FARM Marketing Agency

How to completely dismantle your pre-talk nerves

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A couple days ago, a new Amazon review popped up for my “10 Commandments of Con Men etc” (5-stars; “Here’s why you should buy two copies…”).

That review came from Matt Cascarino, who is the chief creative officer at FARM, a marketing agency that’s had among its clients the American Cancer Society, the SPCA, New Era (the company that makes Major League Baseball’s official caps), and Kelley Blue Book.

I know Matt reads my emails and I have interacted with him before, so I wrote him an email to say thanks for the nice review. To which Matt responded with an even better testimonial:

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I just got home from a new business pitch where I worked SIX commandments into my 18 minutes of material. Specifically, “commit to the bit” completely dismantled my typical pre-talk nerves.

I genuinely enjoy presenting, but your book helped me be more methodical when mapping out my talk.

Thanks for reaching out. Your book is insanely good and worth every hour you poured into it.

And no, your mom didn’t tell me to say that.

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I’m about to give you a link to my 10 Commandments book in a bit, and if you haven’t yet read it, maybe Matt’s experience and recommendation will convince you to do so.

But before you go, here’s a tip I learned early in my email marketing career, which I didn’t realize the full power of until last year:

It’s okay to email people one-on-one.

That might seem like a particularly stupid point to make, but the fact is, having an email newsletter does something to the brain, and many people, myself included on occasion, start to think that the only way to reach out to people who have signed up to your newsletter is via broadcast emails, preferably ones that start with “Dear Friend.”

No.

You can write people on your list one-on-one, over and above broadcast emails.

Again, that might seem super obvious. What is less obvious is that I’ve used this strategy to make valuable connections with prospects right when they sign up to my list… to drive in sales that would never have happened otherwise… and to get nice extra testimonials like the one that Matt gave me (which my mom confirms she had no part of).

And now, as promised, here’s my new 10 Commandments book, to help you dismantle your pre-talk nerves, or take away the sting from objections to your offer, or hide a secret in plain sight:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts

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At the start of this year, I got a message from Matt Cascarino. Matt is the chief creative officer at FARM, a marketing agency that’s had among its clients the American Cancer Society, the SPCA, New Era (the company that makes Major League Baseball’s official caps), and Kelley Blue Book.

Matt had been going through my Copy Riddles program. And he wrote to say:

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Hey, John…

Bluntly, Copy Riddles is kicking my ass. But in a good way.

Despite my bullets missing the mark in the first nine rounds, I’m learning a ton and referring back to the material to craft sneaky-good bullets for my own communications.

It wasn’t until Round 10B that things began to click. See my three bullets below and the A-listers’ efforts after that. I laid an egg by overthinking #3, but I’m pretty happy with my first two.

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Below this message, Matt had pasted three of his sales bullets that he had written recently.

I took a look.

His bullets were great. Whatever he was doing to learn how to write bullets — hmm, I wonder what that could be — it was working.

For a while now, I’ve been beating on my tin pot and saying to anyone who would listen that sales bullets are the essence of effective sales copy. I’ve also been saying that bullets are as relevant today as they were when Gary Halbert and John Carlton wrote entire sales letters that were really just a pileup of sexy, bizarre, fascinating bullets.

But you might be skeptical when I promote the idea of learning to write bullets, since I sell a program on writing great bullets.

Fortunately, just yesterday (thanks to Thom Benny) I came upon a relevant passage from a well-known guy in this field, Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy. Eddie wrote:

“If you can write great bullets, you can also write great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts.”

So there you go. Learn to write great bullets, and most other copywriting skills simply fall out as a side-effect.

As for how to write great bullets:

Copy Riddles is in all immodesty the best program to learn to write great sales bullets.

That’s not because I created Copy Riddles.

It’s because Copy Riddles doesn’t just tell you stuff.

Instead, Copy Riddles can do to you what it did to Matt. Get you practicing in a safe and controlled environment… correct you when you are not doing well enough… and within a matter of a few weeks, have you writing bullets that Halbert himself would be proud of.

For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr