Dan Kennedy

The core idea in this email is not new but that’s exactly the point

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As I sit down to write you this email, an old pop song, the Smiths’ How Soon is Now, is playing loudly in my head.

That’s because earlier this morning, I read about a new AI project, called Stable Attribution.

The point of Stable Attribution is to try to figure out which human-created images were used to train which AI-generated images.

The motivation, according to the Stable Attribution site, is that artists deserve to “be assigned credit when their works are used, and to be compensated for their work.”

That’s a waste of time, if you ask me, and a focus on totally the wrong thing.

A few days ago, a friend sent me an article about guitarist Johnny Marr.

Marr took a few different songs and sounds — most notably Bo Didley and a rap song called You’ve Gotta Believe – and co-opted them. The result was How Soon is Now, which became the most unique and enduring of Smiths’ songs.

Michael Jackson once ran into Darryl Hall in a recording studio. Jackson admitted that, years earlier, he had swiped the famous bass line for Billie Jean from Hall & Oates’s I Can’t Go For That.

Hall shrugged. He told Jackson that he himself had lifted that bass line from another song, and that it was “something we all do.”

Artists and songwriters co-opt and plagiarize all the time. It’s only in exceptional cases that we find out about it.

But this isn’t a newsletter about drawings or pop songs. It’s a newsletter about business, and marketing, and copywriting.

So let me tell you I once heard A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos on the David Garfinkel podcast.

Parris pointed out how a subhead from one of his million-dollar sales letters was the headline of an earlier control sales letter he didn’t write. That earlier headline worked, and Parris knew that. So he co-opted it, or if you like, plagiarized.

Marketer Dan Kennedy once talked about Bill Phillips, the body builder and fitness coach who built an info product empire.

Dan said Phillips is a pack rat who can pull out fitness ads and promos going back a hundred years. Knowing the history of his industry — and co-opting or plagiarizing it regularly — was a big part of the success Phillips had.

Even the core idea of my email today, of plagiarizing for long-term business success, isn’t new. I got it from James Altucher, who got it from Steven Pressfield. Who knows where Pressfield first heard it.

Fortunately, there is no Stable Attribution for human work. Nor should there be.

So my advice for you is to go back. Study what came before you, and what worked. Integrate it into your own work.

Give attribution if you like, or don’t.

Either way, it’s sure to make you more creative, and more successful at what you do.

And if your work happens to be copywriting, selling, or more broadly persuasive communication, then take a look at my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles will show you the work of some of the most successful copywriters in history, Parris Lampropoulos above among them. But not only that.

Copy Riddles will get you practicing the same, so you can co-opt the skills of these effective communicators and make them your own.

Maybe you’re curious about how that might work. If so, you can read more about Copy Riddles, and buy the program if you like, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Tipping outrage and my despicable suggestion

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A few nights ago, I went out for sushi with a friend. At the end of the night, the bill came. We each took out a credit card and split the bill halfway, 40 euro per person.

My friend then took out two one-euro coins and put that down on the table as a tip. ​​Out of solidarity, I reached for my pocket to see if I had any change, but my friend said, “No, no, it’s fine.”

I live in Spain, and the tipping culture here is that tipping is not required or expected. If you do leave anything, it really is “just the tip” and not half the snaking bill.

Compare that to the U.S.

​​I read an article in the AP last week. It said people in the U.S. are increasingly unhappy about tipping.

15% used to be standard once upon a time. Then it inched up to 18%. In most places, 20% is now standard.

Lots of automated registers now prompt you for tips. Plus tipping is spreading in situations where tips weren’t expected before, such as carryout and fast-food counters. If you want to clearly signal you were actually impressed with the food or the service, you will have to leave a 30% tip or more.

Lots of consumers feel this is getting out of control, a kind of highway brigandage at the coffee shop and the rotating sushi place.

On the other hand, you have people in the service industry, the baristas and the waitresses and the cooks, rightly pointing out that tips are how they live. It’s about paying people “what they’re owed,” said one service-industry veteran.

That AP article is worth digging up and reading, because it’s shows a war of different psychological principles — loss aversion, reactance, liking, reciprocity.

But that’s not my point for today. My point is simply that at the end of the AP article, there’s a quote from a consumer who’s complaining.

It’s the company’s job to pay, he says.

That’s foolish. Just the opposite. It’s the company’s job not to pay.

Some companies even advertise good tips in their job listings. “Somebody else will pay you well for doing this job,” they are saying, “but it ain’t gonna be us.”

This might make you feel frustrated as a consumer, or outraged if you work at a tippable job.

And maybe you’re right, whichever side you’re on. But here’s where I will make a suggestion you might find despicable:

Take that frustration and outrage, and instead of stewing there with your arms crossed, channel it into something valuable for you.

​​Get yourself into a similar position to those despicable companies, of not having to pay anything yourself, but passing on your expenses to others.

You might wonder what I’m on about. So let me tell you.

Marketer Dan Kennedy has a story of getting his million-dollar-plus divorce settlement. Dan says:

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I’ve never taken a pay cut. Somebody whacks me with a new tax, somebody else is gonna pay it. I’m not.

Exact same attitude about my divorce settlement. It’s why it didn’t really bother me. I said, I don’t know exactly who’s gonna pay this, but it ain’t gonna be me.

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Dan wasn’t bothered by his divorce settlement because he’s in a position of “income at will.”

In other words, when Dan got the ugly news of the millions of dollars he was suddenly supposed to pay to his ex-wife, he started thinking about creating a bunch of new offers — high-priced seminars, diamond-level coaching, marriage counseling services.

​​And then he advertised those new offers to his list, or as he likes to call it, his herd.

The herd ended up paying for the divorce, not Dan.

So start thinking about how to get yourself into a similar situation.

Because really, the only way to fully protect yourself against inflation… and out-of-control tips… and new tax bills… and ugly divorce settlements… is to put yourself into a position where you don’t have to be the one to pay any of that.

And if you want some free advice on how to do that, you might want to get on my email list. Click here to sign up.

4 stories

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Story 1. John Carlton was interviewing a copywriting client. After hours of ho-hum information, the client casually mentioned how the TorsionFlex Super Saiyan MiracleT golf swing he was teaching was something he learned from a golfer who had lost a leg, possibly in a whaling accident.

​​”Huh?” said Carlton as he leaned in. This turned into John Carlton’s most famous headline:

“Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer Adds 50 Yards To Your Drives, Eliminates Hooks And Slices… And Can Slash Up To 10 Strokes From Your Game Almost Overnight”

Story 2. Dan Ferrari struggled as a copywriter for the first year of his career, only getting work from freelance sites.

​​Things only changed when saw an job listing from the Motley Fool, which I believe he applied to just because it was down the street from where he was living at the time.

These days, he’s known as the number 1, most successful, how-does-he-do-it direct response copywriter out there. ​​

Story 3. Dan Kennedy once had a car repossessed during a seminar he was giving.

​​The seminar was in an office park building with big windows. All the attendees could see Dan go out to the parking lot, knock on the window of his own car, and hand the repo man a $20 tip, as though he was taking the car to get detailed.

4. My mom threw a slipper at me once out of frustration and fear. I was going through a teenage melancholy phase, looking wilted and sad for days, possibly ready for self-harm.

​​My mom kept asking me what’s wrong but I just sighed and turned away. Eventually the slipper came at my head. I managed to dodge it, but it did wake me up.

My point?

I heard recently that door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen were taught to first tell four stories before they go for a trial close.

Now, I’m selling an encyclopedia or an A-Z guide to copywriting. Rather, I’m selling a collection of wisdom that’s been handed from people who made it to the very top of the copywriting mountain.

I’m talking about my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

The three A-list copywriters above, plus me, all feature in the book. No, none of the stories above are in the book. But many others are. In case you would like to read those stories, and maybe obtain some wisdom in the process:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The royal way to grow a list

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Yesterday, King Charles III and Queen Consort Camila went for a drive to Bolton Town Hall in London. Birds chirped, armed guards looked on tensely, and crowds of well-wishers and paparazzi pushed around the fences, trying to catch a geek of the aged couple.

Nothing really remarkable there. It’s just another pebble in the mountain of news coverage about the British royal family over the past year.

The news coverage continues, because people look at the royals as a symbol of something ancient, enduring, quintessentially British.

That’s kind of amazing if you think about it.

Charles III is the fourth English monarch from the house of Windsor, which is only 105 years old. Before that, it was called the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in reference to its original German domains. The name was changed during World War I. The image of a bunch of goose-stepping Germans running the UK was too threatening.

How did the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha get to rule the UK? Well, they replaced another German house that ruled the UK, the House of Hanover.

The history of Europe, and really of the world, has seen this pattern over and over. Conquerors and adventurers, foreign princes and stranger kings, appear from somewhere far away and take control of a large and well-trained population.

I read about this in David Wengrow and David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything. The two D’s say the key is that a population has been well-trained and disciplined to obey rule. Who rules doesn’t matter very much at all.

You might be starting to feel a little uncomfortable, and worry that I’m about to preach anarchy, or talk about political revolution.

Quite the opposite. I’m preaching monarchy, and talking about long-term business stability.

Via your list. Specifically, via growing your list with the best prospects, the kind who will buy and read and do what you tell them to do.

I listened to a Dan Kennedy seminar yesterday. Dan said how his best customers were always the martial arts guys — because they had been trained and selected over years to be disciplined.

I remember when pick-up coach RSD Tyler did a list swap with the dreamy fitness coach Eliott Hulse. Eliott said how the buyers he got from the RSD list were fantastic customers, because Tyler’s whole message was self-improvement and taking responsibility and putting in the work.

I’ve even experienced this same phenomenon myself. Back in 2021, I did a list swap with Daniel Throssell. I couldn’t believe how many sales I got from new subscribers who came from Daniel’s list. And that’s with a hidden sales page I had at the time, and without pitching anything myself. It was simply because Daniel has trained and prepared his audience so well.

So there you go. If you want the best leads and future customers, do it the royal way.

Find a market — or an audience — that’s already been disciplined.

It sure beats the hard work of taking an unruly mass, devising new laws, and trying to beat those laws in over the course of generations.

Ok, so much for monarchy.

Now, let’s talk old-time religion. Specifically, my 10 Commandments book. To find out more about that, or maybe even to spend $5 and get some valuable discipline in return, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

What never to swallow at the start of your newsletter

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No, I’m not talking about swallowing your pride. Read on because it’s important.

​​Last night I was reviewing a newsletter. The newsletter was full of valuable content, but the author didn’t try to sell me on that content in any way. He meant for it to sell itself.

This brought to mind something I heard marketing wizard Dan Kennedy say:

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We sometimes take the attention of the people with whom we communicate with all the time for granted. That they will give us attention because of who we are and our relationship with them. It’s a bad presumption. It was not a bad presumption a decade ago when there weren’t as many of us showing up every day, asking for their attention. But now there’s a lot more of us showing up every day, asking for their attention. And so we gotta earn it, every single time.

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If you’re anything like me, then your brain will try to feed you excuses, all day long, just because it wants to stop thinking. It will say:

“They opted​​ in to my newsletter. They expressed interest. They want to hear what I have to say.”

“They like my persona. They read my emails in the past. They bought stuff from me!”

“​​I’m sure they will read this too. It’s good enough.”

​Don’t swallow your brain’s excuses. ​Don’t take your readers attention for granted. That’s not good enough.

Not if you want the best chance to influence people, to present yourself as an authority, to get your readers to buy or share or do whatever it is you’re after.
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The more closely people read your stuff, the more of your story and your arguments they swallow, the more you manage to spike their emotions in the minutes they spend with your content, the better it is for you. And in a way, for them.

As a Big Pharma salesman might tell you, the most expensive drug is the one that doesn’t work.

And as I, a Big Copy salesman, will tell you, the most expensive 3 seconds for your reader are clicking on your email and skimming straight through to the end because he’s not properly engaged. That’s 3 seconds wasted for nothing.

On the other hand, 3 or 13 minutes reading every word you wrote because you sold it properly ahead of time — that can be both valuable and enjoyable.

So how do you pre-sell your valuable content?

That knowledge is something I don’t pre-sell. That’s something I sell.

Specifically, that’s what I sell inside my Copy Riddles program. In case you’re interested:

Copy Riddles shows you A-list copywriters sell and pre-sell valuable but dry information. But Copy Riddles does much more. It gets you doing the same.

This doesn’t mean you have to go all John Carlton on your newsletter readers.

You can be subtle or savage in the way you pre-sell your content and your information. It’s your choice.

What is not your choice is how people’s brains work, and what kinds of messages they respond to. And the most condensed and powerful way to create messages that people respond to is inside Copy Riddles.

As I mentioned two days ago, this is the last week I am giving away two free bonuses with Copy Riddles. The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until Saturday Jan 21 at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.

After then, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.

To get the whole package:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Barcelona man discovers the secret of how to escape the online rat race

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“It was unbelievable. One day he’s driving around in a rusted out ’68 Pontiac station wagon, living in an uncarpeted house that didn’t even have a color T.V., and struggling to make ends meet like the rest of us. The next day he’s driving in a brand new Lincoln Mark, a brand new Mercury station wagon, a $35,000 GMC motor home, his house is fixed up like a palace, and he’s traveling all over the country.”

This morning I read an old but gold business opportunity ad.

The ad ran across a full page of newspapers, in tightly crammed print. I imagine the entire thing was 3,000 words or more.

This ad is a master class. If you are doing email marketing today, particularly if you sell yourself and your expertise and your authority and your trustworthiness, this ad is worth studying, thinking about, and emulating in your own email copy.

​​You can easily find versions of this ad by googling for the headline:

“Ohio Man Discovers the Secret of How to Escape the American Rat Race”

The Ohio man in question is marketer Ben Suarez. The secret in question is a system Suarez called NPGS.

​​Once upon a time, you could discover the NPGS secret if you mailed a check for $20 to get Suarez’s book, 7 Steps to Freedom.

A little-known fact about me is that I live in Barcelona in a hipster neighborhood called Poblenou.

An even lesser-known fact is that a few years ago, before I started living in Barcelona’s Poblenou, I went on a used-book website and actually bought Ben Suarez’s 7 Steps to Freedom.

I did it because it was one of the books recommended somewhere by Gary Halbert in his newsletter.

Suarez’s book arrived to my house. It is the size of a comprehensive dictionary and weighs as much as a brick. Over many hundreds of pages, it lays out Suarez’s NPGS system — basically how to run a successful mail-order business.

As you can probably guess, I never got beyond the table of contents in 7 Steps to Freedom. I bet that 99.9% of other people who bought this book didn’t get any further.

No matter.

Because as another Ohio bizopp marketer, Dan Kennedy, once said, people want miracles, not how-to information.

So if you want to escape the online rat race of endless content creation that never turns into much cash, here’s the secret:

Give people what they want. Miracles, and not how-to information.

This is why I organized my Copy Riddles program as I did.

Sure, Copy Riddles features some how-to information. That was unavoidable.

​​But the main thing inside Copy Riddles are the repetitive daily exercises, which I claim implant A-list copywriting skills into your brain, will ye or nill ye.

That’s not just an empty claim I’m making. Here’s proof for it, in the words of freelance copywriter Ivan Sršen, who went through Copy Riddles a while back:

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Before John’s Copy Riddles training, I knew about the problem mechanism… and I knew about the solution mechanism. In fact, I knew about around 60% of the stuff he teaches in this course. But I was still like a deer in headlights. Only after going through Copy Riddles… after applying all this that I ‘knew’ in daily exercises, did it all click together. My bullets — and my understanding of copy mechanics — are light years ahead of where they were after a few short weeks.

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If you’d like to experience a miraculous transformation in your understanding of copy, you can find out more about Copy Riddles at the link below.

As I mentioned in my email yesterday, this is the last week I am giving away two free bonuses with Copy Riddles. The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.​​

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until Saturday Jan 21 at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.
​
After then, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.​​​​

To get the whole package:​​

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Dan Kennedy was hoping for a laugh, but when he finished his joke~!

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I was listening to an awkward moment from a Dan Kennedy seminar this morning.

First, a bit of background is in order:

If you don’t know much about Dan, he is a marketer who has influenced more marketers than anybody else.

Dan got his big break back in the 90s, going around the US as part of the Peter Lowe Success Tour.

That was a bunch of famous and influential people — former US presidents, Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, Suze Orman — giving motivational speeches to an audience of tens of thousands, in a different city every night.

At the end of each night, after the famous and influential people had finished their speeches, Dan would get up on stage as the last speaker. He would then deliver a blistering 60-minute standup routine that sold you on buying his Magnetic Marketing product.

If you’ve never listened to Dan’s speech, it’s fantastic. It’s worth searching around the Internet to dig it up.

The thing I listened to this morning was something else – a recording of a $12k/head seminar that Dan gave many years later, to a small group of select customers and proteges.

Dan was talking about the audience for the Peter Lowe Success Tour, and how politically conservative they were. So conservative that when Mario Cuomo, the liberal New York ex-governor, joined the Tour, the audience booed.

So far, so good. At least for Dan’s story.

And then, Dan, who is practiced at selling through humor, shifts into an exasperated tone of voice:

“… Mario Cuomo comes out, and everybody’s booing! By the time he’s done, I’m booing too, cause the schmuck’s thirty five minutes over, and people are streaming out in droves, you know???”

Beat.

Nobody in Dan’s seminar reacts. On the seminar recording, there’s a pause. You can hear Dan swallow hard and then move on to the next bit of his educational material.

That’s an illustration of something I just read in a book called Comedy Writing Secrets. “Humor in front of a small audience is very hard to bring off because each individual is afraid to laugh for fear of being conspicuous.”

Sitting at home and listening to Dan’s presentation, the image of him booing put a smile on my face.

In a large 10,000 person arena, the same bit would almost certainly draw laughs, and maybe loud laughs.

But in a small seminar, made up of 12 or 15 people, all it drew was a moment of awkward silence, and a gulp from Dan Kennedy.

That’s something to keep in mind if you’re ever trying to give a humorous speech.

But the bigger point is that the response you draw is not only a function of your message… of the audience you are talking to… or even your relationship to that audience.

There’s an extra thing, and that’s the context in which you are delivering your message.

Big room, small room, medium room… seminar stage, webinar, bus.

Maybe that idea seems super obvious to you. But the only thing that’s super obvious is that even masters of influence, people like Dan Kennedy, will forget about this crucial element to their own embarrassment and loss.

But enough about embarrassment and loss. Let’s talk about gain instead.

Specifically, my Most Valuable Email training, and some most valuable Dan Kennedy ideas.

In the Most Valuable Email training, I pull back the curtain on my Most Valuable Email trick.

And then, at the end of the training, I give you 10 riddles to ponder. These are valuable and interesting marketing ideas, each of which you can use as a prompt for creating your own Most Valuable Email, and applying the Most Valuable Email trick.

Two of those ideas come from Dan Kennedy. And in typical DK style, they are both very ugly truths, but also very insightful and practical…

You know???

To find out more about MVE:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Income at will

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Tonight, as this email goes out, I will be finishing up the third and final call of the Age of Insight core training.

That done, I still have a few bonuses to deliver.

But pretty soon, I will be finished with everything I promised as part of this offer.

I will have the recordings of all the trainings. With a bit of polishing and tweaking, these will turn into assets I can sell down the line.

I will also have a better and deeper relationship with the group of people who went through Age of Insight, most of whom have bought stuff from me before.

​​If these people got insights from this course, if they got good ideas, if they got value they can use to make themselves more successful, odds are good they will want to come back for more in the future.

A few days ago, Dan Kennedy wrote:

If you’re in a position that at almost any time you can come up with an offer that your customers, clients, patients, donors, followers, or fans list will like, then you have the ability to create income at will.

This position should be a big priority for people to get themselves into. Because in harsh reality, this is actually the only financial security there is. Because one way or another, what you already have can be wiped out. So the only real financial security you ever have is being in the income-at-will position and able to replace disappeared wealth.

I got started with income-at-will very hesitantly last year.

After sitting on the idea of my Copy Riddles program for a few months, I finally got up the nerve to presell it. I then delivered it over the course of a month, while creating it day-for-day.

Then came Influential Emails, also last year. I had the idea for that training one morning. By the afternoon, I had a sales page up and an email went out to drive traffic to that sales page. Again, I presold this training. I delivered it over the next few weeks, and made a nice sum of money as a result.

Next was the Most Valuable Postcard. I sat on that idea for a while, but when I did decide to do it, up went a minimalist sales page. Later that day, a few hours after my one and only email about this offer, I had filled the quota I wanted for this experiment.

Then there was the Most Valuable Email this past September. And then Age of Insight last month. And that brings me to today, and my new offer.

It’s no secret that the reason I’ve been able to create income at will has been this very email newsletter.

I have done precious little to promote myself other than writing a daily email.

I have also done precious little to sell my offers other than writing a daily email.

I’m not telling you anything new here. You probably know the value of email marketing. But the question is not whether you know it.

​​The question is whether you yourself are in that desirable position, where you can write some emails and create income at will.

Enter my new offer.

My new offer is a coaching program, focused specifically on email copy and email marketing. It will kick off in January.

The primary goal for this coaching program is not to make you into the Michelangelo of email copywriters.

The primary goal is to make this coaching program pay for itself, and for much more.

The main mechanism to do that is getting you to send out consistent, interesting, influential daily emails, which you can tack an offer onto whenever you want.

In case you’re interested, the first pre-requisite is to be on my email list. You can sign up for that here.

Business advice I wish somebody had given me seven years ago

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Last year, while writing the sales page for my Copy Riddles program, there came a time in the copy when I had to talk about myself.

I shifted in my seat, coughed a little, and shrugged my shoulders.

“What exactly would you like to know?” I said to the blinking cursor. “I’ve been working as a copywriter for several years now. Each year, it’s been getting better and better. And that’s pretty much it.”

If I ever had a copywriting client tell me something like this, I would get angry. ​​​”Tell me some specific accomplishments,” I would say. “Something soundbite-worthy. You don’t have to have saved the sea cows. It just has to sound good.”

In the end, on that Copy Riddles sales page, I managed to weasel my way out without saying anything about myself — the course is not really about my authority, after all.

I’m not trying to sell you Copy Riddles right here. I’m just trying to share a bit of advice that I wish somebody had shared with me seven years ago, or really, any time before this year. The advice is this:

1. Start a new Google Doc right now

2. Name it “[your last name] – status”

3. Whenever anything even remotely impressive happens to you business-wise, add it to this document right away

And that’s it. But maybe an example will help.

This entire week, I’ve been promoting my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

And it’s been working. The book has sold a few extra copies each day.

As a result, it’s been climbing from its usual place on the Amazon best seller lists. It peaked at one point yesterday, while being ranked higher than both Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters and Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing.

So this is what I added yesterday to my “BEJ status” document:

“My 10 commandments book has been ranked higher among Amazon bestsellers than Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters and Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing.”

You might think this is cheap. You might think it’s transparent. You might think it’s shady.

To which, all I can do is shift in my seat, cough a little, and shrug my shoulders.

The fact is, you might not think you have any accomplishments. But if you make sure you write down every even marginally status-building thing that happens to you, pretty soon you will have a whole encyclopedia of little soundbites that you can feed to clients and customers and prospects.

And who knows, when you look over your growing collection of marginal accomplishments, maybe you will even start to impress yourself.

As for me, I’m gonna keep promoting my 10 Commandments book for a couple more days. Because yesterday, a long-time reader and customer named Gregory wrote me to say:

Okay. I finally bought it. This email got through to me. Not sure why since you’ve mentioned it so many times but there you have it…
Thanks John!

Looking forward to digging into it this week.

Maybe there is still some untapped demand in my list.

And who knows. With your help, maybe I can reach new heights on the Amazon bestseller list — for example, selling better than that clown Malcolm Gladwell, with his stupid Tipping Point. At least for an hour.

In case you wanna help me get there:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Free info on free reports

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Copy Riddles member Andrew Townley takes advantage of the Copy Oracle privilege to ask:

I was listening to a Dan Kennedy program today that got me thinking about all those direct mail “free reports.” I was wondering if you had a source of any guidance on how to build one. I remember Parris describing the process somewhere on a podcast or something, but I can’t find it now.

The background, as you might know, is this:

A-list copywriters like Dan Kennedy and Parris Lampropoulos are experts at selling newsletters. Newsletters are a direct marketing staple because they are great for the publisher. Money comes in like clockwork, on your own schedule, without any added selling of your vague and broad and cheap-to-produce subscription offer.

For those same reasons, newsletters are a suspect deal for the subscriber. Many potential subscribers instinctively feel repulsed at the thought of paying good money, every month, for a “cat in the bag” piece of content, whether they are eager to consume it or not.

Enter free reports. Free reports are one effective strategy that guys like Dan and Parris use to overcome the resistance of skeptical newsletter buyers. The recipe is simple:

1. Go through your past content (newsletter or really anything else)
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2. Find the sexiest stuff. It can either be a single bit of info, or a small number of related items you bundle together.

​3. Put that sexy stuff in its own little package.

​4. Give that package a sexy and mysterious new name.

​5. Repeat as many times as your stamina will allow. I believe one Boardroom promo offered 99 free reports along with a newsletter subscription.

When you think about it, this is really just the same work that a copywriter would do normally. Look at what he has to sell… figure out the sexiest parts of that… highlight it in the sales material, and of course, make it sound as sexy and as mysterious as possible.

And now for the pitch that probably won’t convince you:

I write a daily email newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and persuasion.

But like I said, that probably won’t convince you to sign up.

So let me take my own advice, and offer you a free report when you sign up:

“Become a Repositioning Specialist”

This report shows you how to start a profitable repositioning business, with your own home as headquarters. In case, you want this report, follow these steps:

  1. Click here and sign up to my free daily email newsletter
  2. When you get my welcome email, hit reply and tell me you want the free report