Dan Ferrari

How to get hired without trouble or questions asked

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“Do you have some samples you could send me?”

A few years back, copywriter Dan Ferrari wrote a sales letter for supplement company Green Valley. The sales letter was so successful it sold out the entire stock of Genesis, the supplement Dan was promoting.

But before Dan got hired to do this job, he had to send a few samples to Lee Euler, the owner of Green Valley.

I thought this was interesting. Because Dan was already a very successful copywriter. He had a long list of controls for several financial publishers. I guess Lee, who is an A-list copywriter himself, wanted one final, personal check of Dan’s skills.

Yesterday, I talked about Ogilvy’s famous ad for Rolls Royce.

Well, in the world of direct response copywriting, Dan has Rolls Royce positioning. There are few copywriters out there with his skills and his level of results. That’s why Dan was referred to Lee, who is always looking to hire top new copywriters.

Now here’s how this is relevant to you, in case you’re ever sending over samples to a potential client:

Dan had never written a supplement promo before Green Valley. So he sent Lee some of his earlier financial sales letters. Lee probably looked over these sales letters with his copywriting eagle eye, and he saw what he needed to see. “Looks good. Let’s get to work.”

But that’s Lee Euler, a copywriter with decades of experience, and the guy who wrote The Plague of the Black Debt… and that’s Dan Ferrari, who already had a string of controls at big DR publishers.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

A lot of newbie copywriters obsess over creating a portfolio. “What should I put in there? Which niche to write for? What formats do I need to include?”

My personal opinion is this is waste of time and mental energy. Because when you are new, or just not at Rolls Royce level yet, then your samples should be exactly what the client is hiring for right now. And if you ain’t got that, then write it, then and there.

For example, a couple years back I wanted to get a job writing VSLs in the real estate investing space. I knew a company that was hiring, and for this exact type of copy. So I wrote two new leads for their existing VSLs, and I sent that in. I got hired without trouble, with practically no questions asked.

Thing is, I had already written VSLs at this point, and some were successful. But they weren’t for real estate. I had even written a lot in the real estate space, just not VSLs, and not about investing.

Would those square-peg-in-round-hole samples have gotten me the job? I don’t think so.

​​Maybe this will drive the point home:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rimac comes from the electric engine”

Never heard of Rimac? They are an up-and-coming electric sportscar maker from Croatia.

Maybe one day Rimac will be as recognizable as Lamborghini or Rolls Royce. But today, a headline like that would make most people just say, “So what?”

Because until you become a known brand that people lust after, you have to spell everything out for your potential client or customer. ​​You have to speak to his exact problems… and make the exact promises he wants to hear… in terms that require minimal, or better yet, no thinking from him.

This applies to selling products, and it applies to selling yourself. Don’t expect you will have an understanding and eager Lee Euler evaluating your copy samples.

Instead, g​ive new potential clients no scope to think you are not the person to hire for this job. Even if they know little to nothing about copywriting. Do this, and you will get hired, without trouble, with practically no questions asked.

Finally:

I write an email newsletter about copywriting and, occasionally, about the business of copywriting. In case you’d like to try it out and see if it fits you, you can sign up here.

The secret psychology of giving up

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This is a brontosaurus:

Hello I am Brontosaurus

But let me give you the back story:

Yesterday I saw a question from a struggling copywriter. He says he’s put in the time and effort. But he’s not getting the reward.

He’s not swamped with client work… he’s disappointed by the money he’s making… and he’s not even hearing a kind word or two about a job well done.

This brought to mind a presentation I saw once by billion-dollar copywriter Mike Palmer.

Mike works at Stansberry Research, an Agora imprint. He wrote The End of America VSL, which brought in many millions of simoleons for Stansberry.

So Mike gave this presentation called The Secret Psychology of Becoming a Great Copywriter. The upshot is, there will be times when you feel you suck.

Mike drew a graph to illustrate the natural changes in skill/suck levels. It’s pretty much the brontosaurus up top:

Hello I am Annotated Brontosaurus

Point A is when you get started, full of optimism.

Point B is when you realize it will be harder than you thought.

Point C is the moment of crisis and despair. At this point many people give up.

(I just want to say I am all for giving up. There’s no shame in it if you ask me, and I suspect most people who champion blind perseverance haven’t tried to do much in life. I’ve given up often, and with very few exceptions, I’ve never looked back.)

But if for some reason you don’t give up, then you eventually move to point D. That’s where you improve and rise above your previous level.

This is not a one-time thing, by the way.

It’s happened to me over and over since I started writing copy for money.

For example, last year around this time, I thought I was pretty good at this whole thing. I then joined Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. After getting some feedback from Dan, I realized I still had big things to work on.

A month or two later, deep into a project, the feedback kept pouring in and getting more significant. I thought “Jesus, why do I need this? I’m obviously not meant to write sales copy.”

But I stuck around, finished the project, became better at the craft, and eventually got my rewards.

Like I said, this has happened to me over and over. I expect it will happen again.

Perhaps if you know this, it will make it easier to progress to point D once you hit that hollow, right at the bottom of the brontosaurus’s neck.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps you’ll look up, squint… well, let me stop there.

When I wrote this article and sent it out to my email newsletter subscribers, I ended on a personal note, about giving up. But I limit those things on this public blog. In case you want to get on my email newsletter, where I don’t hold anything back, click here to subscribe.

Persuasion world: Men wanted for hazardous journey

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A few days ago, I was talking to a successful copywriter. He said he had studied Dan Ferrari’s sales letters in detail.

(Dan, as you might know, is another successful copywriter, with a string of big-name controls.)

So I mentioned a presentation Dan once gave, where he broke down one of his most successful promotions. I offered to send successful copywriter #1 this presentation.

But he seemed reluctant. It seemed he had gotten what he wanted from Dan’s sales letters alone… and he didn’t want or need to hear Dan’s take on it.

And you know what? I can understand.

I liken it to going to see a movie versus reading a review of that same movie. The review might be good, might be bad… but even if it was written by the director himself, it’s certainly going to be a very different experience than seeing the real thing.

It won’t stimulate the same random pathways in the brain. It won’t trigger the same emotions. And it won’t allow for much independent thought.

This applies to you too. Right now, you may be reading books… going through courses… skimming emails like this one. Fine. They can give you the lay of the land when you’re new to a topic.

But the map, as they say in NLP, is not the territory.

Somebody else’s second-order interpretation of what persuasion is all about can only take you so far.

​​The good news is there’s a whole wild and dangerous world of TV shows, movies, current events, tabloids, political propaganda, real-life experiences, and yes, even books and articles, just waiting for you to start exploring and asking — why do I think this is compelling?

If you found this argument compelling, you might like my daily email newsletter. Not for any persuasion lessons it might contain… but rather as an example of content that you can dissect yourself. If that doesn’t turn you off, then click here to subscribe.

How to write slowly

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“In ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day.”
— Isaac Asimov

It took me about two hours to finish this post.

I didn’t spend most of that time writing. Instead, I looked over notes for topics I meant to cover but didn’t… I read articles searching for inspiration… I picked up and then put down a book.

The trouble of course was that I had a large block of free time today.

I finished with client work some time earlier… I have a client call later tonight. In between, the only thing I have to do is to write this daily post.

Hence, two hours. To write about 300 words. You might know this as Parkinson’s Law:

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

It’s a problem in my life. And it’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to overbook myself with work — about three times the usual amount — for the coming month.

Because according to marketer Ben Settle, writing lots of words under intense deadline pressure will make you a faster writer. Permanently.

I’ll let you know how it works out. (Although there’s no need to wait for me. It’s something you can try yourself right now.)

Anyways, I’ve long collected copywriters’ advice on how to write faster.

So far, I’ve got direct “how to write fast” tips from Ben Settle (above), Dan Ferrari, David Deutsch, Colin Theriot, and a few others. I’ve also connected some ideas I read from people like Gary Halbert and Gary Bencivenga to the topic of writing faster.

So here’s my offer:

If these tips interest you, sign up for my daily email newsletter. If I share this complete collection of tips, that’s the first place it will go.

The most important “do or die” copywriting skill

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Some time back in the 2000s, Internet marketer Ken McCarthy put on a 3-day seminar titled, Advanced Copywriting for Serious Info Marketers.

This seminar has a kind of cult following in the marketing world today. Some of the most successful copywriters out there — people like Dan Ferrari and Ben Settle — say this is one of the best resources for really understanding what copywriting is all about.

Anyways, during this seminar, Ken asked the participants about the most important “do or die” copywriting skill.

“It’s a mechanical skill,” Ken explained. In other words, he wasn’t talking about secret ways of conducting research… or building desire… or even closing the sale.

All those are important. But there’s a single, mechanical skill that all good-to-great copywriters must master.

If I remember correctly, Ken teased this for over 10 minutes. I won’t do the same, because I feel I’ve teased you enough already. So let me just tell you:

This “do or die” skill is writing bullets.

Bullets? Yes, bullets.

Many sales letters are all bullets. But good bullet-writing skill will also mean you can write great headlines (what is a headline but your best bullet?) and subheads.

​​On an deeper level, being able to write good bullets means you can evoke curiosity in your reader, and focus his attention where you want it to go. That’s something you can use in your body copy too, or even in the structure of your sales letter.

But let’s assume Ken is right, and bullets are where it’s at.

So how do you get great at writing bullets?

Copywriter Gary Halbert had a solution for you:

Find a successful sales letter chock full o’ bullets… then get the book or newsletter or course they were selling… then reverse engineer how the copywriter “twisted” the original content to create the sexy bullet.

Thing is, the golden age of bullet-heavy magalogs has passed. And maybe you’re not keen on going on eBay and hunting for 90’s sales letters and the books they sold.

Fear not.

You can get access to some of the best bullets running today, along with the content that spawned them, for free, and in a pretty entertaining package. I’ll tell you all about it in my email tomorrow.

What, you don’t get my daily emails? Well, if you want ’em, you can sign up here.

What boomers and Tik Tokers crave the most

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A while back, I was listening to a coaching call by top-level copywriter Dan Ferrari. And one of the guys on the call — it might have been copywriter Mike Abramov, I’m not sure — was writing a sales promo for some Agora health affiliate.

You might know how these Agora health promos look: a miracle discovery in the jungles of a remote Pacific island… an FDA conspiracy to suppress a powerful natural cure… long-lost scientific gold uncovered again by accident.

Anyways, the Agora copywriter in question said the following insightful thing:

“People are just really bored, and the one email each day with the curiosity-teasing clickbait is the highlight of their day.”

This ties into something Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief wrote in an email several months. Kevin was talking about the shift from selling to entertaining, and how this is indispensable today as direct response markets shift from the boomer generation to whatever generation comes after the boomers (gen X?).

Kevin says, it’s just as important for a copywriter today to study Quentin Tarantino as to study Claude Hopkins.

I agree. And more people becoming aware of it. But as the Agora copywriter above commented, this is not just if you’re selling to millennials or gen X or whatever Tik Tok-enabled crowd today.

In today’s market, whatever and whoever you sell to, odds are, your prospects are bored. And the sales copy you send them — emails, FB ads, advertorials, long-form sales letters — should be the entertaining highlight of their dreary days. Entertain first, and you might have a chance to sell, too.

And if you yourself need an occasional cure from being bored, I write a daily email newsletter than can help with that. Or it might not. But if you want to give it a try, and see if amuses you to read, you can sign up for a test here.

The occasion of A-list copywriting

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Like Hollywood celebs, A-list copywriters come and go.

Gene Schwartz… Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos…

That’s only natural. People age and the market demands new stars.

But what’s not natural is to have a modern-day A-list copywriter introduce a new insight about copywriting.

After all, pretty much all wisdom we have about copywriting was written down around the time that Marlon Brando was screaming “Stella” and redefining what it means to be an actor.

And yet, these new breakthroughs sometimes happen. Case in point:

Dan Ferrari and his “occasions.”

I’ve written about Dan aplenty in these emails. But the short version of his bio is that he was a top copywriter at the Motley Fool, starting around 2013…

Before going out on his own and becoming an even more successful freelance copywriter.

So let me tell you about one new bit of copywriting wisdom I heard from Dan Ferrari. This happened on a call he did with Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief.

Dan was breaking down his “Genesis” promo. This sales letter beat the previous control by over 300%.

(And if you read my email from yesterday about the fickleness of “beating a control,” let me add that the client in this case was Green Valley Natural Products, which hires the best copywriters and is actually owned by an A-list copywriter, Lee Euler. In other words, that previous copy must have been at least decent.)

Anyways, while talking about this promo, Dan made a small comment, something along the lines of:

“I always look for an occasion or an event to tie my copy into.”

This was something I’ve never heard anyone else talk about. It was entirely new, at least to me. And it took me a while to find out what Dan meant by this.

I guess this occasion stuff came natural to him because of his background in writing financial copy.

All financial promos are sensitive to news and current events, because markets are sensitive to news and current events.

But Dan’s insight was that other markets are the same too.

Your prospects also want to know what the occasion is of your writing.

Are you selling a completely new invention that nobody’s heard of until now? And if not, why are they only hearing from you now, and not five years ago?

This is a question you have to answer for your readers. You have to create an “occasion” for your sales letter.

It might seem like a trivial thing to focus on, but it can make the difference between A-list copywriting and everything else.

For more info on A-lister copywriting tactics, you might like my daily email newsletter.

Copywriting playboys get treated like a piece of meat

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A while back, when there was still such a thing as professional sports, I noticed that the top three or four men’s tennis players all had one unusual thing in common:

They were all in settled, long-term relationships, often with the same girl they had started dating while they were still teenagers.

Further down the rankings, you had tennis players who were known to be playboys. Regardless of their natural talent, these playboys hovered around the top 20, but could never break into the very peak of the sport.

Coincidence?

Probably. But maybe not. Maybe a stable relationship really is crucial for massive success.

Don’t worry. I’m not telling you to go in search of a ball and chain to lock around your ankle. My point is simply this:

When I look at top copywriters — meaning people who get paid millions of dollars a year, with schedules booked up months in advance — they all fall into one of two categories.

One is guys like Chris Haddad or Jon Benson, who got successful promoting their own offers. The other is guys like Dan Ferrari and Stefan Georgi, who worked in-house at a direct response publisher for long enough to get a pile of successes in their knapsacks.

What you don’t see are playboys who came up by bouncing around from client to client. Maybe this promiscuous lifestyle worked many winters ago. But I don’t see it happening today.

Not to say you can’t make good money as a copywriting playboy. It’s what I’ve done in my career. I now make more money for less work than at any job I could have ever held.

But if you want to make it to the top… or if you want to be perceived as more than a commodity service provider… then jumping from client to client is unlikely to get you there. ​​If you want clients to stop seeing you as a piece of meat, you will have to get hitched — either to your own business, or to somebody else’s.

That’s something I’m working on as well right now. If you want to follow how I’m doing that, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.

The naked blog post

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I’m writing this blog post because I want you to click on the link at the bottom.

If you’re reading my blog, I imagine you’ve got some interest in writing, and maybe you even write professionally. If so, you’ve probably found yourself, at least now and then, struggling to get started, or taking too long to finish a solid first draft.

And that’s what the other side of the link at the bottom can help with. It’s a method to quickly produce a first draft, and not just a “shitty first draft,” either. Use this method and you can get going with your writing without procrastination… and produce something that’s 50% of the way you need to go.

Now, if I had to imagine what objections you might have at this point, I would think it’s something like:

* You don’t have time to read another stupid blog post right now

* You don’t really struggle with writer’s block

* You’re dubious about “speed writing” systems

Reasonable objections all. Let me give you my thoughts on them:

* If you really don’t have time, then don’t click the link. But this blog post, which won’t take more than a few minutes to read, could save you hours or days of struggle and frustration in the coming months.

* On writer’s block: I also used to think it doesn’t affect me. I never find myself staring at an empty page. But writer’s block can be insidious. It can transform itself into excess time spent researching… or outlining… or doing other seemingly productive things which really are not. In other words, if you ever took longer to finish a writing project than you wanted, odds are that a sneaky form of writer’s block was part of it.

* You don’t have to be a fan of speed reading, speed writing, or speed chess to use this system. It’s not a matter of getting hyped up, writing at a furious pace, or being sloppy. It’s simply a process to get past the inhibitions in your brain and to start selling your offer.

Like I said, the link below will take you to a simple blog post. There’s nothing for sale and no cost to you except the actual effort of clicking. If you do click but don’t like the blog post, don’t read it. If you do read but don’t like what you’ve read, then don’t apply it.

So there’s no risk. That’s why it makes sense to at least click on the link and see for yourself.

You can even skip the intro of the blog post and jump straight into the how-to highlighted points. That will save you some reading, and you’ll get the gist of this method in just a minute or two.

By the way, it makes sense to read this now if you can. This blog post was originally based on a popular forum entry, which disappeared a while back. I searched for information on this method earlier in the year, and I couldn’t find any. In other words, it’s not certain this blog post will be there if you decide to come back to it in a year or in a month’s time.

Finally, if you need any more encouragement, let me tell you this is a technique that was recommended by copywriter Dan Ferrari. Dan said it helped him write more on a sales letter in an afternoon than he had done in the week previous. If you know Dan, you know he’s very smart and successful, and his recommendations count for something. So in case you’re ready, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/naked

The neverending quandry of direct response ethics

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“‘Children who made fun of me?’ Bastian repeated. ‘I don’t know of any children — and I’m sure no child would have dared to make fun of me.'”

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was The Neverending Story, which the above quote is from.

They made a movie out of the book, but the movie leaves out most of the important stuff. Such as the fact that Bastian (the boy reading the book inside the book) gets sucked into the storyland he’s reading about.

Once there, Bastian, who was fat, clumsy, and unpopular in real life, is transformed into a handsome prince. Even better, anything he wishes for becomes reality.

Bastian goes on like this for a while. He enjoys his new powers, and goes around the world of make-believe, telling fantastical stories.

But then the side-effects of all this wishing become obvious. Each time Bastian makes a wish, he loses a memory. By the end, he can’t remember who he is, what he wants, or how to get back home.

I always thought this is a metaphor for how direct marketing is supposed to work.

First, you massage your reader’s insecurities so he gets uncomfortable without knowing why. Then you get him hot and bothered with a giant promise that fulfills his deepest desires. Finally, you hit him with fantastical success stories, from the 0.1% of people who had the best results using your offer.

At this point, your reader pretty much can’t remember who he is or what he wanted in life prior to seeing your sales page. You can now give him all the legal disclaimers — “results not typical; you’ll have to work hard.” But it won’t matter, because he won’t be able to think logically any more. Any logical thinking will just support his desire to buy your product.

Of course, it doesn’t always work like this. But if it does work, then it seems to me like a pretty sleazy, shady, manipulative way to deal with people.

That’s something I think about on occasion. It doesn’t bother me too much, but it does bother me a bit. And if it bothers you a bit too, then I want to tell you another story:

It’s about copywriter and marketer Stefan Georgi. Stefan recently told an anecdote about one of his successful diabetes businesses.

Now, if you’ve ever read Stefan’s copy, you’ll know it fits the model I laid out above. It’s filled with dramatic life-or-death stories. It pushes emotional buttons hard. It’s over the top.

Anyways, Stefan said that for some reason, he decided to handle the support calls for this business one weekend. In other words, potential customers who were still undecided would call in, and Stefan would answer their questions.

And here’s the kicker:

These potential prospects would call and say things like, “Well, your sales letter sure was pretty over the top… but I found it entertaining. But can you tell me now for real… do you think this supplement really can help me?”

So people fully knew what they were in for. They weren’t really being manipulated… they were being entertained. This echoes something I heard Dan Ferrari say:

“Direct response is a hobby, not just as practitioners but for the buyers as well. The more you play that game, the more fun they have.”

Maybe you buy this. Maybe you don’t. But if you ever find yourself questioning what it is you’re doing with your life, then tell yourself you’re basically providing entertainment for people. And, of course, getting paid well for it.