Claude Hopkins

It drops out the bottom of every sales funnel

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Last summer, I listened to an old sales training by a guy named Fred Herman. Says Fred:

“I believe every sale sort of funnels down this way. You need to have a product or a service. You need to have a customer, of course, to talk to. Then you need to find out what his dominant buying motive is. And then the picture he will buy will drop right out the bottom of the funnel, because people don’t buy products or services, they buy pictures of the end result of that product or service, playing a part in their life.”

This echoes something that the great Robert Collier wrote a hundred years ago in his Letter Book:

“Thousands of sales have been lost, millions of dollars worth of business have failed to materialize, solely because so few letter-writers have that knack of visualizing a proposition — of painting it in words so the reader can see it as they see it.”

And of course, if you need something a bit more modern, there’s negotiation coach Jim Camp, who summed it up in his pithy and dramatic way:

“No vision, no decision.”

“Sure sure,” you say. “Words, words, more words. I need pictures though! Isn’t that what you’re trying to sell me on?”

All right, let’s see if you can picture this:

Yesterday, I told you about Albert Lasker and Claude C. Hopkins.

Lasker, who ran the biggest and most powerful ad agency in the US, wanted Hopkins to come and work for him.

Problem was, Hopkins 1) didn’t want to be in advertising any more and 2) had made millions and didn’t need to work ever again.

Lasker asked Hopkins to meet for lunch at an upscale restaurant.

He played to Hopkins’s vanity, pulling out several pages of typewritten copy for a major new client, the best copy he had been able to get written by the best copywriters out there, which just wasn’t good enough to be submitted.

He made Hopkins an “easy yes” proposition — “just write three ads for us so we can submit it to this one client.”

Crucially — and this is really the picture-within-the-picture I want to give you — Lasker didn’t offer Hopkins any money to take the job.

After all, what’s money gonna do for Hopkins? He’s already got enough.

Instead, as the dessert arrived, Lasker told Hopkins to send his wife to the car dealer so she can pick out whatever car she likes, and Lasker would pay for it.

A bit of backstory:

1. Hopkins’s wife wanted an electric car (crazy thing is, those existed in 1907).

2. Hopkins, though a multimillionaire, was cheap and couldn’t part with the money to buy his wife the electric car. This was causing… tension at home.

You might think, what’s the difference between getting paid outright and getting paid via a free car for your wife?

In theory, no difference.

In practice, all the difference in the world.

And so it is with your prospects and customers too.

You might be promising them money.

That works some of the time. But what works all the time is to promise people what they really want. And that, like old Fred says up top, is a picture of the end result of what they are buying, playing a part in their life.

Of course, that takes some research on your part. Lasker had to do some scheming and digging to find out that Hopkins’s wife wanted an electric car and that Hopkins was too cheap to buy it for her, and that this was the most pressing problem in his life right now. But that’s what made Hopkins yield, “as all do, to Lasker’s persuasiveness.”

And that’s it. That’s all I got for you.

I have nothing to sell you today, at least nothing wonderfully expensive the way I would like.

But if you want more stories that can buy you a car, featuring Claude C. Hopkins and Albert Lasker, can find a couple in my original 10 Commandments book.

I’ve shipped off the new 10 Commandments book to several trusted readers and I am waiting, my cheeks red from holding my breath, for their feedback so I can integrate said feedback and hit publish on Amazon.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read the original 10 Commandments, you can find them all waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

A persuasion riddle featuring the greatest ad man of all time

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I got a riddle for you. A persuasion riddle. It goes like this:

In 1907, Albert Lasker, President at the Lord & Thomas ad agency, badly wanted to hire Claude C. Hopkins, widely believed to be the greatest ad man of that time, and really, of any time.

Problem:

Hopkins 1) didn’t want to work and 2) didn’t need the money.

The background was that, a short while earlier, Hopkins had been publicly disgraced and privately shook up.

He had become a part owner of a patent medicine company called Liquozone. He believed in the Liquozone product — he thought it had saved his daughter’s life. He advertised it very aggressively and effectively.

Hopkins took Liquozone from bankruptcy in 1902 to making a profit of $1.8 million the next year (about $60 million in today’s money).

Over the next five years, Hopkins, who owned a 25% stake in Liquozone, made millions of dollars personally, probably over $100 million in today’s money.

And then some muckracking journalist had the gall to go and write a series of muckracking articles (“The Great American Fraud”) about how patent medicines were all bunk and how Liquozone in particular was the “same old fake” and how, according to lab tests, it was probably more harmful than helpful.

In response to those articles, a bunch of states banned Liquozone, and the federal government set up the Food and Drug Administration, to regulate health products and the claims made about them.

Again, Hopkins, who genuinely believed in Liquozone, was privately hurt. And publicly, being involved with something that was now known as a fake and a scam, he decided to retire to a village on Lake Michigan, determined not to work in advertising no more.

And yet, as Hopkins later wrote, “As far as I know, no ordinary human being has ever resisted Albert Lasker. Nothing he desired has ever been forbidden him. So I yielded, as all do, to his persuasiveness.”

So here’s the riddle:

What did Albert Lasker say or do to convince Hopkins, who didn’t want to work and who didn’t need the money, to come out of his village hiding hole and get back into copywriting?

If you dig around on the internet, or if you get Perplexity to do it for you, you can probably find the answer.

But what’s the fun in that? And what’s the value?

The fact is, if you riddle this out for yourself, you might come up with good ideas of your own.

And when I share the actual answer in my email tomorrow, it’s sure to be much more memorable and useful to you.

By the way, the answer to this riddle applies way beyond convincing A-list copywriters to come work for you. It applies to just about any kind of new business partnership you might want to start.

But more about that tomorrow.

For today, I thought about what offer makes sense to promote, given the Hopkins and Lasker story above.

I realized that once again, it’s Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, which I was promoting extensively last month.

I’m no longer giving away bonuses just for trying out Ronin for free for a week.

I am giving away bonuses if you decide to stick with Ronin past the free trial.

But honestly, the bonuses I’m offering, nice as they are, are but a drop in the total value of what you get if you are actually inside the Ronin community, and if you simply make a point to do something with the resources inside.

If you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

My top 7 marketing books

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I heard once that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Is that true? I don’t know.

But it got me to put together a recommended reading list of my own.

I started with a goal of 10 books — but though I’ve read many more than 10, I couldn’t honestly recommend 10. That’s a good thing for you — less reading to do.

So here are my top 7 marketing books, for you to enjoy, learn, and profit from:

1. The Robert Collier Letter Book, by Robert Collier

This book has it all — wagons of coal, silk stockings, genies in the lamp, free pens, rattlesnakes, dinosaurs. If you only ever read one book about direct marketing, this is my number-one recommendation.

2. Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Tons of other good marketing advice beyond, “Get yourself into a niche of one.”

3. My Life In Advertising, by Claude C. Hopkins

All the wisdom in Hopkins’s vaunted Scientific Advertising, but presented with stories and detail that make it go down more easy.

4. The Adweek Copywriting Book, by Joe Sugarman

Very accessible, usable, and current, even if you never write a full-page magazine ad selling a calculator or UV-blocking sunglasses.

5. Influence, by Robert Cialdini

I wish I had written this book. What more can I say?

6. Start With No, by Jim Camp

You may have seen this negotiation book recommended before by online marketers. It happens a lot. What is it about Camp’s negotiation strategies that could be useful to sales and marketing online?

7. Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath

I read this book only once but it’s stuck. That’s because the authors know what they’re talking about, and because they apply it to their own writing.

Like I said, I’ve heard that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Do they also make for effective email copy? I don’t know.

But I’m willing to test it out.

If you haven’t already clicked away to Amazon to get one of the books above, maybe you will click below to the sales page for my Daily Email Habit service. It sometimes forces even me to write emails I would never write otherwise. Here’s the link if you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Only open this if you play Wordle

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For much of his life Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled with a gambling addiction. He played roulette obsessively, and would lose huge sums of money, and be driven into debt and self-loathing as a result.

I’m no Fyodor Dostoevsky, either in terms of writing or in the depravity of my addictions. Where Dostoevsky wrote Crime And Punishment, I wrote an advertorial for a dog seat belt. Where Dostoevsky played roulette, I play… Wordle.

This email is really only for you if you play Wordle as well. If you don’t, or have never even heard of Wordle, then you are a better or luckier man than I.

Wordle has been a daily addiction for me for the past three years or so, pretty much since I discovered it.

I tell myself Wordle is a tool I use to relax and reward myself for a job well done. But the the fact I play Wordle first thing in the morning, when I’m neither stressed nor when I’ve done any job, well or otherwise, exposes my reasoning as a lie.

The fact is, I like word games, puzzles, brain teasers, clues that tell me if I’m on the right path, the brief flash of insight when a solution comes together.

And then the added features of Wordle — the fact that it’s simple and limited in scope, that there’s just one puzzle a day, that it tells you how many days you’ve kept up a streak of guessing the day’s Wordle puzzle right…

Well, you play also. You can understand me.

Really, Wordle is harmless. It’s also useless, at least in any adult view of the world. But in the words of Claude Hopkins:

“The love of work can be cultivated, just like the love of play. The terms are interchangeable. What others call work I call play, and vice versa. We do best what we like best.”

These be profound words.

The same motivations and drives — love of word games, narrowing in on a solution, a flash of insight when it comes together, a streak you don’t want to break — can be put to some adult use.

It’s why I’ve been writing these daily emails even longer than I’ve been playing Wordle.

And unlike Wordle, these daily emails have been very valuable to me, personally, professionally, and metaphysiologically.

My point for you being, see what you already like to do, and see how you can take elements of that and make it a part of something that pays you.

Nobody was ever going to pay me to play Wordle professionally — THE WORLD IS UNFAIR — but writing daily, in a short format, keeping a streak up, getting some kind of feedback always, is the next best thing, and in some ways, even better.

All that’s to say, if like me you play Wordle, you might enjoy writing daily emails.

You might also enjoy my Daily Email Habit service, because I very consciously introduced elements of Wordle into it — the hints, the streak, the unique once-a-day puzzle.

You can see an example of a daily email puzzle at the page below, or you can sign up to start playing the game yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Mandatory vacation day

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This morning at 9am Barcelona time, I concluded the White Tuesday event that promoted my almost 4-year-old Copy Riddles program.

I ended up making 20 sales of Copy Riddles over 6 emails and 36 hours.

I offered a payment plan as a key part of the White Tuesday promo, which means I collected $2,848 so far (one person paid in full) and will be getting another $17,056 over the next 10 months as the payments roll in, for a grand total of $19,940.

In my small, modest world, with my small, modest list, this counts as a good result — $9,970 per day, $3,323 per email, when all the money is in.

This, by the way, is not any kind of “HOT: Work Just 2 days A Month!” bizopp pitch. In fact, it’s the opposite.

I always do a review for myself of a completed promo and list 10 conclusions. I did the same this morning.

My key conclusion was about the reason why this promo was a success, and that’s because of perceived real value.

Copy Riddles sells for $997. The $2k Advertorial Consult I gave away as a free bonus I really got paid $2k for.

Except, for either of those to really matter, to feel real, it took constant work over months and years leading up to this promo. Selling and promoting Copy Riddles… selling and promoting and delivering my other offers… doing consulting and coaching and client work (back when I still did)… featuring testimonials… talking about case studies… going on podcasts… dripping out my experiences writing advertorials… writing these daily emails, from home, from airports, and at train stations.

A couple days ago, Kieran Drew wrote the following in a review of his own successful promo:

“Sure, courses have little-to-no fulfillment cost. But I now have over 3,000 customers and let me tell you, there is no free lunch. Products are not ‘true’ passive income—especially if you send thank you videos to every customer and reply to every email (I recommend both).”

Not “true passive income” is not a problem for me any more.

Five years ago, I published my 10 Commandments Of A-list Copywriters book. Commandment VI I got from Claude Hopkins, who wrote that love of work can be cultivated, and that for him work and play are interchangeable.

I put that in the book as an interesting and possibly useful idea. At the time, it definitely was not a belief I had managed to adopt. But over the years, maybe because I wrote it down then, it’s gradually taken hold in my head.

Today I work, don’t mind working, and in fact have slowly turned work into a kind of game that I can actually enjoy.

Except even games need a break now and then — body and brain need to rest and recover.

And so I’m taking a mandatory vacation day today. This email is the only thing I will do, besides replying to previous Copy Riddles buyers who asked for the bonuses I offered as part of the White Tuesday promo.

Meanwhile, I can only recommend you read or reread my 10 Commandments book. Looking back over it after 5 years, all the commandments are still supremely valuable. In fact, I only wish I myself would follow them more regularly. Maybe you too can benefit from reading them or being reminded of them? For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Confidence kills

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This morning, I saw a chocolate Labrador run up to a couple at a streetside cafe.

The couple — a man and a woman — were sitting in the sun and having coffee and sandwiches.

At first, I thought the dog knew the couple. He frolicked around them, wagged his tail excitedly, and let them pet him.

But it turned out no. This was their first-ever meeting.

The dog’s owner came up, leash in hand, apologizing to the couple, and tried to collect the dog.

The lab evaded the owner. He ran to the other side of the table. And then he put his entire head on the actual table, right next to the sandwich the woman was eating.

The woman started to laugh. She wagged her finger and in a mock-educational tone, she told the dog, “La confianza mata!” Confidence, as in trust of others, kills. I’m not 100% sure, but I think she slipped the dog a little piece of jamón from her sandwich as the owner yanked the beast away.

Maybe there’s a persuasion lesson in there?

Maybe. Let’s see.

Dogs trust strangers instinctively.

Humans don’t.

“Confidence kills!” That’s what we tell ourselves, our kids, and even those same dogs, though we can’t beat it out of them.

This lack of confidence is a problem, particularly if you want strangers to trust you and to do as you want.

Solution:

Do as the dog did.

Trust people first. Even if they are complete strangers.

This is what master persuaders, the ones who have persuaded thousands or even millions of strangers, have found to work the best. In the words of one such master persuader, Claude Hopkins:

“Ask a person to take a chance on you, and you have a fight. Offer to take a chance on him, and he might slip you a piece of jamón.”

And now, can I ask for your help?

The fact is, I don’t have any offer to promote today. Maybe even tomorrow.

So if you’re okay with it, can I ask you a rather personal question? Here goes:

What’s one thing on your todo list for today that you’re dreading?

It can be big or small. Important or trivial. The only thing that counts is that you’re not looking forward to doing it. ​​

Let me know. Maybe I can figure out or find a solution to help you get rid of this troubling todo item. Thanks in advance.

Exciting update about my No B.S scarcity emails

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Three weeks ago, I wrote three emails making fun of Dan Kennedy’s ongoing, scarcity-mongering “Shutdown livestream” campaign.

At the end of those emails, I included an affiliate link for you to sign up to that campaign.

In part, I did this because the campaign had been effective on me (I signed up both to the livestream and to Dan’s newsletter).

In part, I also did it because I’ve learned a ton from Dan Kennedy, and I would promote his stuff for free, and I have in the past.

But let’s get back to the present.

I sent out those three emails three weeks ago. I had a good chuckle with readers who wrote me back about Dan’s scarcity tactics. And then, I forgot all about it.

Until last night.

Because last night, I got an email with the subject line, “Exciting Update: NO BS Shutdown Campaign Leaderboard Revealed!”

The inside of that exciting email said:

===

Now let’s dive into the current top 5 on our Leaderboard:

1. Tim Hewitt
2. Travis Lee
3. John Bejavoic
4. Frank Buddenbrock
5. Frank Andrews

===

I don’t know if there’s a French-Canadian marketer out there named John Bejavoic. I’m guessing not. Instead, I reckon this is only time #64,171 in my life that somebody’s mangled my last name.

No matter. Because it means that, for the first time in my life, and in spite of my absolute lack of effort and my three tongue-in-cheek emails, I am now in the running of an affiliate competition.

The email described the prizes for the top 3 affiliates:

* Third place is a 6 months free of Dan Kennedy’s newsletter
* Second prize is a box of Dan Kennedy faxes
* First is a ticket to the No B.S. Superconference in May

The first two prizes I don’t need. The third prize I don’t want (who wants to travel around the world from Barcelona to Dallas TX).

And yet…

As I read through this “Exciting update” email last night, I found myself paranoid, spinning around, and looking over my shoulder.

Would somebody swoop in and take my 3rd place position?

I was like a dragon, guarding my wealth, suspicious somebody will take it away from me, and slyly thinking how I could increase my gold stash — even though I don’t really want the gold.

It brought to mind the following passage by another master of direct response marketing, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins wrote a hundred years ago:

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Many send out small gifts, like memorandum books, to customers and prospects. They get very small results. One man sent out a letter to the effect that he had a leather-covered book with a man’s name on it. It was waiting for him and would be sent on request. The form of request was enclosed, and it also asked for certain information. That information indicated lines on which a man might be sold.

Nearly all men, it was found, filled out that request and supplied the information. When a man knows that something belongs to him – something with his name on it – he will make the effort to get it, even though the thing is a trifle.

===

So now I’d like to invite you once again to sign up to Dan Kennedy’s free livestream campaign.

The livestream will happen March 1st, two days from now. It will feature Dan Kennedy, being interviewed in his basement, where he works, by Russell Brunson of ClickFunnnels. The topic will be why Dan has decided to cut off new signups to his No B.S. Letter “for the foreseeable future.”

I’d like to invite you to sign up for this livestream for three reasons:

First, because like I said already, I have learned a ton from Dan Kennedy. Odds are good that you too will learn something valuable, if only you sign up, and even more so if you actually watch the free livestream.

Second reason is that you would help me do better in this stupid affiliate contest, which I am participating in against my better judgment, simply out of loss aversion and blind greed.

Third, because I have a trifle with your name on it.

It really is a trifle. But it’s yours.

​​It has your name on it.

And you can claim it, if only you sign up to the Dan Kennedy free livestream campaign, forward me your confirmation email, and tell me a physical address where I can mail your trifle.

And in the spirit of this entire No B.S. scarcity campaign, I have to mention this named trifle is only for the first 15 people who take me up on this offer.

To get started, here’s the first step, where you can sign up for Dan’s free livestream:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity

An evergreen way to create a spectacle

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At 10 minutes before 12 noon today, I hurried down my street and turned to the Rambla del Poblenou.

It’s Sunday today, and people were out and about, strolling down the sycamore-lined street.

​​As I neared the main intersection in front of the Aliança de Poblenou building, which is the very heart of the neighborhood, the strolling crowds grew more dense and then jammed to a stop.

I stood around for a couple minutes, waiting expectantly.

Then at noon exactly, I saw a group of about two dozen men get in a circle, facing the center of the intersection. ​​All were wearing the same uniform — blue shirts, white pants, black sashes tied tightly around their waists, yellow and red bandanas around their wrists.

The men formed two rows. The ones in the outer row were pushing the ones in the inner row towards the center of the circle. The ones in the inner row were holding up their hands into a kind of team salute.

And them, four other men started climbing up — first up the backs of the outer row men, then over the inner row men.

The new climbers scrambled onto the shoulders of the inner row and then stood up, their arms on each other’s shoulders for balance.

Meanwhile, one more set of four was already clambering up the backs of the people on the first storey… up onto the shoulders of the men in the second storey… and then standing up to form a third storey.

This repeated until the team had formed a human tower, six storeys high, with men at the bottom, young women occupying the middle storeys, and kids wearing helmets at the top.

It’s a Catalan tradition, the castell. Since this weekend is the Festa Major de Poblenou, the yearly celebration of the neighborhood, it was a good time to perform the castell.

Today’s performance reminded me of two things:

First, I thought of Harry Houdini, dangling upside down from the building of the town’s main newspaper at 12 noon and writhing to escape a straightjacket… and second, I thought of Claude Hopkins, dreaming up the world’s biggest cake on the fifth floor of a newly opened department store in Chicago.

In a word:

I thought of spectacle, which happens to be one of the more valuable marketing skills you can have.

So how do you create spectacle?

Some of it is operational. Again, today’s castell happened on Sunday at 12 noon, on a central intersection, and was well advertised. A spectacle is no spectacle unless there are people around to see it.

But once you take care of the operational stuff, you still have the “content” of the spectacle.

How do you do that? How do you create something spectacular in content?

​​I will only point out the obvious from today:

Imagine two storeys of human beings… maybe three.

​​Ho-hum.

But six? And kids up top, 30 feet in the air, looking mildly terrified as the whole thing sways and shivers under the human tonnage?

If you think about that a bit, you will be able to extract a reliable, evergreen way to create the intrigue necessary for the content of a spectacle, which will work even if you’re not Catalan and don’t have a team of castellers to form a human tower.

But on to my offer:

If you want me to spell out this way to create intrigue, you can find it inside Round 3 of my Copy Riddles program. And you can find many more such ways.

Because Rounds 3-6 of Copy Riddles are actually all about creating intrigue.

It takes that many rounds, because this is a big part of what marketing and copywriting is. Most things are not spectacular on their own. It’s the marketer’s or copywriter’s job to take mundane elements, combine them in predictable ways, and create something sexy and new and intriguing.

If you go through Copy Riddles, you will start to exercise your own spectacle-conjuring faculties.

​​Plus, you will see how some of the best copywriters in the world dun it, and learn a thing or six from them.

​​For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Sexy firefighters running around for nobody’s entertainment

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It’s 8:45am as I start writing this email. Right now, off my balcony, I can see a tremendous show.

I live next door to a fire station, and the firemen are doing a public demonstration on the street in front of the station.

​​They are dressed up in their sexiest firefighting suits and they are running around two smashed up cars, one of which is burned to a crisp. The cars were placed there earlier in the morning, inside of a fenced-in area, so the firemen could show how they cut a car open and rescue somebody inside.

Like I say, it’s a tremendous show. Spectacular. My 6-year-old self would have given up a year of eating KitKats in order to see it.

And yet, as I watch this show off my balcony, there’s a total audience of about a dozen adults gathered on the street.

I mean, it’s 8:45am. People are either at home or on their way to work or stuck in the prison of school. Besides, it’s not a busy street. And as far as I know, this demonstration was not advertised anywhere — again, I live right next door.

You’ve probably heard the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins said, “No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”

True, but:

The most famous example of a dramatic demonstration was Elisha Otis. Otis changed the landscape of American cities when he demonstrated his crash-proof elevator — to the masses milling about the New York Crystal Palace Exposition, which attracted 1.1 million visitors.

When Claude Hopkins himself created the world’s largest cake to promote Cotosuet, a kind of early margarine, he made a deal with a giant new department store which had just opened in Chicago.

​​The cake would go smack dab in the middle of the grocery department on the fifth floor. ​​Hopkins then ran big ads in all the Chicago newspapers to advertise the fact.

​​Over the course of a week, 105,000 people climbed the four flights of stairs to see that cake.

And when master showman Harry Houdini did his straitjacket escapes, while hanging upside 150 feet in the air, with only his feet tied to a pulley on the roof of some building, he made sure to hang off the building of the town’s main newspaper, guaranteeing a front page story the day before his show. Houdini did all these public escapes at exactly 12 noon, when lunchtime crowds could assemble.

Point being, as Gary Halbert might put it:

Advertise your advertising.

But maybe you say, “Yeah yeah but how? How exactly do I advertise my advertising?”

I gave you three examples right above. If that ain’t enough, here’s a fourth:

The waiting list for my future group coaching program on email copywriting. The waiting list serves as a waiting list, for sure. But it also serves as advertising for the actual advertising I will do when I do make that group coaching available. Very meta.

If you are interested in writing emails that people actually like reading and that they actually buy from, then you might be a good fit for my future group coaching. Or you might not. ​​In case you’d like to find out more about it, the first step is to get on my daily email list. Click here to do that.

My 11-inch Stonehenge now for sale for $12.69

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The similarities are uncanny:

On the one hand, you have the members of Spinal Tap, the hard rock bank, standing on stage, cowls over their heads, smoke billowing around them, eerie lighting from underneath.

​​They are supposed to be druids. As a mysterious guitar riff plays, a reproduction of one of the Stonehenge pillars is lowered onto the stage.

The pillar was meant to be monumental — 11 feet high. Except, due to a typo in the blueprint, the pillar is only 11 inches high. It’s lowered onto the stage, and is below the knees of guitar player Nigel Tufnel.

And similarly, this morning:

You have me, cowl over my head, lit up eerily from underneath, laughing a villainous laugh, going into my Kindle publishing account and raising the price of my 10 Commandments ebook from $4.99 to $200 — as high as Amazon will let me.

“What a spectacle,” I exclaim in triumph. “The whole Internet will soon be talking about me and my $200 40-page Kindle ebook.”

And then, a few minutes later, I go on Amazon to see my 11-inch Stonehenge lowered onto the stage:

Digital List Price: $200.00
Kindle Price: $12.69
Save: $187.31 (94%)

It turns out that, even if you set a ridiculously high price for your Kindle ebook, Amazon won’t actually honor that. They will sell your book for what they like, not for what you like.

I guess there are many lessons to draw from this.

But for today, I just want to say this is a fitting example of the chasm between spectacle conceived and spectacle delivered.

Lots of business owners think their marketing stunts are groundbreaking, terrific, sure to go viral among prospects and non-prospects alike.

The reality is an increase in price from $4.99 to $12.69.

Oh well. It’s just an opportunity to learn something and try again, with some new sensation. Because what else is there?

I’ll leave you with the following story from the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins, after he first tried and failed to make it as a marketer in Chicago:

===

That night after dinner I paced the streets. I tried to analyze myself. I had made a great success in Grand Rapids; I was making a fizzle here. What were the reasons? What was there I did in the old field which I could apply to Swift & Company’s problems?

At midnight, on Indiana Avenue, I thought of an idea.

===

Hopkins realized that in Grand Rapids, he had created sensations. So his new idea was to create the largest cake in the world to advertise Cotosuet, a margarine sold by Swift & Company.

Result?

105,000 visitors to see the world’s largest cake… thousands of new Cotosuet buyers… and the start of a very long, very successful, and very influential advertising career for Claude Hopkins.

That’s a valuable Claude Hopkins lesson. But not as valuable, in my opinion, as the Claude Hopkins lesson I write about in Commandment VI of my 10 Commandments book.

You can find that, along with a generous discount that Amazon has decided to provide for you, on the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments