Ben Settle

Don’t you get sick of being right all the time?

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“What do you think? I bet it’s just one guy.”

Butch Cassidy. The Sundance Kid. Their last day on Earth. ​​The two outlaws have just ridden into a Bolivian town to have a meal… and somebody starts shooting at them.

They run for cover inside a saloon.

Butch is the brains of the operation and forever the optimist. “What do you think?” he says to Sundance. “I bet it’s just one guy.”

Sundance takes off his hat and pokes it out the door. An army of guns goes off immediately. A dozen bullets whiz through the hat. Sundance stares at Butch.

“Don’t you get sick of being right all the time?”

Well? Don’t you?

Today I want to share an unpleasant but valuable truth with you. You may or may not be ready to hear it.

I first heard it from John Carlton. John says:

In order to persuade large groups of people to buy, act now, or even just begin to see your side of things… you have to see the world as it is.

Not as you wish it was. Not as you believe it should be. Not as you were told it was.

As it is. The stark, cold reality of how things actually work, and how people actually behave.

This is often scary, at first. It requires you to look behind your go-to belief systems (which you may have had since you were a kid)… to challenge authority’s version of what’s going on… and — most important — you must willingly exit the shared delusion among the majority of your fellow humans that what they say they’ll do is more important than what they actually do.

That’s not the only shared delusion among us fellow humans. There are plenty of others.

​​Such as “The One Thing”… the simple, black-and-white explanation… the leader to be obeyed or the charlatan to be mocked.

We all want to believe the world works like this. And there’s a lot of money to be made by telling people what they want to hear.

​​But like Carlton says, to make that money, it might be helpful to see the world as it is, rather than as you wish it were. Even if it means you’ll stop being right all the time.

But you know what? I’m not really talking to you. I’m talking to myself. Because check it:

A few weeks ago, I decided to unsubscribe from Ben Settle’s Email Players newsletter. I was subscribed for over 4 years. But I had my reasons to quit.

Ben is somebody I’ve learned the most from, both directly and indirectly, about this copywriting and marketing stuff. And yet, since unsubscribing from his newsletter, I notice my brain trying to make things black-and-white. To discount the things I’ve learned from him. To put them in a box of things I’ve outgrown.

My brain wants to be right. But I want to be rich.

So for your benefit as well as my own, over the next several days, I’ll tell you a few of the great things I’ve learned from Ben Settle. A few things… because there’s no “The One Thing.”

Put together, these great ideas were a central part of the success I’ve achieved so far. Perhaps they can help you too. As a sneak preview of the first of these great ideas, here’s a bit of dialogue between Butch and Sundance… right before they try to shoot their way out of the saloon, against an entire battalion of Bolivian soldiers and police:

Butch: Australia. I thought that secretly you wanted to know so I told you.

Sundance: That’s your great idea?

Butch: The latest in a long line. We get out of here alive, we go to Australia. Goodbye, Bolivia. Hello to Australia.

Marketing yokel discovers hidden way to write Ben Settle-style subject lines

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A long time ago in a galaxy pretty, pretty nearby, a marketing yokel subscribed to Ben Settle’s email list.

Now if you are reading this, odds are good you know who Ben Settle is.

​​No, he didn’t invent daily emails.

​​But he did do the most to popularize this marketing format… to develop it… and to teach it… so I and hundreds of other copywriters like me could get paid writing emails much like what you’re reading.

But let me get back to my story of the marketing yokel.

The very next day, our hero opened up his first Ben Settle email. The email had a big promise in the subject line, something like:

“How to have power & influence even if you don’t deserve it”

The yokel tore through the email. He was disappointed to find no step-by-step instructions there. Instead, he hit upon a link at the end, which led to a pitch for a paid newsletter.

“You got me once,” our marketing yokel muttered. “Never again.”

But the day after, a new email arrived from Ben Settle. The exact subject line is lost in the mists of history, but it might have been:

“What never to write in an email subject line”

Seeing this, our marketing yokel forgot his resolution from the day before. He opened this second email… chuckled a bit at the writing… and again hit a paywall.

“Ya sonova—”

Never again, right? Of course. The third day, another Ben Settle email arrived, with a colorful wrapper like:

“A secret way of using an ordinary pocket watch to get booked solid with paying clients”

Our hero hung his head, admitted defeat, and opened up the email to start reading.

Now here’s a Darth Vader-level reveal, which you might have seen coming. Cue James Earl Jones’s voice:

I AM that marketing yokel. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Fact is, I kept getting sucked into Ben’s emails until I eventually broke down. One day, I became a subscriber to his email newsletter. I stayed subscribed for over 3 years. Plus as of today, I’ve ponied up an extra few thousand dollars to buy his other books and promoted offers.

There’s more to Ben’s email system than great subject lines. But subject lines are a big part of it, especially in the early days.

Great subject lines take people who haven’t yet bonded with you… who aren’t familiar with your inside jokes… who don’t yet care about your personality and your unique views… they take those people and suck them in. Just like they sucked me in until I was ready to start buying.

But now I’ve graduated from marketing yokel to somewhat of an email marketing authority. So I’d like to share a subject line tip with you.

It’s something I learned from Ben, though he doesn’t explicitly teach it, not as far as I know. It’s a ready-made way to come up with great subject lines like the ones above. Take a look at the following:

“How to have ‘killer sex’ at any age even if you don’t deserve it”

“What never to eat on an airplane”

“How to stop smoking using an ordinary hairbrush”

These are all bullets from classic promos. Compare them to Ben’s subject lines above. You will see that Ben adapted these classic bullets, either in form or in intent, to create his own subject lines.

So that’s my tip for you for today.

If you have your own list and you want to start mailing it daily… then classic bullets offer great templates for your subject lines.

And if you have no list, but you’re hoping to work with clients…

Then to me it seems like email is it. For every successful VSL and sales letter copywriter I come across, I meet three others who focus only on email.

By the way, I mentioned yesterday I’d make a prediction.

It has to do with a stubborn belief, popular in copywriting circles, that long copy will never die.

Well, my prediction is it will.

My reasoning is that, in an age when most of us feel our sense of control is under growing threat, we become more sensitized to outside manipulation.

Anything that looks and smells like advertising will be the first victim of this new sensitivity. And 45-page sales letters will be the first to go.

I think there are signs of this already. Or maybe I’m just biased, because I myself have a hard time reading a long-form sales letter for products I’m personally buying.

In any case, email marketing is still holding on, and likely will for a while.

And if your client wants email, the first thing he (and his customers) will care about is subject lines.

So my tip for you (again) is classic bullets.

And speaking of classic bullets, my Copy Riddles program is open for enrollment for the next few days. It’s all about teaching you sales copy, using the mechanism of bullets.

No, Copy Riddles is not just for learning bullets.

It’s also not just for email subject lines.

But even if that’s all this program gets you to do… then I reckon it can easily pay for itself.

So in more words of Darth Vader, “You’ve only begun to discover your power. Join me, and I will complete your training.” If you want to find out more about the power of bullets:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

The future of break-em-down selling?

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Imagine tomorrow you see an ad for a magical job opportunity:

“$6k a month, only requiring 3-4 hours of work every week.”

The job is with a new video game company. The work is easy. You can do it successfully as long as you have the digital skills of somebody born after 1980.

Plus you can work whenever you like, wherever you like, as much or as little as you like. All you need is your phone. And if you want to work more and make as much as $10k or $15k a month, that’s fine too.

There will be a presentation, the ad tells you, at the local Cheesecake Factory this Friday. Anybody interested can get all the info there.

So on Friday, you show up to the Cheesecake Factory, both hopeful and cautious.

“What’s the worst that can happen,” you tell yourself. “If it’s some sort of scam, I’ll just up and leave. But if it’s for real, it could be life-changing.”

A dozen other people are there with you. Soon enough the presenter arrives. He chats to everyone for a few minutes. Funny enough, it turns out his sister went to the same college you went to.

“But it’s too noisy here,” the guy announces. “We’ll actually go to go to a different location where the presentation will be held.”

So you all load onto a bus. And that’s when the ride really gets going.

If you’re wondering why I’m painting this picture, it’s because situations like this happen for real. Bob Cialdini once told his own personal experience of it.

He got on the bus. And he and the others interested in the opportunity got taken from one town… to another… and back. It took many hours, and they never got a chance to up and leave until it was over.

To help them make the right decision, the bus was covered with inspirational posters. Eye of the Tiger kept playing over and over. Meanwhile, the presenter pitched the amazingness of his pyramid scheme, while the bus bounced and rumbled along the highway at 55 mph.

Result:

Except for Cialdini, who had a little bit of self-defense thanks to his knowledge of persuasion techniques, everybody else signed on for the pyramid scheme.

My point is that a controlled, live selling environment, particularly one that lasts for hours or days, and one where you can’t leave… well… it can sell anything.

So if you are looking to get rich in the pyramid scheme business, it’s time to invest in a bus.

But what if you’re not selling pyramid schemes? And what if you do your business online?

It might seem hopeless. How can you control people’s environment… how can you keep them from leaving… how can you break them down… unless you can physically isolate them?

It might seem hopeless. But social factors are working in your favor. And I’m not even talking about the corona lockdowns, though those certainly help.

The real thing is we all carry our own Eye-Of-The-Tiger bus in our pockets these days. We allow it to create a completely controlled and engrossing environment for us. We take it with us wherever we go, even to small, isolated spaces like the toilet.

And in case you think I’m trying to make a joke, I’m not.

For the past year or so, I’ve been watching Ben Settle promote his build-your-own-mobile-marketing-app business.

I thought it’s stupid. Because I myself refuse to install anything on my phone except Google Maps and this thing that helps you identify trees. And even those have all the notifications turned off.

But I will eventually break down. That’s how the world is moving.

So if you are looking to get rich in any business, it might be time to invest in a mobile app. One with lots of notifications and an inspirational poster background. If I’m right, this is the future of break-em-down selling… and it can help you sell anything.

Meanwhile, the best you can do is get people onto your email newsletter. I’ve got one here. It’s not the same as a bus… so I have to compensate by being entertaining and informative.

Virtue selling

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Because you are an independent thinker, I believe you will appreciate the following:

​​A few nights ago, I was walking along the riverside when a series of loud explosions went off all around me.

I didn’t flinch. Not because I’m so brave. But because I knew what was going on.

The explosions were firecrackers, fireworks, or possibly cannon fire, set off in celebration. They were followed by mass cheering that broke out from balconies, bars, and cafes all over the city.

Because it’s the Euro Cup now. And the national soccer team had just scored a goal.

I say national team, but that’s not what they are called. Not officially.

Instead, government officials, TV pundits, and newspaper editors now use the terms “we,” or more commonly, “Croatia.”

“Croatia was magnificent”

“Croatia needs to try harder”

“Croatia rises from the ashes”

My point is that soccer here is a kind of new state religion.

I’m not kidding about that.

Once upon a time in this part of the world, belonging to the official church and being a good citizen were two sides of the same personal identity coin.

Today, the church has lost much of its pull.

But soccer has gained where the church has lost.

So today, billboards, TV, and newspapers all repeat a hundred versions of the same two-sided message:

“Croatia is soccer! And soccer is Croatia!”

But let me step off my 1984 pulpit. And let me get to the money-making shot at the open goal.

This official push for soccer fandom brought to mind something I’ve heard from two successful marketers.

The marketers in question are Chris Haddad and Ben Settle. And independent of each other, they both said the same thing:

You want to make buying from you a virtue.

Sure, people want to get rich, get laid, and get swole.

But maybe not as much as you think. Maybe not enough to pull out their wallets, to overcome their fears, and to set aside the bad memories of previous purchases that went nowhere. Maybe not enough to buy.

So you link buying from you to a virtue:

Your prospect is a rebel. Or a patriot. Or a visionary.

And by virtue of buying from you… he is making the world a better place… and reaffirming that he is in fact a deserving person.

And when your prospect starts wondering if that’s really something he wants, you remind him:

He still gets rich/laid/swole as part of the bargain. A good deal, no? 1-0 for your business.

And now the pitch:

Since you are an independent-thinking person, you might want to sign up to my email newsletter. By signing up to my email newsletter, you will be exposed to novel ideas, making you an even more independent-thinking person. Plus you might make some money in the process.

How to get booked solid with paying clients without prospecting any harder or dropping your prices

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Today I have a copywriting tip for you, not a lead-gen tip. But if you are looking for a way to get more client work, then here’s an idea from a recent Ben Settle email:

If you want clients who love and rave about you, be punctual.

It truly separates the men from the boys.

It also will make what I teach in my “Email Client Horde” book that’s on sale today a lot more powerful — potentially ramping up the respect and gratitude clients have for you, wanting to keep you, and not wanting to hire anyone else.

I’ve seen (and experienced) it many times.

I suspect you can, too.

Ben’s email had the subject line, “A secret way of using an ordinary pocket watch to get booked solid with paying clients.”

It’s a standard bullet writing technique. You zoom in on the solution. And then you zoom in some more. So far in, that the reader starts to wonder, “A pocket watch? Why specifically a pocket watch? Gotta find out.”

The best copywriters out there, from Gary Bencivenga to Parris Lampropoulos and David Deutsch, all use this technique regularly. But there’s a problem:

You can’t use it all the time. Your readers get wise, and get burned out. “Oh, it’s the teaspoon trick.” “Not the air conditioner secret again.” “There he goes, trying to get me to read by zooming in on a hairbrush.”

So what can you do?

There’s a second clever thing A-list copywriters do in situations like this. It’s probably obvious because you can find it in the subject line of this very email.

But if it’s not fully obvious, or you want a few examples of how A-list copywriters use this trick to create bullets that seem to be truly impossible, then you can find that in lesson 8 of my bullets course.

​​Which you can’t join just yet… but which will be available soon. If you want to make sure you get in while it is available, sign up for my email newsletter, because that’s where I will first announce it.

How to get away with making extreme promises more often than you would ever believe

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In a recent email, A-list copywriter David Deutsch included the following P.S.:

P.S. Justin Goff says working with me enabled him to multiply his income 10 times over.

Not saying I’ll do that for you.

But it does show the power of getting the right kind of help improving your copy.

I call this frontloading. Here’s a second example of it, from an email by Ben Settle:

And it contains the exact same methods I used to land high-paying clients who could have easily afforded to hire better and more seasoned writers. But, using my sneaky ways, they not only hired me… they hired only me (often multiple times, plus referring me to their friends), without doing the usual client-copywriter dance around price, without jumping through hoops to sell myself, and without even showing them my portfolio, in most cases.

I used this info during good and bad economic times.

In fact, I got more high paying clients during the bad times (2008-2010) than the good times.

I cannot guarantee you will have the same results.

And the methodology doesn’t work overnight.

But, that’s how it worked out in my case, and this book shows you what I did.

So those are two examples of frontloading. It works like this:

First, you make a powerful, extreme promise. Then you qualify your promise. That way, you create believability… while still leaving the extreme promise ringing in your prospect’s head.

This works well as a way to organize a single sales argument (as in David’s case above). It can also shape your entire message (as in Ben’s email).

I think of it like grabbing a man by the shoulders and shaking him violently. Once his body goes limp and his head starts to swim, then you let him go and even dust off his shoulders and straighten out his rumpled shirt a bit.

In other words, you agitate and agitate your prospect… and then you agitate some more… and then you ask him to be reasonable.

Of course, you can also choose to be more subtle about it. You can only agitate a little bit, and then immediately get more reasonable. This can work well in your subject lines… or even your headlines.

Anyways, in case you want to get on board the most interesting email newsletter in the world, according to several marketers and copywriters who are subscribed to it, here’s where to go.

A copy riddle with a swipe file prize

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Here’s a copy riddle for you:

Gary Halbert called it the only reason that people buy from an ad, for the most part…

While Ben Settle said that copywriting is all about this one thing.

Parris Lampropoulos credits his success to it. And drilling this one thing is how he spends 80% of his time with his copy cubs.

David Deutsch said it’s the “key to the kingdom”…

And John Carlton believes it makes the difference between a sale made and a sale lost.

So my riddle for you is, what is this one thing?

I gave this riddle to people on my email newsletter. And the people who got it right got a prize.

The prize was a link to the best publicly available swipe file I have ever found. And no, it’s not swiped.co.

In my opinion, the swipe file I have in mind is about 100x better, based on the quality and quantity of ads you can find inside… many of which are only available today as bonuses to expensive copywriting and marketing courses.

Sometimes, I run little contests and challenges like this, as a way to keep my newsletter fun and profitable. If you’d like to try out my newsletter, both to see whether you like the content, and so you can participate in the next little riddle challenge, then click here and fill out the form.

“Good-bye, please don’t cry”: Dan Kennedy and Dolly Parton enforce the rules

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“I cried all night,” Dolly said, “cause I just pictured Elvis singing it.”

Back in 1974, Dolly Parton had a no. 1 hit with a song she’d written, I Will Always Love You. And a year later, she got word that the king himself, Elvis, wanted to record the song.

“I was so excited,” Dolly said.

And then, the night before the recording session was supposed to happen, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told Dolly the deal.

“Elvis don’t record nothing unless we get the publishing rights or at least 50%.”

Dolly cried all night. But she said no. It was her song and it didn’t feel right giving away the rights to it.

​​In the end, Dolly made out all right. I Will Always Love You became a giant hit for Whitney Houston in 1995, and Dolly got over $10 million in royalties — in the 90s alone.

But most songwriters aren’t like Dolly. They give in. And apparently, this kind of thing is a dirty little secret of the music world, according to an article I read in Variety today.

Big stars routinely get songwriting credit — including publishing royalties — for songs they didn’t write or even help write.

But now, a bunch of songwriters are pushing back.

They find it outrageous that they are forced to share a part of their creative ownership with people who were not involved in the creation in any way.

It sounds like a perfectly legit complaint against a perfectly outrageous practice.

But it goes industry to industry, doesn’t it?

Take copywriting.

It’s standard that you write something and hand over all the control to the client.

In fact, if you’re very good and you manage to claw your way to the top, then you can hope to hand over all control of your copy in exchange for a few percent of the revenue it generates.

But it don’t have to be like that.

I heard Dan Kennedy talk about different things he does. How he bakes into his contract that he might later reuse copy that he’s writing for that client. Or that he might use copy on the current project that he wrote for a previous client. Or how he creates templetized copy, and licenses it to clients instead of giving away the copyright.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you to be outraged if you are working the same standard way as every other copywriter. I just want to, as Ben Settle likes to say, give you options for thinking differently.

​​Because the standard way is not the only way it can be. You can create your own rules, and like Dolly and Dan, you can stick to them. And if a potential client doesn’t go for it, you can sing him a bit of Dolly’s song:

Good-bye, please don’t cry
‘Cause we both know that I’m not
What you need…

And then, when the song ends, you wonder what’s next. Perhaps you open up your inbox and read a new email I’ve written, and get some more ideas for thinking differently. Because I have an email newsletter — click here if you’d like to sign up for it.

Crank positioning

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Yesterday, Ben Settle sent out an email with his interview with Ken McCarthy. And in the first part of the interview, Ken says the following:

So my positioning was, I wanted to be the honest broker of information on internet marketing.

And I also wanted to be the guy that you could trust on innovation issues. That if he said something was worth looking at, it was worth looking at. Not worth mortgaging the farm for, but worth taking a look, worth carving a little time out of your week and making sure that you were conversant with it.

And then I also wanted to be seen as a guy that stuck to the fundamentals, and valued the fundamentals, and drilled the fundamentals. Because the fundamentals really are, at the end of the day, what’s going to get you through everything.

I think there’s a fine line, running from Dan Kennedy, through Ken McCarthy, to Ben Settle, following this type of “honest broker” positioning. Dan and Ken and Ben all follow the three points in the quote above.

But there’s another positioning ingredient shared by all these guys. The best way I can describe is they are all cranks, in the various meanings of that word. For example:

“Being offended… hopefully you will be, at some point. I sort of pride myself on it.” That’s from the start of a Dan Kennedy seminar.

Or Ken’s current quest to prove corona is history’s biggest misinformation campaign.

Or Ben’s strategy of repulsion marketing. Ben mocks, shames, and drives away the many potential customers he does not want to serve.

All three of these guys also make a point of being low-tech, both in their marketing and in their private lives. You can only contact Dan Kennedy by fax. Ken started a recent email with, “Let me be clear: I loathe Facebook.” And Ben prides himself on ugly website design and on plain-text sales emails.

It is all just a coincidence?

I don’t think so. Rather, I suspect there’s a certain personality type that gets drawn to “honest broker” positioning… or perhaps the crank persona gives more credibility to people who adopt this position, and that’s why we hear of the cranks.

In any case, this might be something to keep in mind, if you too are looking to position yourself in your market.

On the one hand, this is probably not a position you can hold unless it matches your own personality on some level.

But if you already feel you are the honest broker of information in your market… or, on the other hand, if you have the personality of a crank, and you want to profit from it… then you might consider adopting the other half of this system.

​​With both parts in place, you can be the crusty but credible grouch, spitting and cursing (and making sales) in a marketplace full of crooks and idiots.

But if crank positioning doesn’t suit you, don’t worry. There are lots of other ways to position yourself. This is something I discuss on occasion in my newsletter. In case you’re interested, here’s where you can join.

Obnoxious writing, or, the harsh mathematics of direct response

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Amazing. Free. New. Breakthrough.

Fascinating. Shocking. Secret.

Now.

I’ve started keeping a list of highly inflammatory direct response words.

You can see some of them above. There’s no sense in me sharing the rest. Everybody who is in this business has to pluck these words up for him or hoyself. And then comes the hard part:

You have to actually use them.

I say “hard part” because chances are you are a little like me.

Maybe you find typical direct response writing obnoxious.

Maybe you say, I would never read this, much less buy this “easy genius opportunity.”

Maybe you think you can be the one to talk to people modestly and simply… and convince them with your earnest speech to listen.

Maybe you can.

I certainly cannot.

After years of writing copy for money, the harsh mathematics of direct response is slowly dawning on me.

A typical sales letter goes out to thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people.

If only 98 out of 100 of those people look at your sales letter and say, “Ugh”… then you’ve done good, as long as the remaining 2 buy.

And if a measly 95 out of each 100 people think your writing is obnoxious and repulsive… while those remaining 5 didn’t notice, because you put them in a drooling trance… then you’ve got a ticket to ride.

Speaking of repulsive, maybe that’s what you should focus on the next time you write copy.

​​Rather than trying to appease people who are offended by ugly, hard-hitting, direct response copy… maybe you should actively aim to drive them away. Because as marketer Ben Settle reports:

“In fact, I have found the more I repel the people I don’t want, the more I automatically turn on the people I do. And the more I do this, the more my sales go up. The less I do it, the less my sales go up.”

In closing:

I have an email newsletter. If you are just looking for “swipes,” then subscribing to my newsletter won’t do you any good. Save yourself the effort. However, if you are a business owner who wants to hear what’s working now, at least with the clients I work with… or if you are a copywriter who is interested in those genius secrets of the business… then you may get some value out of it. Here’s where to go to subscribe.