Dan Ferrari, another big name who writes sales copy for the Motley Fool, has to say on the topic:

“The C-level marketers that test 50 promos per year will beat the A-list marketers that test 5.”

What?

Come on, Dan.

Seriously.

What about guys like Gary Bencivenga, whose copy never lost, always became the control, and made his clients millions of dollars without fail?

Well, here’s Gary Bencivenga himself, describing a part of his decision process on whether he would accept a project or not:

“What I really want to know about the advertising is whether or not I see an easy way for me to beat it. If the advertising was created by somebody like Clayton Makepeace, it’s an immediate turnoff.”

The fact is, Gary wasn’t “selling ice to eskimos.”

He would only take on “easy” projects where he had a great chance of succeeding right up front (no harm there, it’s a smart strategy).

And even then, he would spend months and months upon research, to ensure he would really get the best angle.

Which leads me to the final quote, this from Ben Settle (I’m paraphrasing):

“Copywriting isn’t hard if you know your market well.”

The thing is, copywriting isn’t some dark art where you either know the magic spell or you die.

Instead, it mainly comes down to two things:

1. Researching your market.

2. Testing to see which appeal works best.

If you want to see how this simple 2-step approach can successfully be used in practice (specifically, for selling health products such as supplements), you might like my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.

It’s not out yet, but you can sign up to get it for free when I do finish it. Here’s the link:

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

The content is in the list

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For the past week or so, I’ve been stuck writing about aromatherapy diffusers. This is for a book on essential oils I’m about to put out. (Diffusers are the little gadgets that you can use to disperse aromatic essential oils.)

Basically, I needed to write a review article. But I didn’t feel like summarizing thousands of online reviews for hundreds of separate diffusers. To make things worse, many of those reviews are either biased, paid for, or very incomplete. That’s not good enough — I only wanted to make top-notch recommendations to the people who will be reading my book.

So what to do? Well, I didn’t have a good plan, so I kept going back and forth. And back. And forth.

Fortunately, an idea hit me. I decided to write an email to my aromatherapy list, and ask for their experiences. I explained exactly what I was doing — putting together a list of diffusers that work well in practice, rather than just on paper. I explained the trouble with online reviews, and asked for personal feedback.

And to sweeten a deal, I offered a bribe. I’ve asked questions of my list before and the response hasn’t been overwhelming. So I took a page out of Ben Settle’s book, and offered something in exchange for getting people to take action (specifically, I promised them a free copy of my upcoming ebook once it’s finished).

The response has been great. I got lots of interesting feedback, including stuff I would never have found otherwise. Writing the section on diffusers suddenly became easy. I’ll also be able to use the same content (tweaked a bit) for an upcoming email, as well as for an article on my site.

And there have been some unexpected benefits as well.  I got more engagement from my list. I got some in-depth information, which makes it easier to imagine the people who read my emails as real persons instead of just email addresses. Plus I got more people interested in my book than I would have otherwise.

So to sum up:

The content is in the list. Whenever you are stuck for how to proceed with writing a piece of content, canvass your list. Ask for opinions on a specific question, or even better, ask for personal experiences on a specific topic. And give people something valuable in exchange for responding.

The sink-or-swim sales letter close

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Yesterday, I was finishing up a sales letter and I got to my least favorite part, the close.

That’s when you’ve made your offer, and now make one final big push to get the reader to buy. Many times, this is where sales letters reiterate all the benefits of the thing they are selling. Other times, they paint a bleak picture of how lonely and sad your life will be if you don’t buy.

I decided to do something different. I used an idea that I got from a sales letter from Ben Settle, which he included along with his monthly print newsletter several months ago. The sales letter was for a new $279 product for freelance copywriters that Ben was selling. it wrapped up with the following:

“It’s sink or swim around here to encourage implementation. So if you don’t think you can make your $279 back, simply don’t buy it. Otherwise, go here before April 1st to grab it for $100 off:”

Ben’s sales letter had a bunch of curiosity-soaked bullet points, but none of them pulled me in or made me consider buying. However, this one final statement almost made me get my credit card right away and order right away. Here’s why this close is so good:

1. It’s a challenge. This close doesn’t try to convince you. It doesn’t say “Just imagine how much richer you will be with this information!” It does just the opposite — it tries to dismiss you. To me at least, this was a challenge that I wanted to rise up to.

2. It creates vision. When I read this, I immediately asked myself, “Could I make $279 from this information?” And I then started imagining different scenarios where that could happen. This is what negotiation expert Jim Camp called creating vision in your adversary’s mind.

3. It’s different. Again, most other sales letters try to close you with high-pressure sales tactics. This makes Ben’s approach stand out, and it creates curiosity and intrigue.

4. It’s non-needy. Again, no high-pressure tactics here. This signals you don’t need the sale (as you genuinely don’t). Ironically, this will make it more likely for you to get the sale.

5. It repels the buyers you don’t want to have. “Repulsion marketing” is another cornerstone of Ben’s philosophy, and this sales letter close embodies it perfectly.

6. It’s about consumption. This close isn’t about being a dick (though it might sound like that to some). It’s about what’s good for you and for your prospects, something that Sean D’Souza calls an emphasis on consumption. In other words, if some prospects won’t get value out of what you’re selling, why would you sell it to them?

Now I’m sure this approach probably goes back many thousands of years, back to when the first copywriters etched their sales letters in wet clay tablets.

But if it has a name yet, I haven’t heard it. And so, in honor and memory of Ben’s sales letter, where I first saw it, I will call it the “sink-or-swim close” from now on.

6 ways to stir up (and blow up) curiosity

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Local business successfully employs curiosity

No time to dilly-dally today. Straight into the meat of this post, which is about how to create and amplify curiosity:

1 Use an open loop

I know of a fantastic way to stir up curiosity. It works particularly well with skeptical prospects, because it can be go completely under the radar.

But before I talk more about that, let me tell you about a guy named Andre Chaperon. Andre is famous in the copywriting world for a course called Autoresponder Madness, which teaches people how to write successful, story-based autoresponder sequences.

Some big Internet publishing companies, such as Mindvalley and Velocity House, have based much of their sales funnels on Andre’s teachings in Autoresponder Madness.

(Andre’s email methodology was the first I was exposed to when I started to learn about email marketing. I thought it was great then, and I think it’s great still — only surpassed, or rather complemented by,  the stuff that Ben Settle teaches.)

Anyways, one clever trick that Andre uses throughout his email copy, and that he teaches people in Autoresponder Madness, is called the “open loop.” You just saw an example of it four paragraphs back. It’s when you announce something intriguing, and then you completely drop it to talk about other things.

In my example above, the effect was probably not great, because you knew the suspense would be relieved after only a few paragraphs. But Andre frequently uses it across emails that will be sent days or even weeks apart.

Of course, the open loop is a standard technique in any story-telling medium. An extreme example is a cliffhanger in old comics or TV shows (more on this at the end of this post).

2 Tease/Intensify

Do you know why teasing is so great? It’s simply this: it will make your readers itch with curiosity, to the point where they’ll do anything to get the answer from you. And the thing about teasing is that it’s simple to do. Many people have used even without knowing anything about persuasion.

I’ll tell you all about how to do it, in just a second. Or maybe two. All right, here goes:

Teasing, by my definition, is simply dragging things out without actually giving anything away. The section above is one example.

You might find my teasing above annoying and transparent. But teasing can and should be part of good copy, both to build up anticipation and to “intensify” whatever is being talked about.

Here’s a less hokey example from my post yesterday:

But I believe there is another big pillar of influence that Cialdini left out. It’s in the story above. My guess is that it also drives about 90% of Internet traffic today. And according to famous copywriter Gary Halbert, it might even be the #1 reason that people buy stuff from advertisements.

I’m not really giving anything away here. I’m just restating and intesifying the benefits, and buying a bit of time in the process.

3 Tighten the knowledge gap

Here’s a puzzle for you. Why would a headline such as:

“Battery technology may emerge as a trillion-dollar threat to credit markets”

stir up more curiosity than a headline such as:

“Battery technology may emerge as a huge threat to other sectors”

After all, the second headline actually withholds much more information (Which sectors? How huge?) than the first. Shouldn’t that cause more curiosity as well?

The answer to this lies in the concept of a “knowledge gap,” a term I first read in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. A knowledge gap is what ultimately creates curiosity — it’s the bit of knowledge we don’t have and we want to have so we can complete the picture.

The thing is, if the amount of information that’s withheld is too great, you don’t create curiosity. You create indifference. That’s what’s going on in the second headline above.

The way to create curiosity is to tighten the knowledge gap as much as possible without giving the farm away. Some well-known copywriter (Ben Settle? David Deutsch?) talked about good bullet points as giving away nine-tenths of what you need to know, but keeping that last bit so people have to buy your product to find out. That’s the right attitude to have with the knowledge gap.

Tightening the knowledge gap isn’t just about combatting general disinterest. It can also be used to hook skeptical, jaded prospects. Compare a subject line such as:

“The forbidden food you should be eating”

(which, by the way, is a real subject line from an email I got yesterday, and did not open) to a more specific subject line:

“The forbidden breakfast food you should be eating after workouts”

To me, it seems that the second subject line (which I just made up) might get me to wonder, “which breakfast food” and “why after workouts,” which might be enough to overcome my skepticism of reading yet another sensationalist health blog post.

4 Flaunt the velvet pouch

This blog post has run on longer than expected. And I’m getting sleepy. I’ll pick it all up tomorrow — starting with the secret of the velvet pouch.

“Until tomorrow — same time — same channel!”