Gary Bencivenga

Shorthand and shortcut in direct response copywriting

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Imagine the year is 1999. You are a dentist named Kurt, living in a small town in Pennsylvania.

One beautiful Saturday morning in May, you walk out to your mailbox, and you find a letter. You open it up to see a big headline that reads:

“There’s a new railroad across America”

“And it’s making some people very rich…”

Pretty intriguing, right? So you start to read.

The letter tells you how railroads made huge fortunes in the 19th century. But bankers were afraid to invest, so it was small, independent investors who connected America by rail — and got filthy-as-Johnny-Rotten rich in the process.

Finally, the letter explains what it’s selling:

A few companies are laying down a fiber-optic network to connect America by Internet in the 21st century, much like the railroad connected it in the 19th century. People who invest in the right companies have the chance to get rich like 19th-century railroad barons. Do you want to be among these shrewd investors?

Plenty of people did, back in 1999, when Porter Stansberry sent them this letter to launch his newsletter.

But imagine if Porter had written a slightly different letter. Instead of talking about a railroad, imagine he had used the headline:

“There’s a new goldmine in America”

“And it’s making some people very rich…”

This is pretty similar to the original. Another metaphor. Would it work just as well?

It’s unlikely. Here’s a relevant quote by one Linda Berger, a law professsor at UNLV:

“A reader who is asked to interpret a novel metaphor will be engaged in the creation of meaning, while the reader who is confronted with a conventional metaphor will do nothing more than retrieve an abstract metaphoric category.”

Stansberry’s “railroad” is a metaphor for an investing opportunity. Odds are, you’ve never seen this metaphor before.

A “goldmine” is also a metaphor for an investing opportunity. Odds are, you’ve seen that plenty of times before.

And that’s the difference Berger is talking about.

When you give people a novel metaphor, they start turning it around in their brains. They map aspects of the metaphor to their situation. So “railroad” becomes “Internet”… “tracks” become “fiber-optic cable”… “independent 19th-century investor” becomes “me.”

But what if you give a reader a conventional metaphor like “goldmine”? If Berger is right, and I suspect she is, then the reader says, “Oh, they must mean this is a big investment opportunity.” And if that turns your reader on, then he continues to read.

In other words, a novel metaphor is a shortcut between where your reader currently is… and where you want him to go mentally.

A conventional metaphor is shorthand. It can be useful to quickly express a concept in a few words. But it’s not gonna create any new insight.

Remember my post from yesterday? It turns out both Gary Bencivenga and Mark Ford were right. Cliches have their uses, and their limitations. And now you know why — and when to use shorthand, and when to create mental shortcuts.

Speaking of shortcuts, I write a daily email newsletter about persuasion. The way to sign up for it is here.

Cliches: Shooting fish in a barrel? Or yourself in the foot?

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Here’s a tough nut to crack:

Gary Bencivenga was a collossus of direct response copywriting. His sales letters made his clients hundreds of millions of dollars. On the topic of cliches, Gary had the following to say:

“I love clichés, and you should too! They are clichés precisely because everyone already believes them, so using them gives your copy greater credibility.”

Now here is a second quote, this one by Mark Ford. Mark is also an expert copywriter and a very successful marketer. Among his other ventures, Mark helped grow Agora from an $8-million-a-year company to a billion-dollar company. About cliches, Mark once wrote:

“Although everyone can relate to these expressions, they’ve been said so frequently that they’ve been stripped of their power. They no longer communicate profound ideas. And they don’t inspire people intellectually. And that’s why cliches are killers in direct mail. They make your copy seem obvious and predictable. […] Remember, as a copywriter, you’ve always got to keep your prospect from getting ahead of you. If he can anticipate what you’re going to say, he’ll assume he knows what’s coming — and you’ll lose him.”

So who’s right?

The most successful direct response copywriter of all time?

Or the direct response marketer who has overseen more promotions than probably anybody else?

Not to beat a dead horse… but like most things in the universe, the question of cliches is not simple or one-sided. Cliches have their place. But they also have their limitations.

I know that’s clear as mud. So I’ll give you the latest research on what cliches can do — and cannot do — in my email tomorrow. If you want to get that info before anybody else, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.

The persuasion moral of the cock and the jewel

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Let’s start with a short story:

“A COCK, scratching for food for himself and his hens, found a precious stone and exclaimed: ‘If your owner had found thee, and not I, he would have taken thee up, and have set thee in thy first estate; but I have found thee for no purpose. I would rather have one barleycorn than all the jewels in the world.'”

If the old English puts you off, I can understand. And I’m sorry. Please don’t keep reading in that case.

If you’re still with me, what would you say is the moral of this story? Think about it, and we will get back to it in a second.

Meanwhile, let me tell you this is one of Aesop’s fables.

Aesop’s fables have been used for thousands of years to give pithy illustrations to situations we’ve all experienced but we don’t have a good and short name for. Like sour grapes. Or the boy who cried wolf. Two more of Aesop’s fables. I bet you know what those two mean.

But what about the cock and the jewel above? To start to answer that, let me first share a quote with you from a book I’m reading about analogies, written by one John Pollack, and titled Shortcut:

“The degree to which an analogy is or is not ‘accurate’ in a given circumstance is irrelevant, it is the feelings and ideas they evoke that makes them so powerful.”

Fact is, we humans love stories and analogies and fables so much that we are really not too critical about them. We accept the implied meaning and we take it for granted.

Of course, that’s good news for persuaders, influencers, and manipulators of all stripes. As one magician of persuasion, Gary Bencivenga, wrote a while ago:

“This process of transferring the qualities of one thing into another takes place instantly, bypassing critical analysis and resistance. All you do is compare A to B in an effective way and voila! your point is made instantly without disagreement.”

There’s good science behind why this is so, but I won’t go into that now, because I am so concerned with the cock and the jewel.

What does this fable really mean?

The best I can do is to point you to an article titled “The Moral of the Story.”

It was written a couple years ago by an actual poet named Anthony Madrid. If the mention of poetry scares you, as it scares me, then I want you to take a deep breath and relax. Because Anthony Madrid’s articles are all easy to read and fun, and they are mind-opening if you’re interested in language.

​​So here’s “The Moral of the Story,” which explains the moral of the “Cock and the Jewel,” or rather, the half dozen contradictory morals that have been scratched up over the centuries:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/21/the-moral-of-the-story/

Shutting the drawer on the Rule of One

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“One good idea, clearly and convincingly presented, was better than a dozen so-so ideas strung together. That rule made a difference. When we obeyed it, our essays were stronger. When we ignored it, they were not as powerful as they could have been.”
– Michael Masterson

I first read about the Rule of One in Michael Masterson and John Forde’s Great Leads. You get a feel for the rule in the quote above. In a nutshell:

Focus on one idea, one emotion, one problem — not a dozen.

I read Great Leads early in my copywriting education, and the Rule of One sank deep into the fresh soil of my newbie brain. I’ve been following this rule ever since. And here you are, reading what I write.

Only one problem though.

Even though Michael Masterson says his favorite essays and stories all follow the Rule of One, I can’t say the same. In fact, I can think of lots of great content that looks and reads like a grocery list:

– James Altucher’s post “11 or 12 Things I Learned About Life While Daytrading Millions of Dollars”

– Dan Ferrari’s email “35 direct response lessons from 35 years on Earth”

– The Every Frame a Painting video “Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement” (which covers five ways that Kurosawa used movement in his shots)

But you might say, those are all examples of content, not sales copy. All right then, here’s a relevant quote from Gary Bencivenga about sales copy:

“I know this sounds like heresy, but I’d much rather have in a good direct mail package three or four or 10 good reasons to buy, than to have to sacrifice nine of them in favor of the one USP. The USP really can be misapplied to direct marketing where you have the luxury of closing the sale on the spot and can give one dominant reason to buy but also seven or eight other reasons. You don’t have to abide so religiously to a single Unique Selling Proposition.”

Maybe I’m simply misapplying the Rule of One, or maybe I don’t understand what it really says. And I do think there is value in focused writing.

But for me personally, I am moving the Rule of One from the “rule” drawer and into the “tool” drawer. Focusing on just one idea can be useful in a given situation… but it’s not something to obey blindly. Perhaps you’ll consider whether this makes sense for you too.

Anyways, if you’re interested in reading James Altucher’s post above or watching that Every Frame a Painting episode, both are easy to track down on the Internet.

Not so with the Dan Ferrari email. Dan doesn’t archive his emails anywhere. So if you want to get them when he sends them out, you’ll have to be on his list.

And even then, you might have to wait a while, because Dan emails very rarely. (I guess he’s too busy counting all the zeroes on his royalty checks.) But when he does send something out, it tends to be great, like the “35 lessons” email above. So if you want to sign up to Dan’s list so you don’t miss his next (sporadic) email, here’s where to go:

http://www.ferrarimedia.com/

A non-tactic for making friends at marketing conferences

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One of my todos for 2020, along with losing 80 pounds, developing a magnetic personality, and writing my first novel…

Is to go to a marketing conference.

All the big names say you gotta do it. It’s where relationships are made… it’s how you meet the top clients… and if you’re serious about copywriting, it’s supposed to pay for itself.

So I’m putting together a list of such events, and I’m steeling myself to go. I say steeling, because my image of how conferences work isn’t pretty:

A bunch of hungry, pushy, teething pups, all pressing forward to grab a nipple on the tired bitch’s teat.

If that’s how you imagine marketing conferences as well, then I wanna tell you a story.

I heard it today while listening to a podcast episode where Kevin Rogers (of copychief.com) interviewed Dan Ferrari (a top copywriter).

At the time of this interview, Dan had only been copywriting for 3 years. And yet, he already had a string of controls for the Motley Fool, and he had made connections with some of the biggest names in the industry.

Such as for example, at Brian Kurtz’s Titans of Direct Response in 2014. This event featured a bunch of copywriting and marketing legends, including Gary Bencivenga, Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham… the list goes on.

On the first day, Dan (Ferrari) found himself seated all the way in the back of the room, one table away from all the speakers.

When the break came, the whole room erupted as everybody pushed to the back to try and get a word in with one of the celebrities.

As the smoke cleared, Dan spotted a woman sitting meekly by herself. And rather than trying to join the feeding frenzy, he started talking to her.

She wasn’t a marketer.

She wasn’t a copywriter.

In fact, she was only there because her husband had to come.

So Dan and she had a nice conversation. At the end of it, her husband came over. She introduced him to Dan.

And that’s how Dan met and started a friendship with Gary Bencivenga.

Now, I’m definitely not telling you this as a manipulative tactic for worming your way into the inner circle of big players you cannot reach otherwise.

I just want to suggest (to you as well as to myself) that going to a conference and having normal, human-sized conversations, can be productive and useful, even in such a seemingly competitive environment.

By the way, if you too are thinking of going to a marketing or copywriting (or other) conference in 2020, let me know. Maybe we’ll be at one together, and I’d love to meet you in person.

Copywriting for cavemen

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A while back, some scientists at Cambridge University studied a bunch of hunter gatherer tribes, and they came up with an inspiring conclusion:

Hunter gatherers do not work very hard.

In fact, when you add up all the hunting and gathering they do in a typical week, it adds up to about 20 hours.

Compare that to the typical work week of a human being in agricultural society (30 hours) or in an industrial society (40+ hours).

The point being that maybe we’re not evolved to be all gung-ho about non-stop sweat and toil.

And so if you feel a little lazy sometimes, blame it on tens of thousands of years of evolution that our ancestors spent hanging around caves and watching the caveman equivalent of Netflix.

Now, here’s a bit of good news.

If you aren’t all that crazy about long work—weeks, then copywriting might be a good career choice for you.

Some of the top copywriters out there — including Gene Schwartz, Gary Bencivenga, and Parris Lampropoulos — have stated that a good day for them consists of three hours of solid writing.

Pretty cavemannish schedule.

Plus it gets better.

If you’re easily distracted on top of being a little lazy, you’ve got an additional leg up (three legs down?) on all those other monkeys who want to write successful copy.

Because much of copywriting — 60% according to top copywriting coach David Garfinkel — often goes to research.

Ie. reading.

Following random links.

Kicking rocks around.

And looking for that great idea that will help you sell this weeks copy assignment.

So maybe you’re wondering where I’m going with this.

And it’s simply to give you a bit of encouragement in case you’re wondering whether you have what it takes to be a copywriter.

Odds are good that even the things that you might blame yourself for — such as apparent laziness and distractability — might help you in your journey to get to that top level of marketing and writing copy, if you know how to use them.

Of course, there are lots of other things you’ll need as well.

So if you have questions about succeeding as a copywriter, and if you want my opinion on the steps you need to take besides not working very hard and clicking on lots of seductive links, here’s where to go:
https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

2 outs, bases loaded, Gary Bencivenga steps up to the plate

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It just wouldn’t sell.

Back in the 90s, Rodale Publishing was promoting a new book called New Choices in Natural Healing, a kind of paperbound Mercola.com.

Rodale had two separate creative teams write copy for it.

One of the copywriters came up with a sales letter.

It bombed.

The other copywriter came up with a magalog.

This also bombed.

So was it time to quit? Of course not. The inning ain’t over until you have three outs, and Rodale only had two ugly strikeouts so far.

But where to go for a pinch hitter at this all-important moment in the game?

Well, the guys at Rodale decided it was time to bring in the biggest hitter of them all:

Gary Bencivenga, then one of the hottest and winningest copywriters in the business — and today a legend who’s often called “America’s greatest copywriter.”

Anyways, Gary took up the challenge.

He did his research. He talked to the guys at Rodale. And — I assume — he looked very carefully at the two failing promotions that preceded him.

And then he stepped up to the plate, dug his cleats into the dirt, and smacked that New Choices in Natural Healing promotion — not just into the bleachers, not even out of the park — but across the adjoining street and through the window of an apartment where an aging bachelor was making a TV dinner for himself.

In plainglish, New Choices in Natural Healing became one of the biggest promotions in Rodale’s history, and one of the biggest successes of Gary Bencivenga’s career.

But before you get carried away, here’s a warning to you:

Not every project actually deserves three outs.

And not every dying or unsellable product deserves ever-more-elite copywriters to go to bat for it.

In other words, there were some unique conditions in the Rodale promotion that made is so Gary + New Choices in Natural Healing could actually be a success.

If you’ve got an offer, and it’s not doing well, and you’re wondering whether to kill it or to try yet another marketing approach, then I might be able to help.

I can share what the “Rodale conditions” for success were, and help you figure out how your offer stacks up to them. There’s only one condition I make for the help I’m offering: You have to sign up for my email newsletter before you contact me and ask me for help. Here’s where you can do that:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

How to slowly become an A-list copywriter

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Gary Bencivenga, who is often called the greatest living copywriter, didn’t start out so great.

In various places, he’s admitted that he was quite mediocre for a good number of years.

So how did Gary rise to the very top, and make himself millions of dollars in royalties and fees in the process?

Well, he got better.

Much better.

Very slowly.

In fact, one inspiring piece of advice from Gary B. is to simply make yourself 1% better as a copywriter every single week.

How to do this? Here are a few ideas, all of which I personally practice:

First, read. About marketing, copywriting, or persuasion. (Right now, I’m reading E. Haldeman-Julius’s The First 100 Million.)

Second, write. For clients, and for yourself.

Third, spy. Each day, read one successful sales letter for a few minutes. Spend another few minutes hand-copying some other ad.

Do all this every day,  and you can reasonably say you’re getting a 1% boost in your copywriting skills every week.

And here’s the thing:

1% a week compounds.

So at the end of the year, you aren’t just 52% better… you’re 68% better. At the end of 2 years, you’re 181% better. And at the end of 5 years, you become so valuable that the sun itself starts to melt and implode when it catches a glimpse of your skills.

Or not. But if you get 1% better each week, and you keep it up, you will eventually become one of the very best in this field.

But you do have to get started.

Because this compounding thing works best when you give it time. And every week you miss will cost you big a few years down the line.

And here’s one last tip:

If you’re fairly new to copywriting, it’s possible to get better much faster than 1% a week. I’d estimate about 1,000% in 60 days’ time.

Specifically, I’m thinking of CopyHour, a program which combines all 3 of the steps I’ve listed above.

In case this is something that interests you, better act fast. And not only because of compounding. Enrollment for CopyHour is currently open, but it will be closing at the end of this weekend. Here’s the link for more info:

​http://copyhour.com/​

How to outguess “America’s greatest copywriter” for $100

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During his famous farewell seminar in 2006, Gary Bencivenga ran a “Pick The Winner” contest.

He’d show two different headlines or magalog covers and ask the audience to choose which one did better in a direct test. (Example: “HE PROVED IT to millions on PBS television…” vs. “Deadly artery plaque dissolved!”)

The interesting thing was that Gary himself admitted he wasn’t good at picking among these competing headlines.

Let me repeat this:

Gary Bencivenga, who has been called “America’s greatest copywriter,” admitted he can’t pick a winning headline from two solid but very different appeals.

​​So what hope do you have?

And if you can’t even hope to pick out a winning headline, how can you write a good ad?

After all, the headline often determines whether the rest of your ad will get a reading at all.

Before I answer this, let me switch gears for a second. And let me tell you about an interesting bit of research I came across in psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahneman and another psychologist, Gary Klein, had very different attitudes about expert intuitions (such as the ability of a top copywriter to pick a winning headline).

Gary Klein was all for expert intuition.

He studied decision making among firefighters, and he had many reports of how firefighters would make gut calls that turned out to be the right call.

Kahneman, on the other hand, didn’t believe much in the power of expert intuition.

That’s because he spent his time looking at decision making in fields such as finance, where he found that expert intuition was often negatively correlated to the actual outcome. (In other words, once you hear what an expert stock broker advises, you should do the exact opposite.)

So Kahneman and Klein decided to collaborate and answer the following:

When can you trust experts? And how can you develop expert intuition that you can rely on?

It turns out there are two conditions.

First, the domain needs to be predictable enough. Emergency room cases are predictable — but the stock market is not.

Second, you need an opportunity to get feedback, and preferably a lot of feedback, relatively quickly.

So let’s get back to writing copy.

Looking at the two criteria above, you can see why even a top copywriter like Gary B. might not have great intuition when it comes to picking headline winners.

Even if you think an individual market (say, the market for weight loss advice in 2019) is more or less predictable…

It’s hard to get enough feedback on what the market would respond to if all you’ve got is one direct mailing every six months, like Gary used to have.

Fortunately, that’s not the situation we’re in any longer.

With $100, you can promote an offer on a PPC network like Google display, and perform dozens of different (and statistically valid) copy tests.

This way, you can get almost immediate feedback.

You can learn which appeals work.

Plus you will start to develop a world-class copy intuition, which will soon outstrip even great copy masters from earlier generations.

Which goes back to something I read from another top copywriter, Dan Ferrari:

“Winning at direct response is mostly a matter of taking as many swings as possible. The C-level marketers that test 50 promos per year will beat the A-list marketers that test 5. Over longer periods of time, as variability compounds, this will become even more pronounced.”

Anyways, maybe this is valuable if you’re looking to write good copy.

And if you want to see some “Pick The Winner” contests I’ve run with several email lists I manage, you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Hundreds of dollars of marketing and copywriting secrets for $21.36

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As I’ve mentioned recently, I’m traveling over the next few weeks. But I’ve got some big plans for when I get back home and get back to work.

I plan to apply lessons from a talk that Gene Schwartz made at Phillips Publishing to copy that I write for my clients. I plan to apply lessons from a Jay Abraham course to my copywriting business. I plan to apply lessons I’ve learned from a Perry Marshall lecture to a new affiliate project I will be kicking off.

These three resources — the Gene Schwartz talk, the Jay Abraham course, the Perry Marshall lecture — currently sell for hundreds of dollars.

That’s if you can find them at all.

And yet, if you dig them up, honestly consume them, and apply their lessons, I believe they will be a terrific investment that will over time make you much more than that what you’ve paid for them.

But here’s the thing. I didn’t pay hundreds of dollars for all these courses. I paid a total of $21.36.

That’s because all three of these reousces are among the 11 free bonuses for Brian Kurtz’s new book Overdeliver.

In case you don’t know Brian Kurtz, he was one of the main guys behind Boardroom (now called Bottom Line), one of the biggest direct marketing publisher of the last few decades. And he’s one of the best-connected and well-liked guys in direct marketing.

That’s one of the reasons why so many top marketers volunteered their valuable products — like the ones above — to serve as bonuses for Brian’s book.

(I also suspect it’s why Brian’s book gets over-the-top praise from many of the big names I’ve mentioned frequently in these emails, including Parris Lampropoulos, Ben Settle, Mark Ford, Joe Sugarman, Gary Bencivenga, Ken McCarthy, Kim Krause Schwalm, and the list goes on.)

Anyways, I’ve personally found Brian’s offer very valuable — even though I have only been going through the bonuses and haven’t even made it to the core book yet. In case you want to check it all out for yourself, and maybe even invest $21.36, here’s where to go:

https://overdeliverbook.com/