Gary Bencivenga

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/

Long-form sales copy is finally dead

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If you go on Google right now, and search for “freshly pressed olive oil,” you’ll soon find a quirky web page as the top result.

It’s for the Freshly Pressed Olive Oil Club, which mails you olive oils from around the world, right after they’ve been pressed, year round.

Here’s the interesting thing about this site for copywriters and marketers:

One of the people behind this business is Gary Bencivenga, often referred to as the “greatest living copywriter.”

Back in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and up to his retirement in 2005, Gary made his clients lots of money (hundreds of millions of dollars?) by writing long-form sales copy. His promotions sometimes spanned 40 or 50 pages.

And in fact, Gary even wrote a long-form sales letter for the Freshly Pressed Olive Oil Club.

It used to be there, right on the homepage.

But if you check the homepage of the club right now, that’s not what you will see any more.

Instead, you’ll see a quick and clear headline for the offer…

Some bullet points that have been pulled out from the original sales letter…

A bit about the founder of the club…

And a couple of buttons to buy.

That’s it. All in about 2 or max 3 pages of copy. So what’s going on?

I don’t know. But my guess is that they tested this shorter home page, and it’s working better than what they had before.

And here’s the lesson I draw from this.

If you start to learn about copywriting, you’ll quickly be told that “copy is never too long, only too boring.”

You might hear this backed up with the experience of top-level marketers and copywriters — including Gary B. — who will tell you that long copy, if done right, always outperforms short copy.

And it may be true.

IF you only have one shot to make the sale (ie. direct mail) or IF you are selling to cold traffic.

But that’s not how many online marketing situations work today.

And that’s why I say long-form sales copy is finally dead.

And in case you think this is just cherry-picking and exaggeration… then I agree with you. But I also think it’s no worse than saying “copy is never too long” — when it clearly can be.

Even if it’s written by the great Gary Bencivenga himself.

All right, that’s enough copywriting iconoclasm for today.

But in case you want more copywriting lessons — and not all of them controversial — you might like a list of the 12 best copywriting resources I’ve personally benefited from:

https://bejakovic.com/copywriters-hero/

The obvious secret to creating blockbuster products

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I talked to a potential client a couple of days ago.

He’s selling a prostate supplement. It’s going well. And he now wants to create other products he could sell to the same audience.

So he wanted to know whether I could give him advice about which products to develop based on what I’ve seen working. I told him the truth:

I don’t know that I can predict which marketplace will sell the best. But I do know of a formula for almost guaranteeing that a product you create will be a blockbuster.

It’s a secret I learned from master copywriter Gary Bencivenga. In Gary’s own words, great products are “those with a clear-cut, built-in, unique superiority supported by powerful proof elements.”

Now, this might sound obvious. Or maybe too abstract. So let me give you a few real-world examples of what “powerful proof elements” really mean in practice:

# 1. RealDose Nutrition is an 8-figure weight-loss supplement company that I’ve written for. Their main product is called Weight Loss Formula No. 1. It’s a combination of four ingredients, each of which has been shown in clinical studies to improve a different hormone related to weight loss.

​​RealDose sources their ingredients in the same way as in the clinical study and they use the same dosage (hence RealDose). At core, their marketing simply consists of saying, “Our product works, and here’s the science to prove it.”

# 2. Another supplement company I’ve written for is Vitality Now. The face of that company is Dr. Sam Walters, who at one point formulated nutrition bars for NASA.

​​Unfortunately, Vitality Now isn’t in the business of selling nutrition bars. If they were, they could make a killing simply by saying, “The same nutrition bars used by NASA!”

# 3. I’m currently going through a magalog written by another famous copywriter, Parris Lampropoulos. This magalog is for a boner pill called Androx. One of the ingredients in Androx is cordyceps — a mushroom from Tibet that was used at the emperor’s court in China for its libido properties.

​​Thanks to this, Parris can open up the sales message by talking about how the Emperor had to have sex with nine different women every night, and how this was the supplement that made it possible.

With products like these, which have such powerful proof elements built in, the marketing writes itself. Or as Gary Bencivenga put it:

“It’s your mission to come up with a product so inherently superior that, as soon as it’s effectively explained, demonstrated, or sampled, your prospects have no conclusion to draw except “I want it!”

I hope that’s the kind of product you’ve got (or are looking to make). And if that’s the case, and you just want good ways to explain and demonstrate to your buyers WHY your product really is superior, then you might like my upcoming book:

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

Copywriting lessons from a knife-wielding burglar

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Back when I was in college, I lived in a slum house with four other guys.

One of them eventually turned out to be a weed dealer. Which I didn’t mind for a while — it was Santa Cruz, after all.

But that all changed one sleepy afternoon.

I was taking a nap in my room, as I tend to do. And then a strange rasping noise woke me up.

Rasp rasp rasp.

I tried to go back to sleep.

But the rasping wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t even so loud — but it was such an unusual noise, and coming from somewhere so close, that I got curious to find out what was going on.

So I got up, opened the door of my bedroom, and stepped outside into the hallway.

There was an unfamiliar man there.

He was ​​holding a large kitchen knife, and trying to carve a hole in one of the other doors. The door belonging to the room of my weed-dealing housemate.

The burglar and I looked at each other in the darkness of the hallway. He collected himself first and said, “Go back to your room.”

Which I promptly did. I locked the door behind myself and called 911.

Of course by the time the police came, the burglar was gone.

All that was left was the kitchen knife lying in the hallway, and the random pieces of door that he had uselessly chipped away.

Which brings up today’s marketing lesson.

You see, this knife-wielding burglar attacked the door from all angles.

In fact, the area that he was trying to carve through was about the size of a dinner plate.

If he had focused his energy on a smaller part of the door…

Or even better, if he had just clawed away at the door knob…

Then he probably would have gotten to the money and the weed on the other side.

And that’s the marketing lesson I mentioned.

When you’re writing a sales message, you don’t want to spread yourself thin, and hope to have a breakthrough by chipping away at all parts of your market.

Instead, you should always aim for the white-hot core — the fanatics, the ultra-devoted, the people with the most consuming pain. ​​

Why?

Well, because the experts say so. I’ve heard the above sentiment from at least two A-list copywriters (Gary Bencivenga and Richard Armstrong). And whenever I’ve taken it to heart, I’ve found I get better results than when I try to make too many different appeals.

Sometimes, business owners find this hard to accept. Which is why it helps to get an outside perspective with your marketing and sales copy.

And in case you want to see how I’ve helped some big supplement businesses by applying the above principle, you might like to get a free copy of my upcoming book. You can sign up for it here:

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

How to get away with murder and sales

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“‘This young man did not deserve to die on a parking lot of Long John Silver’s on a Saturday night,’ Chris Bailey, Indianapolis Police deputy chief, said after the killing. ‘Those with information who are not sharing with us should be ashamed of themselves.'”

A couple of years ago, the national murder clearance rate dropped to its lowest level ever since the FBI started tracking the issue.

The clearance rate measures how many murder investigations ended with an arrest or with an identification of a suspect.

Nationwide, it’s around 60% right now.

In big cities, however, it’s much worse.

So for example, in Indianapolis, you’re more likely to get away with murder than not. And if you shoot somebody dead in Chicago, you’ve got roughly a 75% chance of never being caught.

So what’s behind this?

There are lots of possible explanations. But one big reason — at least according to police chiefs — seems to be a growing unwillingness to talk to the police, whether it’s out of fear or simply because of a no-snitching policy.

Which is pretty crazy if you think about it. People dislike or distrust the police enough to side with murderers.

And as usual, there’s a lesson here that you can apply to your own marketing.

​It’s a powerful technique that you can use to get your market to side with you — even though you might be worse than a murderer (that is, a salesman).

This technique something I learned from copywriting legend Gary Bencivenga. In a nutshell, the technique is to create a common enemy. ​​In Gary’s own words:

“Instead of the usual ‘I’m trying to sell you something,’ which sort of sets up immediately in the reader’s mind a you-versus-me mentality, I found a way to shift gears by saying, ‘it’s you and me against these other guys.’ And if you can create an enemy in your copy, that’s what happens. You set up a three-point discussion and you come around from your side of the desk to be on the reader’s side of the desk and then it’s you and the reader against the enemy that you’re railing against.”

Of course, you want to be careful when you pick your enemies.

And I would also add, you want to be intellectually honest.

In other words, pick on people (or ideas) because you genuinely disagree with them — not just because you are looking for a fight.

The good news is, if you start looking around your market, you’re very likely to find good candidates to turn into enemies. And when you identify them, you can start honing the perfect message to position yourself against them.

How do you hone that perfect message?

One way is to write daily emails to your list, and see what they respond to best. And if you want help with those emails, then you might like the following:

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

“America’s best copywriter” offers a 2-part formula for sucking readers in

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I’m re-reading Maxwell Maltz’s self-help classic Psycho-Cybernetics, which opens with the following sentence:

“During the past decade a revolution has been quietly going on in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and medicine.”

Now if you ask me, this is a great opening line.

In case you’re interested, I’ll tell you why — and how you can use this to suck your own readers into your copy.

To get started, let’s look at a couple of alternative opening sentences old Max coulda used. For starters, here’s one:

“During the past decade a revolution has been quietly going on.”

This opening line isn’t bad.

It sounds mysterious. And sometimes, that’s enough to suck readers in.

But it might not be enough, because this opening line is also very vague.

Anybody who reads this might rightly say, “So what? There are too many revolutions out there to worry about right now.”

That’s why this opening line gets a B-.

Now let’s look at a second possible opening line:

“During the past decade researchers in psychology, psychiatry, and medicine have come to an important conclusion.”

Boy that’s a dull duck.

While the content is pretty much same as in Maxwell Maltz’s original, there’s no intrigue.

There’s no excitement.

There’s just the cold feeling that reading on will be work and not fun.

That’s why this second opening line gets a C-.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

Because the B- and C- aren’t grades in the traditional sense. I’ll let Gary Bencivenga, who has been called “America’s best copywriter” and “The Michelangelo of direct mail copywriting,” explain it in his own words:

“In pondering this, I realized a great truth about headlines: your level of interest is directly proportional to the presence of two factors: benefit and curiosity. Either one without the other is a devastating weakening. I = B + C. Interest equals Benefit plus Curiosity.“

And there you have it.

The first alternate opening line was missing a benefit (B-).

The second was missing curiosity (C-).

The original Maxwell Maltz opening line wasn’t missing anything. It had both benefit (don’t tell me you have zero health or mental issues) and curiosity (a quiet revolution?). That’s what made it so good.

The good news is, you now know a formula that let’s you do the same: I = B + C. This works whether you’re writing a headline, a subject line, or some other crucial piece of copy, like an opening sentence.

Or a call to action. Speaking of which:

I’m putting together a book on email marketing for the health space where I will share what I’ve learned writing for some big clients. And I’ll also share examples of some of the most successful emails I’ve written — including a 5-part email sequence that tripled sales in a funnel for RealDose Nutrition, an 8-figure supplement company.

If you want to get your paws on this book when it comes out (and get it for free), here’s where to sign up:

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

Five words to get to the heart of why people don’t buy

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A true story about objections:

A chemical supplies salesman goes into a client’s office. The client used to have a big account with the salesman’s company, but about a year ago, he mysteriously withdrew his business.

“Why?” the salesman asks timidly.

“We decided to give your competitors a shot,” says the client. “They’ve proved to be perfectly satisfactory, so we will stick with them.”

Hmm.

What to say?

Well, one option is to take a page out Frank Bettger’s book How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success In Selling.

Back in the 1920’s, Bettger was a pro baseball player. He then got injured and started selling life insurance.

Very unsuccessfully, at first.

Eventually though, he became quite the salesman. In time, he even teamed up with Dale Carnegie on the self-help lecture circuit, and wrote the “How I Raised Myself” book after Carnegie encouraged him.

That book, although it’s not well-known today, had quite the following once.

Gary Bencivenga, widely believed to be the greatest copywriter of all time, and Marty Edelston, the founder of the direct response behemoth Boardroom/Bottom Line, both credit it for their massive success.

Anyways, one thing Bettger says in the book is he kept a list of reasons why people didn’t buy.

He tallied them all up, across some 5,000 sales interviews.

What he found is that around 60% of the time, the initial, logical objection that people gave for not buying was not the real reason.

Bettger advised first asking “Why?” to get this first reason.

He’d listen.

And then, he’d say, “In addition to that, is there any other reason you might have for not buying?”

In total, those five words — “Why” and “In addition to that” — were usually enough to draw out the real objection.

They worked in the case of the chemical supplies salesman above. (It turned out the client was angry that a special discount had been discontinued without notice.)

All of which is great if you can talk to your prospects.

This is something you do in direct sales. You might even be able to do with copywriting, if you can find prospects to interview.

Unfortunately though, it’s not always possible.

So how do you get at those hidden reasons when all you have is a customer avatar?

Well, you need workarounds.

I have my own — basically how I do research.

I’ll talk about this in more detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. If you want to raise your emails from failure to success in selling, you might be interested in grabbing a free copy of this book when it’s out. Here’s how to do that:

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

The “fresh fish” sales argument

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Here’s a true story about hypocrisy:

It has to do with DVDs.

About 10 years ago, if you bought a DVD to play at home, you would first have to sit through a little educational video. The short video had a driving, Prodigy-like soundtrack, and it said:

“You wouldn’t steal a car…”

“You wouldn’t steal a television…”

“Downloading pirated films is stealing.”

“Piracy. It’s a crime”

Tell me more, Mr. DVD.

You see, it turns out that driving Prodigy-like music in the background, which was used in the original video and was distributed to millions of DVDs, was actually pirated.

A Dutch musician by the name of Melchior Reitveldt wrote the music for the Dutch royalty organization, under the agreement that it was to be used one time at a local music festival.

Once Reitveldt realized his music was being used across the world without his permission, it took him quite a bit of time and effort to actually collect his royalties from that same Dutch royalty organization, which had cheated him earlier and which was crying about piracy.

Anyhow, I’m not here to talk about copyright.

But copywriting, on the other hand, we can discuss.

You see, today I was writing an advertorial for a dog seat belt. I didn’t even know these existed until a few days ago, but it makes perfect sense.

Your dog goes in the car.

If he’s not restrained, he can jump in your lap while you’re driving, jump out the window when he sees a biker, or get catapulted when you hit the brakes.

It seems that woke dog owners are fully aware of this fact.

And one statement many dog owners repeatedly made was an echo of the piracy ad:

“You wouldn’t let your toddler walk up and down the back seat… So why would you let your dog do it?”

There’s something here.

In fact, the great Gary Bencivenga used this argument as well, when selling premium, fresh-pressed, mail-order olive oil:

“You and I insist on fresh milk, fresh eggs, fresh fish, fresh meat, and fresh produce. Don’t we deserve fresh olive oil???”

So in short, this “You wouldn’t… So why would you…” formula can often (not always, see the piracy ad above) be an effective sales argument to throw in.

And since I first noticed this argument in that Gary B. sales letter, I will from now on call it the “fresh fish” argument to help me remember it for the future.

On an entirely other note:

If you need fresh advice on how to get started as a copywriter, specifically on the online platform Upwork, you might be interested in my upcoming book on the topic.

To get notified when I finish it up and make it available, sign up below:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

The worst aromatherapy book Broadway has ever seen

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“Tonight, essential oils. Tomorrow…”

The Producers — a brave and brilliant comedy from back in 1968.

The basic plot goes as follows:

A Broadway producer named Max Bialystock meets an accountant named Leo Bloom.

Together, they realize that a play that flops could earn more money than a big hit.

So they set out to produce the worst play in the history of Broadway. It’s titled:

“Springtime for Hitler”

It’s shocking, it’s campy, it’s offensive, and it’s guaranteed to fail. Except, against all odds, it becomes a hit.

Well, I am currently having my “Springtime for Hitler” moment.

You see, once upon a time, I got into the aromatherapy niche. This was mostly a marketing exercise, and the main reason I chose aromatherapy was the big interest I saw among Amazon best selling books on the topic.

In other words, I expected it to be a quick cash grab or more likely a flop.

Fast forward a few years, and I am genuinely interested in essential oils (I use them myself), I’ve spent hours upon hours researching and writing about the topic, and I’ve even become a low-level expert on the matter.

And now, I have my very own book to prove it.

As of today, my first book about essential oils, Essential Oil Quick Start Guide, is live for sale.

And while it’s not a Broadway hit yet, I do have my first sales trickling in.

Anyways, you can see the sales page at the link below.

If you have zero interest in reading about essential oils, it probably won’t make you buy. Still, it might be worth looking at just to see how I weave in valuable information (suggestion: Gary Bencivenga) with a non-stop barrage of bullets (suggestion: Gene Schwartz). Here’s the link:

http://www.unusualhealth.com/quick-start-guide/